Naughty Dog continues on its path as one of the best video game developers today with another unforgettable title.
Do you like to have fun when you play a game? Enjoy relaxing to a great game, playing until you get the wonderful feeling as the credits roll? Then don't play The Last of Us. This game is a great many things, but never would fun come to mind. It's a pleasure to experience, but this game is harsh, depressing, and unforgiving in its vision of a ruined world. You won't be likely to forget the experience, but you'll never remember it as a jolly time.
What sticks with you the most in The Last of Us is its setting and sense of atmosphere. It conveys one of the most believable post-apocalyptic settings across any medium, even throughout all the diverse locations you'll see on its cross-country adventure. As you search an empty house, you'll feel the family that used to occupy it, the only remnants in the house is the things that survivors didn't need. Whether a child's room filled with toys or writings on the roof warning out trespassers; you get a feeling for the kinds of people that lived in these homes. The attention to detail is mind-blowing.
The world was torn to pieces by a type of fungal virus that manages to take over human hosts and turn them into zombie-like creatures known as Clickers. You'll encounter a few different types, depending on how long the host has been infected. The standard Clicker type is unnerving in the way it moves and sounds and you'll never feel comfortable with them around. They succeed in convincing you such a disease could bring the world to its knees.
Joel and Ellie will be your two protagonists on this lengthy adventure. Joel is a man is his late-forties to early-fifties, and he managed to make it through the world ending twenty years prior. He's a hard man of little words, and seems to have no moral line left to cross. Despite his always questionable actions, you come to understand him through smart characterization over the course of the story. Ellie is almost the complete opposite, a fourteen year-old girl born after the fall of man's world. As she travels with you, you understand how different life is for the children in this world as she questions everything new she comes across. The two characters' interactions over things little or large make them feel like genuine characters, and will endear them to you in no time at all.
As they travel, you'll encounter other survivors. Each one fills out a cliché in the tried-and-true zombie apocalypse genre, but most of them manage to be exemplary examples of those clichéd characters types. Cliché is a great way to describe most of the story, as Joel and Ellie manage to hit up every trope along their adventure. Thankfully, the story is pulled off with such gravitas on its way to a perfect conclusion you won't mind at all. Really, The Last of Us is similar to Naughty Dog's earlier Uncharted series in that it goes above its clichés and tropes to show how these types of stories should be told.
As is par for the course with a Naughty Dog game, the presentation is staggering. The acting is top-notch all around the board, utilizing the detailed performance capture Uncharted did so well. The technical prowess of the developers is also on top performance pumping out some of the best graphics the PS3 has ever produced. The music is another area that'll come through as great. It's typically pretty subtle, using maybe only one or two instruments per track, but it'll stick with you. I have the theme song stuck in my head even as I type this.
You'll not only cross Clickers along the way, but other humans as well. In fact, human encounters will make up the bulk of combat in the game. The Last of Us seems to want to be a stealth game at its heart, because they give you a plethora of ways to deal with enemies undetected. Joel has a "listening mode" that allows him to detect enemies through walls. It's a bit silly that he has an almost super power like ability such as Batman's detective vision, but it's a small bit of disbelief to get over to actually know where enemies are. Plus, it can be deactivated in the menu for the more hardcore type of players out there.
The AI is actually pretty smart in these stealth scenarios. You can play a great game of hide-and-seek with them, playing on their knowledge of your last known location. It can make hit-and-run tactics pretty exhilarating as you stealth out guys one by one. Unfortunately you'll realize it's a bit too easily gamed. The game provides you with an insane amount of bottles and bricks to distract people with. It becomes all too simple to lure enemies away one at a time to choke them out. If you ignore these items, the game becomes an intense adrenaline rush, but it's very disappointing to see a stealth system topple over on itself thanks to a brick.
There's gunplay as an option, as well. It's unlikely you'll be able to survive firing from a single position, however, as bullets do an insane amount of damage and stagger Joel. So the entire combat in the game, whether you go loud or quiet, will probably devolve into the most dangerous game of cat and mouse ever played, and it's a thrill.
The game tries to tell you bullets are scarce, but in the entire play time I never ran out once. You have so many different weapons at any given time, and if you run out for a gun you can be assured an enemy will provide ammunition for it when they die. Keeping the actual number of bullets lower than most games goes a long way, but bullets are never as scarce as the game tries to convince you they are. Other supplies will run low, however. A crafting system is present to create one of several types of items, such as medkits required to heal injuries. These items can be found in drawers and cabinets of the abandoned buildings you'll travel in, and actually does go a long way to convince you that Joel and Ellie are scavengers in this apocalypse. The fact that crafting those items in real time adds to the tension is also a major plus.
There's a leveling system present in the game, as well, but it feels oddly superfluous. It almost really feels thrown in at the last minute. You find "supplement" pills in the environment, and once a certain amount is accumulated you can upgrade a stat. Outside of the ability to unlock a last minute save from an instant-kill Clicker grab, each upgrade is boring. No matter what, upgrading your healing or crafting speed never feels fun or worth the effort. It's the largest example of doing something gamey in a game that otherwise tries to convince you of its world.
The only thing consistent thing you'll be doing outside of exploring and combat during the campaign is brief puzzles. They're all about getting from point A to B in a room, and they all feel remarkably similar. There are three types, all involving one ladder, plank, or palette each. It gets very annoying walking into the room, and instantly knowing the solution to a problem. It gets to feel repetitive by game's end, in a very disappointing way. They never last for very long, but they do help to drag down an otherwise typically smart game.
Another negative is the game's multiplayer. It doesn't feel tacked on, it just feels so boring. They mechanics of the single-player don't transfer to a multiplayer setting very well at all. There's an interesting idea for a meta-game about building up a survivor camp, but no matter how many blue dots I see on my screen representing the survivors in my base, I can't care about blue dots. Unlocks never seemed too enticing either. Without a compelling reason to return I lost interest very early on, and the core game's combat in a multiplayer setting just wasn't fun to me at all.
I know it starts to sound like a fair bit of negativity, but this is genuinely a game everyone should experience. Its storytelling, characters, and world are nothing short of remarkable. The core game is definitely entertaining, and it really is good enough to be recommended to anyone looking for a mature game experience.
Overall, The Last of Us is a game you will not be able to forget. When you're in this world, you'll find it next to impossible to stop playing the game to see more of these characters. The collectibles provide a great reason to explore, as it fleshes out the world even more and begs you to continue. You won't want your time in The Last of Us to end while you're in it. As I said before, it may not be the typical definition of fun with its harsh nature, but you will be compelled to see it through to the end. At the end of the day, it's a game that overcomes any faults it has and needs to be played by anyone even remotely interested.
SCORE: 9.0 out of 10