Preview build for the 2004 canceled Heat-inspired PS2 game The Last Job is now available

Do you remember Heat? The 1995 crime film directed by Michael Mann? I don’t. I don’t even know who Michael Mann is. I don’t really watch film all that much. I’m too busy playing video games.

It’s too bad The Last Job went unreleased then, since it’s supposedly inspired by Heat. I wouldn’t know, so I’ll take Games That Weren’t’s word for it. It was in production at Acclaim Cheltenham (EGIII: Extreme G Racing, XGRA), but that came to a halt when Acclaim went bust in 2004. Now I have the urge to play some EGIII.

While I don’t hold Acclaim in very high regard (Extreme G and a few others aside), The Last Job actually looks both inventive and ambitious. It’s a heist game, and you play each member of the team individually. Each member has their own role, so you complete their tasks as best you can, then you switch over to another member, and it covers that same timeframe but from a different perspective. The idea was that you would have to deal with repercussions from your previous performance. If you do well, the next role will have an easier time, and so on.

You can even try out a preview build, if you’re keen. It was provided by the game’s level designer, Stuart Maine, to Games That Weren’t. It is only about 40% complete and is supposedly quite glitchy because of this. However, the concept is still in place, and “most” of one mission is playable. There are other levels, but they’re unfinished and mostly just explorable.

As I mentioned, I don’t have a very high opinion of Acclaim. Occasionally, it put out a worthwhile game, but rarely anything stellar, and its output was mostly drowned in lower quality and derivative releases. Acclaim Cheltenham had a decent track record, so it’s unfortunate that such an ambitious game wouldn’t make it to market. There’s no guarantee that it would have been great, but its concept is executed in a unique enough way that it would have at least stood out.

Anyway, what could have been and so on. You can get the preview build of The Last Job over at Games That Weren’t.

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