The Last Of Us Review

A couple of things before we start. First of all I was a victim of the dreaded "auto save" glitch which destroyed my experience about 8 hours in so I wasn't able to finish the game. So in depth talk about the storyline will be kept to a minimum because I didn't see the end of it and I'm currently too blinded with rage to care.

Secondly, The Last of Us is good. Let's get that out of the way to put this review in context, what it isn't though is a shining example of videogame storytelling or game design. It's alright, it does what it does and for the most part does it well, and the absolute landslide of other reviews proclaiming it to be "near perfect" and "one of the best games ever made" are nothing short of ridiculous and hyperbolic.

As you could probably guess from the fact that it's a piece of entertainment that was released in the 21st century The Last of Us is all about zombies. It's kind of difficult to tell whether it's blatantly ripping a lot of things off or if zombie fiction has blurred into one huge singularity and it's just impossible to tell one from another these days. There's not really any surprises here, humanity has been severely ballsed up by a virus, the military is keeping the survivors quarantined but they're kind of being dicks about it and there's a outsider cult who don't appreciate the "being dicks" part and therefore pledge to outdick the military in the name of their own survival.

You play as Joel Notsureiftheyevermentionhislastname, a jaded outlaw who is a bit miffed at the world in general after his daughter got infected with a severe case of dead right at the start of the outbreak. Circumstances are sure that he ends up escorting a girl named Ellie through the ruins of civilisation and long story short she might be the only hope of finding a cure. The writing is fine, the setting is well established, the characters motivations are decently explained and the dialogue is up to usual Naughty Dog standards in the sense that it's inoffensively generic. The Last of Us could indeed be a movie, not a very good movie mind, but hey if it would get 2 and a half stars at the Box Office then apparently we should all put it on a pedestal as a marvel of video game storytelling.

There's a lot of issues with the mix of storytelling and gameplay that take away the effectiveness of both, which ultimately is my main problem with The Last of Us. The first two hours play like the most boring bits of Uncharted and The Walking Dead strung together as the game forces you to slowly pace through it's world and demand that you appreciate the quality of the environments the development game spent far too much time making. It really gets frustrating after a while, there's many times where you enter a brand new arena and want to run off into it to explore but the game pulls you back on a choke lead because it's time for TALKY TALKY STORY TIMES and your control is severely limited or you just bounce off a NPCs big fat arse.

While Joel isn't quite the psychopath Nathan Drake is, who murders people at mass for no reason other than they're trying to destroy and steal ancient ruins before he can, there's still a lot of unnecessary violence in the game. Joel is supposed to come off as someone who fights to survive and has no issue with getting mean sometimes, but about halfway through the game it does feel like the game is throwing encounters with large groups of random dudes for no reason other than the player is understandably getting bored. There's quite a few human encounters where you're made to clear out large groups of guys for no real reason, I guess it's trying to establish a cruel and dog eat dog world but in the survival context of the game wouldn't it make more sense to -avoid- encounters altogether?

Let me ask you this dear reader, how familiar does this scenario sound? You fall into a new room in a game, there's nothing in the room but some form of crate that you can push against a wall to leave the room. There's an awful lot of that sort of thing in The Last of Us, and this review officially makes the statement that this does not count as gameplay. It's not a puzzle, it's not challenging and it's only there to pad out play time. It's hard to argue that this is good design in any way when I'm introduced to a brand new beautiful looking environment, but I'm programmed to ignore everything around me but the big dirty stick on the ground because I know that's there for a "puzzle" and nothing else is important.

Several hours into my playthrough of Last of Us I was really disappointed. There's nothing inherently special about the game, like the vast majority of linear triple A titles for the most part it's a really pretty looking corridor sightseeing tour which moves at the writers pace not the players or the game designers. But then the game dragged me to a big huge arena with lots of enemies and allowed me to approach the situation from any angle I chose. These are the only bits of The Last of Us that truly live up to the hype, there's no regenerating health so you don't want to take damage which makes every hit matter so running in guns blazing is almost never an option. These bits are just fun, they're tense and they actually engage...not that they're perfect either.

Melee combat is far too effective, there was one situation where I punched about six guys to death all in a row who all had guns so felt a bit silly afterwards. Enemy AI is absolutely pathetic, that might seem harsh but for a title of this magnitude in 2013 the fact that stealth and action encounters still have not evolved from "What was that noise!?" in Metal Gear Solid 1 in 1998 is ridiculous. Enemies can pretty much see you and forget about your existence within seconds, a lot of human characters had a bad habit of running directly into gunfire and are just general idiots. It's also frustrating that the game has a strong inventory and level up mechanic which rewards exploration to find supplies, but every time you clear out a huge arena and go exploring for goodies the game starts yelling at you to move to the next checkpoint because you're starting to hurt the scriptwriters feelings by WANTING TO PLAY A GAME.

You've probably noticed there's been a big gaping hole in this reviews commentary so far...why haven't I talked about the soundtrack yet? Well, on the one hand...OH WAIT ZOMBIES. Design wise they're quite impressive, the fresher looking ones withhold more human elements in their movements and their grunts and you get the feeling that there's still some human sanity in there struggling against the infection but they're far too gone. There's also the "clickers", the super creepy guys who are blind due to the infection giving them a nice fleshy burka and instead rely on hearing alone.

These guys are great for stealth sections as they instakill you if not approached properly and add to the tension in zombie based encounters. What they suck at though is other parts of the game, they are by far the most frustrating thing about The Last of Us. Using a pipe to clear out a bunch of regular zombie dudes only to have it break and then get murdered instantly by a clicker because you now can't do anything happens way more than you'd think and it's really bloody annoying. Especially since these guys don't instakill your AI partners, so eventually it occurs to you that the best strategy is to lead the clickers into your AI partners and then shoot them down while they're distracted which is kind of stupid if you think about it.

This is getting a bit long now so I'll wrap up. As said, The Last of Us is good....but what it's not is special. In basic design it's not really that different to other games on the market, and there's not many examples of writing and gameplay mixing in a way where the story grips you like the frankly superior Walking Dead game. It's good at what it does, but even then it has some bizarre technical issues, padded out sections and balance and gameplay design issues. This review is not here to destroy The Last Of Us for anyone, but basically a reminder to everyone to not gush over things so easily.

Even if you don't care about a lot of what this review has covered, is The Last of Us really the game you want to hold up on a pedestal as "perfect design" for all other games to copy? A game that scarifies gameplay for story and vice versa rather than find a happy marriage, and a game that for half its running time gives the player as little control as possible? Naughty Dog are the absolute best at this kind of game, but these aren't the best kind of games, so try to control yourself next time game journalists...yea?