The number of online multiplayer games vying for limited attention is a well-documented issue, but an equally pervasive problem is how similar they are to each other. You can find an easy comparison for almost all of them. Marvel Rivals is NetEase’s Overwatch 2. FragPunk wants to be Apex Legends. Even Elden Ring Nightreign makes the familiar circling storm from games like Fortnite a key feature. It’s impossible to stand out when you’re the same as everyone else, so I was pleasantly surprised by Last Flag, the debut game from budding studio Night Street Games.
Earlier this month, Polygon attended a digital preview event for Last Flag, a 5v5 multiplayer shooter that eschews typical genre trappings (which we’ll get to in a moment). You may recognize Last Flag from its 2025 Summer Game Fest announcement, and for the pop culture pedigree of its developer. Night Street was co-founded in 2025 by two key members of Imagine Dragons: brothers Dan (the frontman) and Mac Reynolds (the manager). While “5v5 multiplayer shooter” might sound like just another collection of buzzwords, Night Street is happily doing its own thing with Last Flag.
A member of the development team told Polygon during the demo that they wanted to recreate the fun of capture the flag from childhood, having felt that other games with a flag mode, such as the Halo games (known for their competitive capture the flag modes), never quite manage to do that. What they came up with was an idealized form of that fun — the kind of childhood memory where you’re not you, but some larger-than-life alter ego, and your street, yard, living room, or wherever you played becomes some impossibly fantastical battleground.
Last Flag is hide-and-seek as much it is capture the flag. Both teams have a minute before a match starts to find a discreet spot to stash their flag and scrounge up spare cash to upgrade their characters’ abilities, and most of the match is spent by trying to figure out where the other team hid theirs. Three towers are situated in the middle of the map, and they scan one map square every 30 seconds or so for whichever team occupies them, revealing whether the opposing team’s flag is on that square or not.
The roster of playable characters includes your standard archetypes, such as a mid-range rifle user, a stealth expert, and a melee fighter, along with some more unusual inclusions. There’s a hulking lumberjack who relies in equal measure on the power of nature and his very sharp hatchets for help in battle and a ninja who can practically fly, if you know how to use their jump skills the right way. My favorite, though, was a swanky guy with two sawed-off shotguns, a Gatling gun, and a special ability that trapped a single target in a safe, like a Saturday morning cartoon.
Even the familiar types have something unusual about them, some quirk that makes playing them feel original or exciting. The engineer, for example, has a warp gun that can wreak absolute havoc on the other team’s plans by teleporting someone to a location where you previously set up turrets or just as far away from their objective as possible. The thief’s invisible stealth ability sounds a bit humdrum initially, but they can hide near the capture point and sneak away before anyone knows what’s happening, a method the developers on the opposing explained and then slyly demonstrated, winning the match while the rest of us (myself and four other Night Street members) were distracted elsewhere.
We played across two maps during the session. The first, my favorite, was an autumnal forest with a rundown, frontier-style mining town in the middle, some disused tunnels, and even a creepy little abandoned house tucked away in a dark corner of the woods. It felt like the perfect size for a game like this, with just enough points of interest and intriguing little nooks to explore without feeling overwhelming.
The other was a massive winter-themed map complete with an ice castle, a quaint little frosty village, glittering caves, and perhaps too much space in between. It’s visually splendid, and the tower locations (which included the courtyard of said ice palace and a research outpost in a secluded cave) were home to more heated, brutal battles than on the first map, as the number of possible hiding places made radar help essential.
This map just felt a little too big. For context, the one match we played on it lasted roughly as long as three matches on the forest map, because it really was that large with so many places to search. At the end, it felt like one of those hide and seek games that stretched on for what felt like ages until your parents called you in for dinner and everyone realized the last person standing was hiding in plain sight the whole time — memorable, but a bit tiresome and likely to put you off from playing again for a while (even more so if you’re working with limited free time).
Then again, I don’t think Night Street sees Last Flag as a game that takes over your life. While we only played an alpha playtest version and not a final product, the focus was very much on just having fun in a good game of capture the flag. Progression is tied to each match, as you spend cash found on the battlefield to upgrade abilities, and there were no objectives to tick off or other gimmicks to push you to play more or in specific ways.
Cooperation is important, of course, and I imagine Last Flag will be at its most fun when playing with groups of friends on voice chat. However, one of its strengths so far is just how straightforward it is. There’s just a small selection of things you can do at any point — hunting for the flag, battling for tower control, or upgrading abilities — and they all contribute to your team’s hopes of success. You don’t need precision coordination to pull any of this off, and the game makes it very clear once the opposing team has your flag that you need to focus on stopping them and not whatever else you were doing. Otherwise, you’re free to do what you think is best, even if that’s splitting from everyone else and just going it alone for a while. You can really do what you want and be fine (based on this preview session, at least).
In this sense, Last Flag truly captures the essence of playing schoolyard games like hide-and-seek or capture the flag. You think kids on the playground are shouting on comms or putting together spreadsheets for min-maxing or timetables for battlepass grinding? Okay, maybe they’re doing those last two things now. But the prospect of chucking all that out the window in favor of low-pressure, low-stakes fun is a promising one, and I’m keen to see how Last Flag evolves leading up to its 2026 launch.
