High strength alloys such as nickel and titanium and advanced engineering materials such as ceramics, composites are being developed and widely used in aerospace, automotive, medical and nuclear industries due its inherent physical-mechanical properties. However conversion these new materials into engineering products are always associated with machining. The machinability characteristics such as higher cutting force, higher cutting temperature, poor surface integrity and shorter tool life associated with these materials posing many challenges to the researchers, and hence considered as difficult to cut materials. Conventional methods of machining these materials are found to be uneconomical. In recent days, many attempts have been made to improve the machinability of these materials more effectively via use of external energy assisted machining. Among the various external energy assisted machining methods, laser assisted machining (LAM) has received the attention of researchers in the metal cutting domain and a few research was carried during the recent years. This paper is aimed to review and summarize the potential use of LAM for difficult to cut materials, current progress, benefits and challenges in laser assisted machining. In addition an optimization frame work to study the effect of laser parameters and machining process parameters on machinability performance is not reported which is applicable to industrial processes It is concluded that further experimental modeling and empirical techniques are required to create a predictive based models that gives good agreement with reliable experiments, while explaining the effects of many parameters, for machining of these difficult-to-cut materials. © 2014 Published by Elsevier Ltd.