I've been interested in this one for a long time - at least since it came out in 2013 - and with a PS4 in hand I knew it was high time to try it out, remastered and all. This one came dripping in hype, with Keith calling it one of his top five games of all time and Stevie sharing similar praise. Could it possibly live up to the hype?
[Deep breath, through teeth.]
Not quite.
Here's where I quickly backtrack and lump praise on the game. I had a lot of fun playing it, for the most part. I was very invested in the story, for the most part. I thought the two main characters were very well developed - full stop. The gunplay was pretty good, although I had all kinds of issues with stealth takedowns - sometimes you had to press square, sometimes it was triangle, sometimes they were quiet, sometimes they weren't - but this was, all in all, a pretty good game. Let me repeat that. A pretty good game! I'd readily call it my favorite survival horror game of all time. For real!
But folks - survival horror just ain't my bag. Sween was all jazzed up when I started playing Resident Evil 4, but I just couldn't get into it. And when the world went apeshit over Left 4 Dead, I bought in, but I spent most of those games being annoyed and frustrated. I can recognize that what annoys me about the genre is the same thing that appeals to most people - limited ammunition, sluggish controls - hell these games are probably more realistic than most regular shooters, but when I'm reloading a shotgun at a fixed three-second clip while a pack of zombies bears down on me for the eleventh time in a row because I've got two shells and one pipe bomb and a broken baseball bat, eh, I just get a little sick of reloading from the same checkpoint over and over and over again.
So again, The Last of Us has instantly become my favorite survival horror game. It's also one of my favorite pieces of zombie fiction to date, which is impressive not because zombie fiction has a high bar (pfft) but because there's just so much of it out there. This was very good, and there were moments when it was great. I disliked the ending for reasons I'm willing to discuss with anyone who's beaten the game, but I at least appreciate and understand why the writers chose to end the story in such a manner.
Plus, Boston! The first quarter of this game was set in Boston and then a little more of it unfolded in Lincoln, a nearby suburb (but not that nearby). The attention to detail was pretty good, particularly in the State Street subway station, and I can only assume that the other locations in the game were rendered with caring accuracy as well.
Most of the "issues" I had with this game - and really, I didn't have many, I just wasn't as blown away as the rest of my friends seemed to be - are probably just "issues" I have with the genre. Overall, it was another impressive game from Naughty Dog and I'd be interested in playing the rumored sequel. Plus, my PS4 copy of the game came with the Left Behind DLC. Maybe that's worth looking into. Probably! But not yet. Not yet.
Spent about two or three hours today tackling the Left Behind DLC and I definitely think it adds to the game. I'm not sure whether to treat it as a separate smaller game or not - I guess not, since I'm making a comment and not a post - but there's a lot of Ellie's story that gets explored in more depth. You know how this one's going to end if you've already played The Last of Us - and you should, prior to doing this - but that doesn't make it any less emotional when it happens.
ReplyDeleteOn a gameplay front, there were a lot of small minigames I appreciated here, as well as some more puzzle-based zombie-dispatching sections. It's still survival horror as all hell though, and you spend most of the game armed with only a knife and a pistol.
Also, Trevor watched me play about half an hour of this from his own PS4, which is just a really cool feature I'd love to explore more. Had I plugged in my microphone, I think we could have talked about some zombie-killing strategies in real time instead of me checking my phone every time I died to see several new messages from him like "DON'T DO IT!" and "BRICK TO THE FACE!"
I liked it!