Note: The last update made by the developers was over 2 years ago. The information and timeline described by the developers here may no longer be up to date.

Thank you Valve for doing this at this point the game still costing money is a scam.

I've played this game for every season, since the game came out. Here's my honest review.

Last Oasis is a great concept and has a lot of addicting game-play aspects (Mostly the melee combat, grappling, wing suits, and walkers).

These key features is what has kept players playing over the years of good and bad.

Most of the mixed reviews comes with the history and poor changes made by some of the developers of this game, (since it's 5 years old now, lets go through the history,)

At launch (Season 1) the game had around 30,000 concurrent players, unfortunately this was waay more than the developers expected to have and their servers couldnt keep up with the playercount, so they had to either A-purchase more servers through their current host which was struggling to keep up, or B-switch hosts to microsoft servers that could easily carry the new players but the servers would have to go down for about a week to migrate. The devs chose option B and offered full refunds to anyone who wasn't willing to wait a week for server migrations. (This was a good move from the devs in my opinion.)

Season 1 was great, though the game was still in early access and the endgame wasn't really developed yet so there was a waiting period of really nothing to do until devs could push later content. On-top of this some players found ways to dupe items which did ruin the economy for a lot of the larger groups. (there ended up being a "black market" where you could give players cash for ingame duped items.)

keep in mind that since the game was limiting in content at the start, the player base quickly dropped once everyone got to end-game (30,000 - 2,700 concurrent players after 3 months, 9% of starting pop)

about 7 months after launch we were given Season 2, the first wipe of Last Oasis.

(Note: the devs released a beta branch for players to test the new features of season 2 before it released, this helped drive hype and make sure the wipe went well.)

This brought the playercount back up from 700 concurrent players at the lowest, to about 6,000 concurrent players.

Season 2 was mostly accepted by the community but there were some controversial changes; Instead of a nomadic approach to living on walkers, and packed wood bases. They added "Founder Walkers" which were essentially very difficult (if not impossible early on) to raid bases that could be moved between tiles. Additionally they released the new volcano hard maps, battle fans, and a few new walkers. They also tried making the economy more important with a "Commerce Update" that gave currency more uses and encouraged a player based market. The most controversial change however was Clan Caps, essentially limiting the group size on certain tiles. (this was an attempt to counter the "Zerg Problem" with the game at launch.)

Season 2 had a similar player dropoff: (from 6,000 to 1,800 after 3 months, 30.4% of starting pop) % wise a smaller dropoff but the overall player count was much less than at launch.

Only 4 months after Season 2, they released Season 3.
(note, there was no beta for season 3, so players were blind when coming into this new season besides some steam posts)

This brought the playercount back up from 1,790 concurrent players at the lowest, to only about 4,420 concurrent players.

Season 3 had some massive content additions to the game, but also some of the most controversial changes to date:
We had the addition of the Ancient City, Asteroid Crash Sites, Kali Spires, Raptors, and the Worm, as well as the official release to Xbox. (Massive changes that were extremely hyped and players were waiting for) but with that came the change to how servers were setup, instead of having the game be an MMO where all servers were connected, someone had the idea to force players to select from different realms at the beginning of the wipe (selecting what clan cap they wanted to play on along with region locks.) this change alone killed the game for most of the big groups, who decided to not play at all as a way to protest these changes. Since you cannot switch between realms after selecting one, the now small playerbase was divided into even smaller chunks due to these realms and the season felt smaller than more empty than ever. players could roam empty servers for hours before finding someone else, and if you wanted to join a different group in a different realm you'd have to make a brand new player and lose all previous progress.

Season 3 lasted 5 months, and the player drop off was (4,420 to 997 in 3 months, 22.5%) a decline from season 2.

Season 4 didn't add any new content, and was almost entirely just a server wipe, with them reverting back to the MMO server setup from seasons 1 and 2. (they did add the abilty to host private servers though.)

That change alone brought some players back, we went from 532 concurrent players at the lowest to 2,715 at launch of s4.

Season 4 was very weird for most of us, because of how long it was: After launch of the season things were pretty quiet from donkey crew regarding any new content or talk about the next season. Though the rumors were that S5 was going to be big changes and would be a "Make or break" in terms of funding for the game.

Season 4 lasted a whopping 12 months, with the original plan of s5 releasing after 8 months but it was delayed due to the war in ukraine (they're in poland).

The playerbase kinda knew it'd be a while for the next season since it was supposed to change up a bunch of the game and add a massive amount of new content. And as we got closer to S5 launch the hype grew: the devs were putting out tons of social media content and steam posts hyping up the new features, and the hype worked.

S5 didn't have a beta either, and that was the devs crucial mistake...

Season 5 launched with a whopping 6,127 concurrent players (higher than even season 2) and people were excited.

Unfortunately, it was very apparent that there were big changes, but it was all the wrong changes. They redid the thirst mechanics, building mechanics, grapple mechanics, and overall progression. The game felt 10x as grindy, waay less forgiving to new players, and they made all the mob (event starter mobs) so powerful that they could easily kill you before you even see them, on top of that they upped the thirst mechanic so you would die of thirst within about 10 minutes of leaving your base. AND they made all the grapples, slow and heavily stamina draining so the movement mechanics were gone too. 90% of players quit within the first week of this new season, and it turns out that all that overhauling broke most of the original content for the game so all the new stuff introduced back in season 3 was missing and not playable, and most of the original (larger) walkers were missing from the game. They added new mobs that seemed cool, but again made it nearly impossible to beat them and nobody was willing so sink 1k hours into a bad version of the game.

After only 1 month the playercount of season 5 went from 6,127 to 663, and after 3 month was at a lowly 365, 6% of starting pop...

The devs made a few small changes to season 5 over the first 3 months, but nothing substantial. After that there was radio silence, and the promise that they're going to work on "mod support".

10 months after release of Season 5 they announced the first version of the modkit, but modders were stuck trying to build ontop of the broken mess that was season 5, and player pop didnt change.

S5 has been out for 2.5 year, donkey crew put out a new game "bellwright" 15 months after s5 whilst still ghosing LO playerbase, in an effort to make money and keep their team from having to disband.

We currently have 3 devs working to restore Last Oasis, S6 is about a month out and they've been doing beta tests. It feels good again from my experience, and they fixed all the BS that was previously broken.

TLDR: game has had poor leadership, it looks like they might have their ♥♥♥♥ together now, but We Shall See...

Dead game, likely a scam.