Review: The Last of Us

            The Last of Us comes to us by way of Naughty Dog and is easily one of the biggest games of the year. Like so many games now-a-days The Last of Us features zombies (or zombie like creatures if you want to get picky) and plants us in a post-apocalyptic world. However, it intends to separate itself and perhaps even rise above its sea of competition by really making you feel as if you are living in this world and trying to get you to care about its characters.

           

Aside from a small section at the beginning of the game The Last of Us is set 20 years after the outbreak began and the world is now in shambles. The decayed city architecture really reinforces a sense of solitude and helplessness about the world. The few times where you are out in the wilderness or in a building that has held up fairly well comfortingly offsets this with a hope that not all has been lost, that some good remains and can be protected. The gorgeous graphics really help the game’s slower and more serene moments, walking the streets or through the woods and soaking in the atmosphere. Most big budget games tend to shy away from slower moments and only really offer much down time when there is an open world and you have to walk to the next mission, but The Last of Us embraces them. I felt it really improved the sense of pacing and the conversations between the protagonists, Joel and Ellie, that tend to occur in these instances help give you moments to connect with them outside of just cutscenes and prevents it from feeling like the developers were just padding out the game.

           

That is not to say that you don’t, unfortunately, get that feeling at times. An integral part of The Last of Us’s gameplay systems is searching your environment for items that you can scavenge in order to craft items or to obtain ammo. While I like this mechanic, there are times where it feels like the game is detracting from its narrative or mission focus. At times it feels like there are too many areas to explore and too many items to recover, so you end up darting off in directions you weren’t supposed to be taking at times when you really should be more focused. That being said, for the most part, I enjoyed scavenging and I like that the items have multiple purposes, so that you have to make decisions about your play style in a game that doesn’t offer classes. I actually wish they would have expanded on the number of item types you could find by say making food a necessity. As it currently stands food is in the game as a rare minor health boost that you can’t store. Medkits can be carried with you and can heal way more health. This makes food rather meaningless in the game, which doesn’t fit with the world that has been created. Needing to hunt occasional rats or birds or having additional places that are hard to come buy where food can be stored would have been a nice addition and maybe prevented the occasional since of padding.

Imagine entering a large, run down building you need to get across and realizing that it was a shelter and then taking alternate routes to see if any of the food stored there at one point still remained. Or perhaps hearing something in the distance down another hallway and sneaking up just in time to overhear some optional bandits, or even more intriguingly some normal people, talk about their food storage and where it is. Then you can either continue on your journey or navigate a different section of the building in order to rob those people. If you can be stealthy enough you can get the food without bloodshed or you can just kill everyone. That’s something I would have found interesting and would make use of some of the games larger more open areas.

The combat is another aspect of the game that I liked, but that could have been better. I personally enjoy shooters with really tight controls and aiming, so that when I get something in my sights I hit it. It is why I enjoy Halo and Gears so much. In an attempt at realism there is a lot of recoil and hitting a moving target can be challenging, especially if he is darting to the nearest cover. Speaking of cover I thought the cover mechanics were good, I didn’t come off of the cover when I didn’t want to or have difficulty going in and out of it. I just wish the shooting had been tighter. I know there is a sense of tension when you have limited ammo and you can’t guarantee that you’ll make every shot, but I feel it hurts the gameplay experience more than it helps.

Upon upgrading your weapons you can improve stability and accuracy, so that they function better and for some weapons in a way that I actually quite enjoyed. The drawback though is that the game’s leveling and upgrade system is designed in a way that it not only persists through additional playthroughs on New Game+, but that it is meant to require multiple playthrough to unlock most of the upgrades. The slowed progression makes it so I was past the halfway point when I got a gun I really liked. I would have appreciated it if the upgrades were geared towards giving you a better initial experience as opposed to being there to assist you on higher difficulties or as something to unlock on your second or third playthrough. After all for most games, and this includes The Last of Us, I’m only going to play all the way through once.

Where The Last of Us really succeeds is in its characters and its writing. Throughout the game you really come to care about both Joel and Ellie. Joel is a man with an understandably rough exterior, but keeps Ellie safe. Ellie is the more likeable one of the pair and has a great attitude and charm about her due in part to her young age accompanied by the harsh world she has been born into. There is also a sweet ignorance to her when exploring towns as she has no idea about how the world was and can often offer a humorous and at times even insightful opinion from her outside perspective. Both Troy Baker and Ashley Johnson who play Joel and Ellie respectively delivered great performances. The other characters you come across aren’t focused on all that much, but they aren’t reduced to basic stereotypes either and feel like real people.

I was glad that the writers took their time and didn’t rush the characters to significant developments, but let them play out a little more naturally. There is definitely a very cold streak that runs through much of the writing largely stemming from Joel and I was surprised that they were willing to keep things distant as opposed to having his cold heart melt moments after deciding to take care of Ellie, which feels like a more common approach. There is also something to be said for their choice of ending that I can’t really get into here, as it would obviously be a major spoiler.

The Last of Us has a multiplayer mode and it actually isn’t horrible. It also isn’t great. The main draw of this game is definitely its single player campaign, but even though it took me a little while to get into it there is some fun to be had in the multiplayer. There are only two modes, both are Team Deathmatch variants. In one type both teams have a pool of respawns and in the other everyone gets only one life. Personally I only liked the latter as it had more tension and also allowed for more sneaking around & prep as people won’t be spawning behind you. There is a weirdly useless meta-game where you gain survivors for your group that are blue dots and if you don’t earn enough points the blue dots can get sick and die or if you do well you can get more blue dots. I don’t know why they put it in.

Overall The Last of Us is a good game. Unfortunately it is held back by a lack of enemy variety (after about a third of the game you have seen every enemy type except for one) and weapons that aren’t enjoyable until you are halfway through the game and have purchased some upgrades. The writing is well done, the game has memorable characters in Joel and Ellie and there is a great sense of pacing. If you are looking for a game that doesn’t always crank it to eleven and has some mature writing and themes this one is worth checking out.

Score: 3/5