A Polynaut Retrospective: The Last of Us

Warning: There might be spoilers in this text or in the comments.

(I'm too lazy to make a header image at 4am. Sorry Polynauts! May after some sleep.)

I recently finished playing through The Last of Us and while overall, I did enjoy the game, I am rather torn on whether I want to classify it as a good game or a great game. I definitely do not agree with the 10/10 scores, the proclamations of "Masterpiece!" and "Flawless!" I feel there's easily enough wrong with the game to inhibit rational justification of a perfect score.

So it seems like I'm going to be blasting The Last of Us for the rest of this piece. Yes and no. I will primarily focus on what I felt was wrong about the game, but there's also many things it gets right. I overall enjoyed the experience and do not hate the game, however it's a bit dismaying to see such high praise lavished on a flawed game.

Visually, the game is beautiful. Not just in a textural sense, but in presentation of a ruined post-apocalyptic America; The decay of human civilization and the creep of nature on ruined cityscapes. The characters, I feel, were beautifully rendered and believable. The motion capture was stellar; The character motion looked good and facial expressions... I feel they were able to convey emotion very well - I enjoyed the facial expressions far more than I did in say L.A. Noire, which was praised for its facial animations.

Audio, I feel the game successfully delivered as well. The game sounds amazing on my sound system. Guns had a 'weight' to them. Melee weapons hit with a meatiness. Ambient sounds... It was a great aural experience. I also really liked the music.

The game has a great atmosphere and isn't outside the realm of believe. There's a noticeable attention to detail in the crafting of the environment, with many areas having stories about what happened (that you can find out through letters, etc.). The story, though... The intro, while predictable, hooked me and it's been a long time that a game has made me respond to it like a good book would. The events that happen around Winter, for instance, had me playing about 2 hours after I intended to stop, because I REALLY wanted to know what was going to happen to both Joel and Ellie. Speaking of Joel and Ellie, character development, I feel, was pretty well done for a video game.

The 5-6 hour tutorial was a harrowing experience and very nearly drove me towards hating the game. Yeah, the game and pretty much all games like it, are linear, but the first handful of hours were extremely linear in terms of tactical freedom in engagements as they slowly drip fed you your tools to manipulate the battlefield and drive home the fact that say Clickers will eat your face and Bloaters will tear it open.

To me, the game really starts to fall apart in terms of gameplay and mechanics.

Gameplay, the game is nowhere near an exceptional stealth\cover based third person shooter. I didn't have any qualms with the waver mechanics (it's a real thing!), but I did take issue with Joel's apparent sluggishness in movement (even with sensitivity pumped up). Forced walking and event tuned fast movement are also really annoying. The stealth mechanics were somewhat serviceable, but had several issues, generally revolving around how the AI would react; For instance, occasionally detecting Joel through walls\cover or not reacting at all to a bottle in their hearing range.

The listen mechanic is interesting, but the game design ends up making the system flawed. There are instances where you can't "hear" certain enemies, because they want to build a tense moment. I've also "heard" enemies spawn. I do like that you cannot "hear" enemies after a few moments if they stop moving.

Other design flaws, I feel are that there is clear "arenas" for confrontation. You can pretty much guarantee an encounter if you drop down into a new area and see copious cover options. This approach essentially eliminates a potential mechanism to build tension, as encounters start becoming predictable, rather than surprises.

The progression design is flawed, I feel, for a game focused on the concept of survival. By somewhere between the middle and end, Joel feels like a killing machine. Yes, you can't just take all the bullets and kill all the things, but I was able to effortlessly murder targets, especially when given the option of guerrilla warfare. I'm not even sure if there was an option to sneak by everything in the game, as systematically killing all the adversaries seemed like the path of least resistance.

Bugs, bugs, bugs... I ran into countless bugs in my playthrough ranging from harmless missing walls\textures, to annoying, like enemies phasing through walls, all the way up to game breaking. I didn't document all my bugs, but the biggest game breaking one I ran into was while hunting a deer. I hit the deer in the head with an arrow and the deer froze, rather than flee; My speakers were blasted with a nice really loud, never ending "BRRRRRRRRRRR" noise and while the game didn't freeze, I was unable to progress further.

A checkpoint restore solved the problem, but the checkpoint system itself is flawed, keeping track of what weapons you have holstered, but not what weapon you have equipped. I've been restored to a checkpoint with a pistol, when all the cool kids use the bow to hit all the faces (I had been using a bow for quite a long time and I really only ever used the pistol as a fallback option).

There's also seems to be a bug with the stealth takedowns, as sometimes the game inexplicably goes the "I'm gonna bash ya" route, rather than the strangulation route.

If I were to give The Last of Us a score, I'd probably rate it around an 8, maybe an 8.5 if someone made a good argument. However, that good argument would likely be countered by the excess of bugs I ran in to. I feel it lives up to its hype in terms of say story, atmosphere, and character development, but the gameplay is rather lacklustre and nothing seriously revolutionary (or even evolutionary). It's not a must-buy game for the general gamer, in my opinion, but if you like a well crafted story and world you'll definitely get that with The Last of Us.