Relic's an accomplished developer of real-time strategy games, including Company of Heroes, Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War, and Homeworld. With little downtime between waves, players have to do their damnedest to keep their multiplier up, so as to ensure a high score and earn experience to level their characters. So even in defeat you're rewarded. The result (if you have teammates you get along with) is a desire to jump right back into the fight again and again in order to level your character, equip new items, and get just a little bit further than before.After all, since score and experience are the main reason you're playing, you never really lose, but instead just gain levels and win new pieces of gear to use in subsequent battles.

The leveling process is an important part of Relic's strategy for keeping players engaged. Each level you gain gets you one more item for you to equip on your hero in future battles, allowing you to customize your character's load-out to work best for how you want to play. The ability to equip various items also adds a deeper level of strategy for teams who want to work on their high score, as players can coordinate complementary armaments. In one round I played a character who wielded a suppression weapon, allowing me to slow incoming forces while my teammates ran into the fray and ripped them apart.And to get a higher multiplier players have to control various map points, defeat sequential waves with no casualties, or kill all the enemies in a wave within a preset amount of time.That probably sounds like a lot, but in practice The Last Stand amounts to killing everything you see. And even if you die or don't hold the control points, your team can up your score simply by surviving.