This week I decided to talk a shot at my backlog. My PC backlog is NEARLY as large as my other consoles, so I picked a tower defense game centered around dogs and saving them from the evil bad guys who do not like dogs. This week is The Last Friend.

The Last Friend is a tower defense game from The Stonebot Studio, Ludus Games, and published by Skystone Games. The Last Friend released in 2021 and is available for the PC and Nintendo Switch.

The world has fallen into another apocalypse, with factions fighting over territory and resources but, Alpha, the protagonist, has noticed that doggos were also being wiped out or kidnapped. It is up to you and your best friend to venture out, beat up these factions and take back the kidnapped doggos.

Think Plants vs. Zombies with Dogs and you have The Last Friend. After the onboarding, the player is introduced to five lanes for the turret building. After a buffer period to build turrets, the waves begin. Throughout the game, there are max five waves of enemies.

Turrets take scrap to build and enemies drop scrap when eliminated. Scrap can also be obtained through a certain dog and during the preround build time.

There are a bunch of different dogs to choose from. There are dogs that man turrets, dogs that provide passive abilities, and super dogs that provide ultimate abilities when providing enough ass-whooping. I used a majority of the turrets but I was really fond of the starting doggos. To list a few: regular shot doggo, slow doggo, sniper doggo, trap doggo, and bomb doggo are a few turrets to choose from.

Passive doggos come in the form of stamina regen, HP, how fast abilities can regen, powers up certain abilities, etc.

There is just so much in this game in terms of choices it is mind-boggling.

You have your standard squishy enemies, tougher, mid-sized enemies, chonky boys, and end-of-level bosses, which, surprisingly, do not require turrets, only your protagonist fists.

I want to stress that a lot of the levels require turret building but there are just as many that do not. Alpha can attack, and Alpha is quite strong, especially with the passive buffs from his friends. The enemies in the first half of the game stand literally no chance to Alpha and his superior strength until the final levels of the game when the game throws an uneven amount of healing enemies that make succeeding a literal coin toss.

Enemies and clearing levels reward treats that can be used to upgrade your turrets and stars for clearing levels can be used to upgrade your RV. The upgrades are pretty mild, just adding more damage, but they provide aesthetic differences.

The overworld is broken into individual instances of either a rescue mission, a story mission, or a boss fight. The amount of side missions to work on is pretty significant if you are a player that likes to 100% a game this has plenty of side stuff to do.

The Last Friend is appealing visually. The levels are quite varied. There is a post-apocalypse area filled with fire brimstone, a tech area filled with overworked, underpaid workers, and a quaint monastery filled with violent monks. I very much like dogs, but sometimes I think I know what breed it is and it is entirely different. Very weird.

The Last Friend is an easy game up until the final section of the game. I wanted to experiment more with all of the dogs but the originals were just always better. Alpha is just wayyyyy too powerful. A lot of the time gameplay is just solo killing enemies and letting the turrets clean up the rest. I had to play The Last Friend in short sessions because I was becoming bored of the game after one or two rounds. The game is fun, do not get me wrong, but it is also very easy.

The Last Friend is fun and looks good but, at the end of the day, it is way too easy and it really suffers because of it.

I like seeing little dogs in the gunner seat of the turrets