Late Shift

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Late Shift is a technological beauty that shows what full-motion video games can truly achieve. Its slick plot and fast but meaningful pacing proves that the genre has some uncharted territory it can explore in the future.

A slightly iffy script, one or two uneven performances and some questionable scenes aside, Late Shift is an intriguing FMV crime thriller worth checking out.

Countless developers have tried to fuse cinema and video games in an interesting ways over the years, from the grainy live-action cinematography of Mad Dog McCree to the filmic structure of Naughty Dog’s The Last Of Us. Late Shift marks the latest attempt to cross the streams, letting players make choices at critical junctures that supposedly shape the direction of a heist film. While there is promise in the idea of having the player steer the events of a movie, Late Shift proves over repeated playthroughs that it can’t live up to the promise of its premise.

Late Shift is interesting enough on its first go around, but without reward in its narrative or punishment in its gameplay, there’s not enough reason to go back.

Late Shift is an interesting update on the idea of the interactive movie. While it brings decent tv-quality production values and soap opera level acting to a genre notoriously riddled with far worse, it still doesn’t do enough to stand out as a film, nor offer enough interactivity as a game. There’s potential for this template, but the interactivity needs to be much more ambitious.

Towards the back end of last year, we were pleasantly surprised by a full-motion video game named The Bunker. The first of its kind on PlayStation 4, its story, characters, and acting performances were the driving factors in what was a short but sweet experience. Publisher Wales Interactive is now back with a second foray into the FMV genre in the form of Late Shift, developed by CtrlMovie and written by the author behind the 2009 film Sherlock Holmes, Michael R. Johnson. Originally released on the iPad and iPhone, its origins could be questionable to a point, but does this jump to the big scr...

Late Shift is a decent FMV title with a cast that puts in a lot of effort to make their characters believable. It’s let down by some glaring plot holes that don’t stand up to scrutiny. There are seven endings, meaning that some of the choices made do matter, while others feel a bit like filler and don’t seem to change anything. The ambition and the actual cinematography is there, but the writing really needs some improvement to push Late Shift toward greatness.