The Last Friend

The Last Friend is a mixed Tower-Defence/Beat 'em Up game where you rescue dogs as the last friend to all dog kind. Each tower and fighting ability is unlocked by completing levels to rescue dogs and recruit them to your cheer team. You level up the dogs with treats to improve the towers or abilities they provide you. You can focus on tower building, beating up enemies, or a balance between them for most of the game, but there are “challenge” fights where you don’t build towers. I enjoyed my time rescuing dogs from post-apocalyptic ne'er-do-wells, though I’m still not exactly sure why dog napping is a popular pastime in this universe. The difficulty level could use some balancing as the early game is a breeze, but the end game became a bit of grind to brute force my way through with a min-maxed tower selection. It took just under 9 hours for me to complete the main story and get all the Steam achievements, which personally was great as too much longer and the game would have outstayed its welcome. There isn’t an awful lot of re-playability after you’ve unlocked everything but there is couch co-op, which I’m hoping to distract my nephew with. There’s also an in-game sticker book where you can unlock a sticker for each dog by completely certain milestones, and it is very cute. The writing and dialogue is funny enough that I actually read it rather than just skipping through, but as you’d expect from this kind of game, the story isn’t particularly in depth. It can be quite sweet though. I didn’t run into many bugs in my play through, but my inpatient button mashing to release a dog and finish a rather annoying level managed to glitch my character straight passed the end point of the stage, which forced me to repeat it and deal with the annoyance again. Overall The Last Friend was an enjoyable experience and I would recommend it as a chill out style game, where you just want to relax and not be beaten into the ground repeatedly or spend weeks grinding to get to the end.