The Last Salvage Squad

The Last Salvage Squad released on Steam on June 17, 2026 from developer Sunfish Kumano and publisher Waku Waku Games, priced at $9.99. It's a single-player 2.5D FPS pitting cute, giant mech-girl characters against enemy forces visually modeled on retro sci-fi alien invaders, and it wears that contrast, grim premise, endearing execution, without a trace of irony.

A retro shooter skeleton with a distinctive coat of paint

Structurally, this is a familiar formula: short arena missions, sprite-based 2.5D enemies rendered against low-poly environments, a single carried weapon per run, and a light accessory system for build variety. What makes it stand out isn't mechanical innovation so much as commitment to a specific aesthetic identity. The art direction earns consistent praise across the review base, and the tonal juxtaposition, essentially a War of the Worlds invasion narrative told through an anime character lens, gives the game a personality that a mechanically similar but visually generic shooter wouldn't have. HUD design and animation work also come in for specific praise, small touches that reinforce the sense of a team that sweated details beyond the core combat loop.

Short missions, real difficulty tuning

Individual missions rarely run past a few minutes on normal difficulty, and the roughly two-hour main campaign is intentionally approachable, gentle enough for players less experienced with the genre to comfortably finish. Built-in aim assist and a forgiving damage curve on normal difficulty further lower the barrier to entry, a choice that seems deliberate rather than a limitation of the underlying combat design given how sharply the challenge ramps up once Hard mode is switched on. The real substance, according to a large portion of the review base, only appears once EX mode and Hard difficulty unlock after the credits roll: enemies become meaningfully more aggressive, resource management around respawns and positioning becomes mandatory rather than optional, and the tactical layer the base campaign only hints at becomes the actual point. It's an unusual structural choice, front-loading an easy campaign before gating the real challenge behind it, but it works because it lets newer players finish the story without being walled off entirely from the deeper combat systems.

Where the mechanics show their limits

The most consistent criticism concerns the single-weapon-at-a-time structure: players can only carry one gun per mission, which several reviewers feel limits moment-to-moment variety more than the game's otherwise tight pacing should allow. Movement, specifically sliding, also draws repeated comments as the least polished part of an otherwise well-tuned combat loop. The accessory build system, meanwhile, tends toward broad stat bonuses rather than build-defining choices, which is a reasonable design decision for a game this short but does mean repeat playthroughs lean more on difficulty escalation than genuinely different strategies. A small number of players also flag weapon balance as uneven, with certain starting or early-unlock weapons outperforming later options enough that experimentation feels less rewarded than it should.

Where the source material actually comes through

The alien design is worth dwelling on specifically, because it's the clearest evidence of intentional craft rather than generic asset assembly. Reviewers repeatedly identify the enemy forces as a deliberate homage to classic War of the Worlds tripod and heat-ray imagery, filtered through the game's low-poly, high-saturation art style rather than copied wholesale. That kind of specific, legible reference point gives the enemy roster a coherence that a lot of small indie shooters lack, where monster design often reads as arbitrary rather than purposeful. Combined with the mech-girl protagonists, whose designs draw just as clearly from a completely different visual tradition, the game ends up occupying a genuinely distinct space rather than reading as a mashup of unrelated influences bolted together.

That distinctiveness extends to the post-game content structure. Completing the main campaign unlocks an EX Remix mode that reworks every mission with escalated difficulty and a small metagame layer some reviewers describe as a paid progression unlock system worth exploring on repeat playthroughs. It is not a huge amount of additional content, this is still fundamentally a short, focused game, but it gives committed players a clear reason to keep returning after the credits roll rather than treating the ending as a hard stop.

A team that trusted its own difficulty curve

One detail that stands out across the review base is how consistently players credit the developer's difficulty tuning specifically, calling it appropriate rather than either punishing or trivial, a balance indie FPS games frequently get wrong in one direction or the other. Enemies on normal difficulty are readable and fair even for players newer to the genre, while Hard mode and EX content ask considerably more without ever feeling like an artificial difficulty spike bolted on for padding. For a small, presumably solo-or-near-solo development effort, getting that curve right across an entire campaign and its harder remix mode is a genuinely difficult thing to land, and it shows up directly in how positively the higher-difficulty content is received relative to the more muted (though still positive) response to the easier base campaign.

Verdict

The Last Salvage Squad is a small, focused, and confidently made retro shooter that understands exactly what it is and doesn't try to be more. The art direction alone makes it memorable, but the real payoff is mechanical: a genuinely rewarding Hard-mode and EX-mode experience sitting just past an intentionally gentle main campaign. At $9.99, it's an easy recommendation for boomer-shooter fans willing to push past the easy difficulty to find the game the developer actually built underneath it.