The Last Friend Review

The Last Friend is an awesome game with fun achievements. It was plagued by one buggy level which made it impossible to complete but works well enough now. ~12h to 100% and no missable achievements.

Approximate amount of time to 100%: 12h
Estimated achievement difficulty: 4/10
Minimum number of playthroughs needed: 1
Is there a good guide available: I wrote this achievement guide
Multiplayer achievements: No
Missable achievements: No
Grinding Achievements: No
DLC-Only achievements: No
Speedrun achievements: No
Time-gated achievements: No
RNG-achievements: No
Does difficulty affect achievements: No
Unobtainable/glitched achievements: “Lost” can be hard to get because the shrine level has difficulties with the camera

I have a hard time writing this review, and I’ll start by explaining why. I got the amazing chance to play this fantastic game a few days before the release. I found some bugs and had contact with one of the developers. First by e-mail, later through discord to make talking about what I found out easier. Everything was fine, they quickly fixed the bugs and it was just nice to be able to help out. The last bug I found was that the camera stopped following the character in the Shrine level, and with that 3 achievements were impossible to get. At first, everything was still fine, they tried to fix the bug, but it didn’t help.. at one point (3 weeks after the release) the communication completely stopped. No response in private discord messages, no response on the discord server in general, no response to e-mail… nothing. I tried multiple times and after 2 months I made a topic here on steam about it and wrote a negative review. The response on that steam topic was that they would look into it, but then it went silent again.
https://steamcommunity.com/app/944430/discussions/0/3200369112091234426/

This still hurts today, as I adore this game, I think it is awesome and the developers strike me as lovely people who care so much for their game. So I have no idea where it went wrong that I got the silent treatment and that it took 7 months to be able to finish the Shrine level with minimal bugs, but I still lost the camera at some point.

So much for a bit of the backstory where I come from when writing this review. and keep in mind that it is 7 months ago that I played the game, but here is my review from what I remember of it:

The Last Friend is an awesome tower defense/ beat ‘m up type of game. Most of the levels are a bit like “Plant Vs zombies’ that you put towers in lanes and they kill the enemies. The twist is that you are quite strong yourself also, so you’ll help beat the enemies by going up close to them and beat them to death. Each level has their own sub objectives which ask you to play a different way/ use a specific power or complete it in a certain way to make it more challenging.

To unlock all the achievements you have to complete every sub-objective as well. It also has a lot of “do this X amount of times” and “try out this awesome combo you wouldn’t have done otherwise” kind of achievements. It has the kind of challenges and achievements I love and that in combination with being such an awesome game is great. If we forget the history I have with the developers and just look at the game and its achievements itself, I would have ranked it in my top 5 indie games in 2021.

This review for The Last Friend was written on 22 April 2022, based on the current Steam version of the game which has 56 achievements at the time of writing this review. This information can be outdated, for example, when the developer adds or removes achievements or releases (new) DLC.