This is part two of my weekly review for The Last of Us, where I will break down it’s level design, gameplay, and give some conclusions of my own on how I feel about the game.

The levels in The Last of Us are absolutely beautiful, giving a really immersive and realistic surrounding that really helps to immerse oneself in the world. Forests are wonderfully built to allow a bit of exploration, whilst also being linear  to make sure a player does not get lost and stays on the right path. The level design can be a bit predictable at times, meaning if you’re exploring with Ellie and you all of a sudden see some bottles and bricks scattered around, you know that an enemy encounter is about to go down. I found this annoying to my game experience, as it broke my immersion whenever I would be happily exploring the beautiful environments. This immersion breaking level design would also happen when you started levels, for example having just drove hundreds of miles, you can control Joel to walk back at the start of a level, only to find there’s nothing but rocks or a bus blocking your path. It’s a bit gimmicky and takes away from an otherwise good design.Overall I would say these are some of the most well realised cities/worlds I have ever seen in a game, which really help to portray the fact that humanity has been on the edge of extinction for 20 years.

As for how you play The Last of Us, it’s classed as a survival Action Adventure, meaning that it’s a third person adventure game but it employs survival elements where you don’t get much ammo or resources. During the game you’ll come across cloth, alcohol and many other miscellaneous items hidden throughout the world. You use these items to craft better items such as molotov cocktails, or medkits. This does result in a management of materials, as the examples I just used require the same materials, so you really have to decide whether to go on the offensive with molotovs, or to make medkits to survive for longer. During my playtime on normal difficulty, I didn’t have any of these problems as resources seemed to be plentiful. That isn’t to say it’ll be the same on harder difficulties, but from my experience, survival wasn’t  problem. Most encounters you have in the game allow you to bypass by staying in stealth mode and making your way past the enemies. I found this great to start off with, but as the game went on and I got closer to the end where it was just bandits galore, sneaking past just took too much time and effort, so I took them on with guns. Overall the action in The Last of Us is effectively no different than Uncharted 3’s combat, the only difference being that ammo isn’t chucked at you willy nilly, meaning you have to ration resources a bit more. It’s ok, but definitely could of been done a lot better. Ellie may be your companion, but you don’t notice her at all through your playing, she has no influence on the game, and is merely there as a plot device. If you’re sneaking around men or infected, they will literally walk right through Ellie, which is both jarring and silly for such a serious game.

Pros:

• Gorgeously realised world that really looks and feels like 20 years have passed.
• Fantastic characters that really do evolve throughout the main story.

Cons:

• Too many human encounters for my liking.
• Ellie has no impact on the game mechanics of the game.

Overall, The Last of Us is definitely a step in the right direction for action games, I just worry about whats happening at the same time. This game feels like a re-skinned Uncharted, but where Nathan Drake would kill hundreds of people and in the cutscenes he’d brush it off, The Last of Us has changed the main character to be immersed in this world of violence, making it so your character has no other choice. It seems that developers are no longer trying to justify the actions of their protagonists, and are now just allowing them to be violent for the stories sake. By all means play The Last of Us, the whole world is raving about it, but I don’t think it deserves all the 10/10’s its been getting. Maybe it’s because The Last of Us was hyped as the game of the decade, but something about it didn’t sit right with me, it’s not different than any game that came before it, it just had a good story and characters. I was hoping the story would effect the game mechanics, which it didn’t.

4/5

This weeks review is on a game that has received a lot of attention recently, with many people calling it the game of the decade. I decided I had to see this for myself, so I popped down to Gamestop, and bought myself a copy for $60. (It’s still strange to write that, and $60 is the same price as back home so I was all good for it). For the purposes of length, this review will be split into two, with the first part today concentrating on premise, story and characters, and tomorrows part focusing on the gameplay, level design and conclusions.

So, The Last of Us is based in a post apocalyptic world where zombies roam the earth. These aren’t normal zombies, they’re infected, which is slightly different and more believable than zombies; the first stage of transformation is crazed “runners”, who will beat and bite ordinary people like a traditional zombie. The next stage is “clickers”, this transformation entails a fungus exploding from the infected’s face, meaning they can no longer see, but click their tongues to see like a bat using sonar. The final transformation is the Boomer, a gigantic foe who will throw his fungal protrusions at enemies. Past these transformations an infected person will finally mould into a wall and give out spores to infect more people. It’s a nice concept that is different than the typical “zombie apocalypse” scenario, albeit all the familiar as well. Naughty God didn’t have to make the runner zombies, but to make the game play interesting they had to have multiple enemy types, and so it was a good fit.

The story starts with you controlling a little girl who wakes up to a phone call asking for her dad. The man on the phone sounds out of breath and scared, so the girl you control (Sarah) gets scared and has to find her dad (Joel). It’s a great scene that sets up the rest of the game fantastically, allowing you to see the world turning to chaos right before your eyes in a unique perspective. Once the screen fades to black, the player takes control of Joel 20 years later in Boston. In this time the infection has spread throughout the world, and special quarantine zones have been set up with military overlooking civilians. Rations are low, and the whole zone feels very much down in the dumps. As Joel and his companion (Tess) are smugglers, they need to get to the other side of the quarantine zone in order to get a “shipment”, and this is when you’re first introduced to the conflicting factions in this post-apocalyptic world. There’s the army, which is trying to take care of everyone in a harsh way, and the fireflies, a group of rebels that want to overthrow the army and feel they’d do a better job of protecting civilians than the government. Once Joel and Tess reach their shipment, the games true purpose is shown; in order to get their shipment, they must smuggle and deliver a child (Ellie) to the fireflies just outside of town. What seems like a simple task soon turns into having to traverse the whole USA, from Boston in the east to Salt Lake City in the west, which is a good set up for a game. The clans coupled with the new infected make for a very interesting take on the post-apocalyptic world, if not 100% original, it’s definitely a different take on a already popular genre of media. The story itself was ok, with cutscenes shinning light on the current circumstances characters found themselves in, but I found it all a bit too predictable, meaning that apart from the ending, I knew where the game was going. This is mainly because the story is based on the characters themselves, and not necessarily on the world around them.

The characters are brilliantly filled out, with Joel and Ellie having a dynamic that makes you want to continue playing, just to see how their relationship changes. Throughout the campaign, Joel and Ellie will encounter many other characters on their travels, with each of these people being just as fleshed out and detailed as the main protagonists. Joel has been through a lot and is cynical of the world around him, meaning he’s a hardened veteran that doesn’t want hassle. Ellie on the other hand is a hard ass teenager who doesn’t want to be a burden on Joel, so tries to be independent, which causes more trouble for Joel. One example of the fleshed out characters is a man called Bill, who owes Joel a favour, to which Joel uses to try and get a working car to drive across the country. Bill is a very distrustful person who doesn’t like change, which really doesn’t go well with Ellie being a independent and strong woman, resulting in some very funny scenes between the two conflicting personalities. Overall the characters are amazingly thought out, which makes for a lot of believable relationships throughout the main story, meaning it’s not necessarily the story or the world that appealing, it’s the way the characters change and evolve throughout their time together.