The Last Citadel

A one-person Borderlands-meets-Vermintide, with real ambition

"The Last Citadel" is a roguelite, role-based third-person shooter built by a solo developer, sending up to four players through a procedurally-shifting citadel suspended above a black hole to hunt artifacts and bosses. Reviewers reach for a specific pair of comparisons to describe the mix: "This game is something like a mix or borderlands (visuals/weapons/abilities) and Vermintide (mission structure). You have some pre-set classes but you can customize your own build choosing 4 abilities (out of about 10-15 offensive, 10-15 defensive, and 10-15 supportive) active abilities as well as offensive/defensive/supportive passives and your main weapon (rifles, shotguns, rocket launchers, machine guns, Tesla gun, flamethrower, and various melee weapons)," wrote one detailed reviewer. That build depth is the single most consistently cited strength across the review sample, alongside near-universal acknowledgment that this is an unusually accomplished first project. "Active Dev, fantastic first project, the passion and work is obvious! A lot of variety, and worth the price-tag, especialyl co-op! The Hardest Difficulty requries some really good RNG and rewards coordination!" wrote one player.

Value for money comes up constantly and independently across reviewers with very different amounts of playtime. "For the price this game has a ridiculous amount of value. Aside from the overall design, the sheer number of different weapons and perks as well as the random map layouts each run and random bosses create a huge amount of replay value and variation," wrote one player, and another framed it with a simple rule of thumb: "I have a pretty easy general rule of thumb for games. Is it worth 1 dollar per hour of gameplay. This game is a simple yes." A reviewer with 57 hours logged described the appeal of the top difficulty directly: "This game asks you to get good or go home... At this point my 3 man group has managed to unlock 6 of the 9 rewards hidden behind completions. We've not beaten the second boss on Raider and that's what makes us keep coming back." Steam's own achievement data backs up just how hard that top tier is: the "Raider" achievement sits at 0.6% completion, the lowest in the game, consistent with reviewers' accounts of a difficulty spike that few groups clear.

Freezes and lockups, reported independently across languages

The most serious and consistently corroborated technical complaint is a hard freeze or lockup bug that multiple, unrelated reviewers describe hitting during runs. One player, still positive overall, described the exact failure mode: "I really love this game, which is a shame because I have yet to have a run that didn't get killed by the game completely locking up and having to be killed by the task manager." A negative reviewer reported the identical symptom independently: "Wanted to like this game, but it froze several times during play then froze completely and I had to force quit." A third reviewer, writing in Spanish, flagged the same issue alongside a related server complaint: "El juego es muy entretenido, PERO se congela de forma random y no tiene servidores dedicados, yo juego en LATAM y nunca hay servidores, JAMAS!" ("The game is very entertaining, BUT it freezes randomly and doesn't have dedicated servers, I play in LATAM and there are never servers, EVER!") Three independent reports of the same freeze/lockup behavior, spanning both positive and negative reviews and two languages, is a strong signal this is a real, unresolved stability issue rather than an isolated hardware problem.

"This should have been Early Access"

A second recurring complaint, appearing more than once in almost identical language, is that the 1.0 release feels underbaked for a finished product. "It's like I was playing an Early Access game, rather than a completed game," wrote one reviewer, and a second made the same point even more directly: "Sadly this should have been an early access release." That second reviewer specifically called out lighting as a symptom: "Lighting is my number one issue with this games. Brights are to bright and the shadows are way to stark. I don't know how they looked at it and said it's good for 1.0. It's not like I'm the only person who's mentioned this." A third reviewer who had played the pre-release demo months earlier expressed a related disappointment about the gap between preview and launch: "Months after the initial demo and the 'release' is the exact same game, missing pieces and incomplete development."

Enemy and map variety draws a similar pattern of repeated, independent criticism. "Levels are uninspiring and dull, enemies are too few & far in-between, even on the highest difficulty," wrote one player, while a separate, more balanced review listed it as a specific negative alongside real positives: "Positive: Nice selection of weapons that feel and sound powerful... Negative: Very few enemy types, Lack of map variety, Some skills feels completely useless." Sound design also draws a specific complaint: "The basic mechanics are great, and I don't mind that it contains graphics purchased from asset stores that are also used 1:1 in other games. The biggest problem for me is the audio. it's either buggy or the sounds used are so poor that I simply can't get immersed in the acoustics."

Performance and balance rough edges

Beyond the freezing bug, several reviewers flag distinct performance and hardware concerns. One player reported having to manually intervene to protect their PC: "I made it to world two with rivers of lava and my pc felt like it was in that room with my character. Had to go to Nvidia control panel and cap my global fps to 60 so it wouldn't fry my computer." A separate reviewer described a specific and severe performance bug tied to sensitivity: "There is a severe performance issue that happens just randomly that not only causes me to get frame lag, but also it causes the sensitivity to spike by an insane degree during this time which causes me to basically be unnable to play the game correctly." One critical reviewer raised specific weapon-balance concerns: "Gunplay is underwhelming and overly nerfed. Enemies are too damage resistant, with ranged weapons that should be doing 50+ points of damage are instead reduced to low single digit damage." These balance complaints appear in only one review in the sample pulled for this piece, so they should be read as one player's specific account rather than a broadly corroborated pattern, unlike the freeze bug and the Early-Access framing above.

Verdict

"The Last Citadel" is a genuinely impressive achievement for a solo developer, with build variety and co-op mission structure that reviewers consistently say punch well above the asking price, and a top-tier difficulty that the achievement data confirms very few groups have conquered. But the recurring freeze/lockup bug reported independently across multiple players and languages is a real problem, and the repeated, specific complaint that the 1.0 release feels like it needed more time in Early Access — thin enemy and map variety, harsh lighting, rough audio — should give prospective buyers pause. Co-op groups willing to tolerate some jank in exchange for genuinely deep build customization and hard-fought progression will likely get real value here; solo players or anyone allergic to stability issues should wait for a patch or two.