Imagine the perfect premise for anyone who has ever had a frustrating job in an office in the past: a game about going absolutely berserk inside an office space, venting out all of your anger on furniture, machinery, computers, and so on. As someone who has had bad experiences with workplace abuse many years ago, and had fantasized about the exact damn thing during work hours in a menial logistics job, I was legitimately hyped for As Per My Last Email. It was the kind of cathartic experience I wish was available back in, say, 2015. Sadly, what could (and should) have been a slam dunk ended up being one of my most disappointing gaming experiences of 2024.

I imagined that As Per My Last Email would start off with some sort of premise to make you feel even more sympathetic toward the game’s nameless protagonist. Some kind of introduction to his boring job, some nod towards work abuse or crappy colleagues, anything. Be it a bunch of text or a mere picture showcasing a frustrated guy in a cubicle, I just wanted something to kick off this experience. But nope. Got nothing out of it. I booted the game up, and was immediately thrown into a game mode menu with a staggering two options, and that was it. Not a great first impression, even if we’re talking about a lower-budgeted indie game. Then again, we’re here for office wrecking.

Aaaaand office wrecking ended up being terrible. It all boils down to how unimpressive and glitchy the overall gameplay loop is. In essence, you are thrown into an office, you have a hammer, a set amount of time, and a score threshold. Go wild, bucko. Do you think you have multiple ways to destroy everything around you? Nope, you have your hammer, that’s it. There are no people inside the office to shout at you or react to your lunacy. Finally, there aren’t multiple ways to use your hammer to destroy furniture, computers, and such. Press ZR to swing the hammer, always with the same movement.

Swinging the hammer around isn’t even fun. On the contrary, the controls are horrendous. The amount of input delay is immense, I felt like I was playing in slow motion. To make matters worse, the game would occasionally refuse to register my presses, to the point I started feeling worried that my Joy-Cons were becoming faulty. Nope. I jumped into the Nintendo Switch’s button calibration screen and noticed everything was normal. It was just As Per My Last Email refusing to function as intended. I understood right away that the protagonist refuses to swing his hammer when there isn’t a piece of furniture in front of him (what a gentleman), but even when I was in front of a server, it would occasionally take four, five, seven presses of the ZR button before the game would wake up and realize I was trying to wreak havoc.

Let’s add more complaints to the pile. The presentation was disappointing, as the graphics were way too simplistic, and the amount of destruction I was causing was actually quite minute. Debris would even disappear after a while, making everything feel borderline pointless. The music was bland and forgettable, and the amount of bugs was impressively high. Let’s give an example with the endless mode option, where the game randomly generates an immense office or me to destroy. More than once was I summoned outside of the office boundaries, just falling forever in a precipice.

It might sound like an exaggeration, but this is the absolute truth: I was really looking forward to playing As Per My Last Email, only for it to become one of my biggest disappointments of the year, or possibly even the past few years. I was salivating for a game about a frustrated office worker being able to demolish his workspace, but for crying out loud, this is far from the kind of game I hoped for. It’s basic, it’s slow-paced, it’s glitchy as all hell. Finally, it’s just not fun at all. There’s no catharsis, no reason to play it for more than two or three minutes, or even a reason to check it out as some kind of novelty.

 

Graphics: 3.0 Bland-looking office spaces, a terrible resolution, and poor animations. There is an occasionally half-decent shadow effect, but that’s pretty much it.	Gameplay: 1.5 The poor framerate, the glitches, the boring gameplay loop, the horrendous controls… man, it’s a mess.
Sound: 4.5 It’s nothing special. It went through one ear and came out from the other, without me ever being able to pay too much attention to it. Still, it wasn’t terrible, it was just there…	Fun Factor: 2.0 A game about venting out your frustrations by destroying offices should have been a tremendous slam dunk. It should have been cathartic. But As Per My Last Email was the complete opposite of it. Between the lack of variety, poor presentation, and atrocious controls, I felt bored and disappointed.
Final Verdict: 2.5

As Per My Last Email is available now on Nintendo Switch.

Reviewed on Nintendo Switch.