Dragon's Crown (PS3): Buxom, Bruising, Beautiful, Bad-ass.

If you'll remember (or probably don't) back in December I wrote a review of what I thought was the last great game in the PS2 in Vanillaware's Odin Sphere. After playing the ever loving shit out of both that and Muramasa: The Demon Blade I have been absolutely chomping at the bit for Vanillaware to produce a new title. I knew they had a PS3 one in the works, so I waited.

For 2 whole years. Delays, production issues, funding issues. Anything that could have gone wrong seemed to go wrong. Once things were finally underway the game managed to come under massive scrutiny because of the art style, but through all of it, it finally has been finished and released, and now I finally get to enjoy....

DRAGON'S CROWN:(PS3)

In the world of Dragon's Crown you play one of six adventurer's who arrive to the kingdom of Hydeland, a place where numerous labyrinths have been found and linked by magic in order to find the legendary Dragon's Crown. An item with the power to control dragons and possibly be a pivotal item in turning the tides of war to whoever can get their hands on it.

You arrive to town to seek your fortune by searching the labyrinths for treasure but find yourself getting caught up in the search for the Dragon's Crown for the kingdom's royalty in the hopes of preventing war and stopping an ancient dragon from awakening..

So that's it. That's the story for the most part. As you can see, not much to it but ultimately that's not a huge factor in this game for once. It does go with a fairly interesting storytelling mechanic that I haven't seen very much in games. I guess the best way to describe it is if the story was being told by a dungeon master. Since none of the playable characters actually have names, he refers to "you". He will also chime in through out the level to explain the setting or what is happening just as you would in a game of D&D. For a classic fantasy set piece like this one, it works pretty well.

As mentioned previously, you can pick from one of six adventure classes to start the game: The Fighter, who has high defense and strength, but slow speed. The Dwarf, who has high strength and can throw enemies into each other. The Amazon, who has high attack and agility, but low defense. The Elf, who is the melee/range hybrid and is the most balanced all around.  The Wizard who is the full blown glass cannon, huge damage but easily killed. And the Sorceress who uses attack/support magic, and has a massive rack.

The game pretty much tells you when you start who is good for new players and who is good if experienced players so if you think you wanna start off with a magic user, you might be in for a bit of a rough road. I went with the Amazon because after looking at another review she seemed like one of the classes that most fed into my desire to have endless combos.

If you looked at any of the screenshots, trailers, or videos on Dragon's Crown  then the gameplay should be pretty self explanatory. This game is a wonderful throw back to those fantastic arcade style side scrolling beat em up's a-la X-men Arcade, Simpsons the Arcade game, Crime Fighters, and so on. You could draw a comparison to console beat em ups like TMNT: Turtles in Time, or say Streets of Rage but I think the whole presentation of the game feels more acradey to me. Something I thoroughly enjoyed.

But its not just a plain ole walk right and mash attack game neither (well it is, but there's more). Each of the characters have their own unique strengths and weaknesses, and they all have different abilities to unlock as you play through the game that caters to these unique strengths. For example, I'm currently using the Amazon and many of her abilities play into the ability to keep attacks coming. Her swings are slow and sluggish, but the more you land hits the faster they come and harder they hit. With the right additions to her jumping attack, combo extensions, and ability boosts, she can go from slow swings to a lighting fast axe cloud of death in a matter of seconds with enough enemies on the screen.

Also, in addition to the character specific skill trees there is also a series of common skills that all the characters can use. These are simpler but still effective things like increase vitality, get health from coin drops, carry more stuff and so forth. This is a game where you can power level the hell out of character and still probably not max out all of their skills. It leaves me with the paranoia of never wanting to use my skill points in the event I'm a level or 2 away from something better. 

Typically, for the main story portions the narrator will guide you along the town map to direct you where the next portion of the story will take place. For the first nine or so stages it does this to introduce you to the 9 levels where the majority of the game will take place. The majority of the levels are reasonably short, taking you through a few breaks of fighting before giving you a boss to fight (thank christ). Also during stages you can accept side objectives that you can claim for additional experience or skill points.

But after you complete these first nine or so levels, the game lets up on the reigns and really starts to knuckle down with you. It forces you to go through them again under the guise of searching for dragon talismans, but it gives you extended versions of the levels you have played and gives a new and more difficult bosses to fight. It also ramps up the difficulty of the monster level, gives more monsters on the screen, and provides a much faster paced experience over all.

When you have a full team banging on all cylinders, the screen can get kinda hectic.

Good thing too, because if you are like me, you might be started to get bored just before that point because until you hit that the game seems pretty easy and monotonous. Once the difficulty starts to ratchet up you will spend too much time trying to fight your way through waves of enemies to worry about being bored with the game play. 

You have to go this somewhat lengthily tutorial section before the game actually opens up the online play. Its annoying, but makes sense in a light because that means by the time everyone gets into online mode, you don't have to worry about anyone really being a new player. Everyone will be familiar with the game and the character they are using by that point. You can't match make in a lobby in specific rooms though. You can drop into random games or drop into a friends game, so at least you can probably organize so you and friends can all be in the same game.

Although its not an issue if you have local multiplayer, as on a single screen you have up to 4 people from the word go. Which is certainly helpful because the game can certainly get a bit hairy to play single player if you are going it solo. It also features a mechanic to where AI bots can take control of characters to fight along side you. As you go through the levels you will find discarded bones throughout the stages. These bones can be picked up so when you return to town you can revive them, and have them fight with you. You can also bury the bones in the hopes of getting a free item.

The bot mechanic can work one of two ways. When you are in town, you can go into the tavern and cherry pick which of the characters you revived to help in the next stage you choose. You will go through a number of these because they cannot gain experience, nor can their equipment be repaired. But as you find more bones their levels will increase as you do. Or should you chose to go it alone, unless you specifically locked the join feature, there is a chance a random character from your available pool will drop in sporadically to help you as you go. This is often how I will play unless a level starts to get too frustrating for me.

There are a small couple of headaches in this game though, as no game is perfect. One of my biggest irks is the support character that follows you around, Rannie. He's basically an NPC thief character who basically follows you around to collect the spoils that drop from the baddies you kill. He also unlocks the chests you find or the doors to advance the stage or hidden areas. If that were his sole mechanic, I'd be ok with that.

Unfortunately though, he is controlled via mouse click. This is annoying for the PS3 users because the mouse guider is used with right analog stick. Even with maximum sensitivity set it never seems to move fast enough for me to get him over to a door or chest. And it requires you to be fucking precise as shit when you click it. I can't think of how many times in the heat of combat, or really even after combat, I'd try to move my little hand to the door or chest I want him to open, just to have a dumb NPC get in the way or find myself clicking on wall next to what I wanted.

Fun trolling tip, you can steal other peoples food out of their pot.
(So don't be a jerk, stay with the pot in front of you.)

This is especially frustrating in the heat of boss fights, because this same mechanic is used to revive your teammates if they die one to many times. You have to move the mouse to the top and click their face, or name, or counter, or SOMETHING. I've yet to figure out what fucking spot I need to click to bring them back, and when I have a boss monster wailing down blows on me I don't have time to piss around trying to figure it out when I have 3 hero's to revive.

The other feature that uses this is the Rune Magic. Through the stages you will find runes scattered about the walls. if you click on them, they will glow. if you can come up with the right combinations with the runes you've collected with the ones on the walls, they can have various effects, again though, this is something that requires you to be precise, which means I'm not doing it in the heat of combat.

This might be something that is easier to do in 4 player mode, but by myself I usually have to wait till I've cleared the room only to unlock a spell that would have helped me in the fight prior.  Because I'm constantly struggling with remembering the runes, and take too much time guessing, a majority of the time I just don't even bother.

Speaking of the multiplayer, there are an handful of hiccups there too. First off, there are 6 character types. The PS can support up to 7 controllers. This seemed to be begging for a 6 player Co-op a-la X-men the Arcade game. But whatever, only 4. That's OK, its still fun. But as previously mentioned, the actual online multi-player is actually locked off for the first 9 levels. You can have bots join you, but not actually players. This seemed kind of strange to me but I guess it makes sense since the beginning functions as a tutorial before getting thrown into the main game.  You can still play it local though....

But there is problems with that too, actually. For some reason, unlike on the 360, the PS3 doesn't allow for multiple profiles on the same system to be logged in at the same time. So like in the case of one my guest writers (Big Sister) She had her game on her profile and so did her boyfriend on his, but they couldn't join those two characters because you can't log into two profiles in this game. So in order to play together, one of them had to start over. That's kinda stupid, and it goes by a game by game basis. You can log into multiples in Scott Pilgrim vs the World on the respective arcades. It's a bit of an oversight but I guess ultimately not a huge issue. Hopefully this gets patched.

Then of course, There is the "controversy". Most people know what I am talking about. Vanillaware founder and lead artist, George Kamitami came under quite a bit of scrutiny by a number of reviewers and video game community members from the over exaggerated endowments of some of the characters. Most specifically, the Sorceress character and her previously noted cartoonishly large breasts. He got into a bit of spat with a writer from Kotaku about the design, and this character has become the image of why all women are completely objectified in the game world. It eventually did bring out intelligent debate, but to me it was a pointless firestorm.

First off all, has nobody seen any fantasy? Nobody remembers Morrigan's half a shred of a shirt in Dragon Age? Nobody played God of War, a game based in mythology where clothing was pretty much optional? Soul Calibur, where Ivy basically fought in a chain mail open one piece? Or even his previous game Odin Sphere where Velvet basically wore a red hood that covered the naughty bits and her hair. All of these characters a presented in equally oversexualized ways and it didn't cause half the stink this game did. News flash, the image of the young "Witch" in fantasy is always been oversexualized and has been for years, does that make it OK? Probably not, but is it really something to complain about? Yes the Sorceress' chest is ridiculously large, but its not like they are bare. Do women get mad at other women for having large chests because its offensive? Who fucking cares? They are lumps of fat.... that are imaginary..

The sidequest rewards feature art from the various contributors from the game.
They are all incredible.

Secondly, Dragon's Crown is an equal opportunity objectifier. Every character is an overblown cartoon of itself. the Amazon's endowments are hulking half naked muscles, with a pair of legs I'm not entirely sure aren't just a pair of obtuse triangles. The is an old man you meet who is so withered and decrepit he could be a skeleton, but no seniors groups offended by that. The dwarf basically just rocks a helmet and loincloth and then we have Roland, one of the games barbarians. Who when he appears on the screen is about 8% background, 10% head, and about 82% rippling man chest (see video). Completely ridiculous and unattainable images of masculinity. Don't see any men's rights groups or reviewers complaining about how offensive that is. Know why? Cuz nobody gives a shit, and you shouldn't either.

Thirdly, if you fuckin laid off with the pseduo-pretentious crusades and actually looked at the visuals, you would see that this might be one of the most visually stunning games you'd get your hands on. Kamitami has this ability to take watercolors have them all blend and pop so complimentary that it produces this level of vividness that makes every little detail to everything shine through. Everything is beautifully animated to extensive levels of detail that you just don't see in games today. Its a wonderful break form this depressing age of video games where colors are shunned for palettes of brown, grey, and black grit. Honestly, in my opinion the characters all take a back seat to the spectacular monster designs. The fight with the Gazer is one of my favorites.

D'aww... so adorably deadly.

Even when you complete missions are you treated to rewards of still pictures of the quest you completed by the various artists in the game and every single one of them is impressive to behold, and this is coming from a guy who for the most part finds art museums to be a bore. If you seriously don't think this game is beautiful then throw on a dunce cap, go out and hold a stick like a gun, crouch in front of a brick wall, and stare at it for 60 hours. That's the majority of the games in the past 5 years right there, and if that's what you want? Fuck you, we need more games with spectacular art design like this.

Gimme a sec to get my blood pressure back down.....  OK. So if I had to say the game had a major flaw? it would be that it can sometimes be a repetitive and monotonous at times. Each time you start a new character you have to go through that 9 level tutorial again each time. And while having a strong leveled character is fun, building a new one from scratch can be a bit of a drag (especially if doing local multiplayer). It's also a bit of a grind, you're gonna be seeing the same levels a lot, but as the difficulty increases you get newer monsters to fight. And its a Looting game, so those Diablo types who like to continuously fight for marginally better equipment should be right at home here.

Guess it would make sense to have a dragon in the game, huh...

Typically when you find yourself waiting for an extended length of time for a game, you will find yourself disappointed because it just won't meet up to your expectations, (See Duke Nukem Syndrome). So far this summer, I'm 3 for 3. The Last of Us and Hot Shots Golf: World Invitational met up with all my expectations, and now Dragon's Crown has too. Its the first game in like fuckin' ever where I've actively texted folk to set up online and local games. Those games have been a blast, and for a simple arcade style game? I have like 45 hours and counting on it. that's pretty damn good replay value for game with about 9 stages.

I really don't know what else to say about it. I really like this game, a lot. Sure, it has some oversights and issues, but so far I haven't found a reason to put it down. Its a solid play and anyone who's begged their mom for a few quarters to play that arcade standup at the store will get that nostalgic feeling from this game. To use an awful, awful analogy that I swore I wasn't gonna use: Dragon's Crown is sweet as tits.

You may now write counter blogs about what a horrible sexist pig I am.
And I will respond with images of my middle finger. 

Deadpool (PS3): Breaks the Fourth Wall, but not much else.

So, full disclosure: Up until early 2011, I really had no idea who Deadpool was. I considered myself to be a comic fan, but really wasn't all that brushed up on anything that happened after the early 90's. Priorities changed, and me and comics just kinda drifted apart. Thankfully, I work in a library so I have been using its connections to catch back up with my favorite franchises.

But around February of 2011 came the release of Marvel vs. Capcom 3. I remember when selling reserves of the game some of my coworkers and people picking it up were very excited about the appearance of this "Deadpool" character. I shrugged it off. But then at a fight night later that week, someone played against me with him, and I laughed my ass off as he yanked the lifebar off the screen and proceeded to smash me with it. From then on, I was hooked. I've been reading much of his back catalog, and now after a hilarious Comic-con announcement last year, Deadpool has his own game in.....

DEADPOOL: (PS3)

So the overall meta of the Deadpool game's story is that Deadpool is basically holding High Moon studios hostage after they rejected his initial video game pitch. After giving a much more "explosive" proposal, High Moon Studios sends over their script for the Deadpool game.  Deadpool is clearly not happy going off a script and starts cutting through it with a crayon without reading to make his changes. After arguing with his voices a bit and dicking around his apartment, we jump into the script...

Deadpool receives a contract to kill Chance White, a corrupt media mogul. Deadpool has no idea why he's accepted this contract because he didn't read the script. But none the less Deadpool cuts and shoots his way through White's armed guard in his headquarters to make his kill. In the wake of his destruction (and blowing the games budget in the process), White escapes with the help of Mister Sinister.

This irks Deadpool because he won't get paid if he doesn't actually kill White. Sinister makes his escape to the island of Genosha. While in pursuit of Sinister, Deadpool teams up with his old collegues with the X-Force in Wolverine, Rouge, Domino, and Psylocke and after a bit of an argument about who gets to fly the Blackbird, the group of them give pursuit to get revenge for robbing Pool of his pay (oh, and stop Sinister's scheme.)

So alright, the premise for the story is both completely fitting for the Deadpool character and at the same time feels slightly lacking. The biggest problem in the area of story is the lack of a really strong set of supporting characters. For the weeks approaching release they would tease and release images showing that Wolvie, Domino, Cable, and Rouge were all in the game. At the onset, I was pretty happy about that since these are characters I generally like and am familiar with.

But really, the only ones who gets any real extended screen time in the game are Cable and Death. They mainly serve to kinda push Deadpool along in the story, but he clearly has little interest in doing so. Its funny because those were pretty much the exact feelings I had as well. I found myself a couple of times wondering if this was meant to be something they did on purpose, or if the writing was particularly weak in that area. This really is a theme you might find yourself in for a number of the game's aspects.

Cable can be described as the game's Grumpy Dad.

The main antagonists, Mr. Sinister and his gaggle of D-list villains (Blockbuster, Vertigo, and Arclight) all feel kinda thrown in. Which again, seems like something that could be intentional or slapdash. You'd feel that that this is a Marvel licensed game they'd have the right to throw in characters from the entire universe. Then again because of the very nature of the Deadpool character, this allows him to completely trash how awful this cast is. It makes sense in that regard. 

But what sticks in my craw about it is if you are going to advertise that these more popular Marvel characters are going to be in the game, one would hope that its going to be more than just a lame token appearance which many of these characters seem to be. You get one small section where you "sort of" play as Rouge. I don't think Psylocke even gets a line of dialog. Wolverines contribution to the story is marginal at best. It's really kind of a letdown considering the history between characters like Deadpool and Wolvie/Domino.

Full disclosure: I thought Arclight, Vertigo, and Blockbuster were made up for this game.

I know that Deadpool for the most part of his series deals with some pretty off the wall main antagonists for the majority of his main stories, but he's clashed with almost every hero and villain in the Marvel universe a one point or another. There could have been an actual fight with Wolverine or Domino, any of the previous Weapon X products, no mention of Spider-man after one small reference at the start, none of the Avengers make and appearance. There isn't even people who are more commonly known to his own franchise in there (probably because a lot of them are dead, but still.)

Really, I think a lot of Deadpool's best story arcs are where he's a support character to a major player. Thor, Hulk, Spidey, and so on. I feel the game might have been better served as a series of disconnected missions with the other characters universes. Sadly that's not how it played out.

"Deadpool, we need to go off screen and be ineffectual to the plot for the next few levels, bub."

So the Deadpool game's combat system I guess can be considered pretty cookie cutter for those action adventure spectacle fighter kinda games we've seen. You got your light attack, heavy attack, jump, dodge, counter functions, you can use your shoulder buttons to go into the over the shoulder 3rd person shooter kind of control scheme with pistols, shotguns, and machine guns. If you have been playing video games at all for the past 10 to 15 years nothing about the game's control scheme is gonna throw you a wild curve ball. Its about as cut and dry as it gets.

However on the same token, sometimes it can feel a bit loose too. If you go into the menu for your unlocks and upgrades you will see that certain levels of weapons unlock different and more extended combos to use. But my mashing of the combos never seemed give me the inclination I was doing my combos properly. This is really an area where Deadpool can take a page from the God of War playbook. When I hit my specific button presses in that game, the combos on the screen look clearly different enough for me understand that those specific presses triggered that specific move.

Occasionally you will get the QTE button press to counter an enemy, but the window of it is small or sensitive to directional button presses, so I never seemed to be able to really rely on the ability to counter certain enemies, sans a few fights with Blockbuster where his counter is very highly telegraphed. Which makes that boss fight almost insultingly easy. Luckily for the most part if your counter doesn't work you will still teleport dodge away so you remain safe. A friend of mine thinks this was done intentionally, to make a mockery of bad gameplay, but I think that's a bit too subtle for the Deadpool universe. I think it just doesn't work well.

During the course of the game Deadpool will continue to break the fourth wall in cutscenes and a number of those deal a good amount of laughs. There was a concern that, much like recent Spider-Man games, Deadpool would overuse some of the pool of quips he has ad nauseum to the point of irritation. Depending on how long you play the game, this might be an issue or not. I for the most part didn't have much of a problem with this, but there was one line that I seemed to get much more than others: "Two extra slices for just 9.99."

It came up just enough times for me to find it irritating but not so much that it ruined the gameplay for me. What they really should have done here is give Nolan North the script, let him run through his lines, and then let him ad lib for like and hour and cram every bit of those you could fit onto the disc. This would made certain things come up a lot less frequently, or if anything allow them to play at random but no repeat until it cycles through the whole list. 

The game has a tendency to keep you bottled up in some pretty lame environments through the whole game. Buildings, Sewers, factories, or dilapidated buildings. I know there is only so much you can do with environments in a game like this but a couple splashes of color would have been nice. Genosha is an island in the middle of nowhere, a few stages could have taken place in the jungle or something with some wild animals to fight. 

Ultimately the game is pretty samey though and through. You'll find yourself running around hack and slashing your wear through faceless baddies until they start to shoot at you, which will be your cue to pull out your guns and fire back in kind. There is an occasional stealth element where you can sneak up on a guy and hack them to ribbons without being seen, but its so rare and so likely to go wrong you might as well keep powering through with your swords anyways.

Lastly the game also features a series of challenge maps that are kind of like horde modes. The more you beat the more you unlock further difficulties and if you manage to get a gold medal, you can get an alternate costume for Deadpool. The thing is, you can only use said costume on said challenge map, and only for its unlimited mode. So basically you only get the new costume for a section of the game you can't win or unlock more things for. Seems like a massive oversight, let me use them on the other challenges or in the story mode.

So did I like Deadpool? I have to say that I did for the most part. Its not a game that's going to break any molds or show you anything new, but for the most part its pretty functional and fun to play. The difficulty curve is a little ridiculous from time to time where in some stages you'll find yourself slashing things to bits like a red and black katana cloud of death, yet 5 minutes later you'll find yourself getting gunned down in the same section over and over again. It can be frustrating but not so much that'd you would stop playing.  I'd say the games biggest flaw is what I perceive to be a lack of replay value. 

The Deadpool game is made for those people who are clearly fans of Deadpool. I wouldn't say its a great introduction to the character for those who aren't exactly familiar with him, but he does make the transition from comic to game pretty well with his character intact (for those of you who saw the X-men Origins: Wolverine, that is not how Deadpool should be).

Ultimately though, it shows why it came out at a lower price. I think the game could probably get a sequel, but I suggest that they focus on really beefing up the story aspect of the game bring in more of the more notable Marvel universe. It's not the best game to ever come out, but not bad either. Its safe. You'll get your yucks, and its fun enough to see to the end, just don't expect to keep playing it to perfection. Here's hoping for a more polished sequel, because it has potential.

Even D-Pool appreciates "Yo Dawg". Love it.

The Last of Us (PS3): Pretty Little Hype Machine.

So lets be honest here: The Last of Us game play footage and trailers have been giving us a literal/metaphorical boner for the past 2 years now. The game looks awesome, the concept looks great and it was promising to be one of the biggest games of the year. Done by the folks at Naughty Dog, who make Uncharted, which is awesome. The only big fear I had was if there was too much hype going into a game would it not deliver? Now I finally got to see...

THE LAST OF US (PS3)

The Last of Us opens up in the Austin Texas home of Joel and his young daughter Sarah. After an exhausted Joel returns home almost at midnight, we share a moment between him and his daughter as she gives him a watch for his birthday. They flick on the TV, Sarah nods off, and Joel carriers her to bed.  Sarah wakes up later to some commotion outside, and you take control of her to search the house for your father to find him panicked racing back into the house. Apparently a sickness is spreading quickly, and is turning people feral. After gunning down his feral neighbor, Joel and Sarah hop in the car to get out of the city.

Unfortunately this leads with them getting stuck in the middle of the panic, and they get blindsided by a truck. With Sarah sustaining a broken leg, Joel carries her trying to escape the rioting in the streets and the feral infected. After eluding them and getting to the town outskirts they are stopped by a soldier who orders them to turn back and raises his gun on them. They turn to escape as he opens fire....

Technically, Sarah is the first playable characters in the game.

Flash 20 years later, Joel is in a heavily militarized Boston. The infection has greatly reduced the population, and Joel is currently running as a smuggler under this police state. Tensions are high between the police and the fireflies. Joel and his friend Tess go after a target who stole their cache of guns to find the injured leader of the fireflies. She bargains to give the guns back and more if they will transport a young girl named Ellie out of town and to their fellow fireflies outside the quarantined zone. 

I left a bit of the intro story out of my description because really what I describe is a good chunk of time in the game, but it needed to be explained to give the story a bit of context. What I didn't tell you though, is that intro is pretty fucking powerful, and it does something that really I don't recall seeing happen much in games. I have this friend who I don't want to give his identity (but for the sake of the story we'll call him JD). JD has made like 5 of my friends play the start of this game, just to get their reactions to it. Everyone's reactions were mainly jaw dropping. It's pretty strong stuff.

Tess is headstrong, tough as nails, and Ice Cold. But really feels like one of
the few characters who look at the bigger picture in the world around her. 

I did have a little bit of reservation about the game though when I first tried the demo. The demo starts from a pretty early mission which sort of mislead me to what the game was all about. It felt and played like post-apocalyptic Uncharted with not-quite-zombies. I only played the demo once because I felt it was just going to be another variant of their popular franchise and nothing more.

A bit premature it seems though, because there is a bit of subtleties that make The Last of Us a very different experience than the rest of Naughty Dog's flagship franchise. For one example, it slightly expands on the two gun slot system I usually hate, allowing for more readied weapons if you have the salvage to expand them, but ammo is always going to be scarce. So when firing your guns you are gonna want to pick to shots wisely and not miss.

Yeah, no game seems to escape cover based shooting these days..... sigh..

But should you run out, the melee is fairly simple. 95% of the time you can charge up to an enemy and just start mashing the square button for a quick combo. While there is zero complexity to the combat, it still feels good and fluid enough to make it a viable option and not boring.

What really sells it though is the final shot on an enemy is usually zoomed in and highlighted with a visceral finishing hit. Either bare handed or melee, all of them can be pretty rough to watch. Watching a big wind-up and haymaker to the throat is painful every time I see it. Make no mistake, there is nothing cartoony about this violence.

Between this game and Tomb Raider, I'm ready to become a pacifist.

Unfortunately though, there are a lot of enemies, and some of the special infected who cannot be take down with hand to hand melee. These enemies can one hit kill you, and even fighting with a weapon is risky. So the game forces a very good deal of stealth gameplay at you which is something I wasn't expecting. It's pretty well executed though.

There's no "wall molesting" button so its easy to crouch and move behind cover and the game has kind of a sonar mechanic where you can see enemy silhouettes through cover by how much noise they make. You can sneak up on them for silent choke outs, or for the cordyceps infected take them down with a shiv. As a fan of non military stealth games, this is pretty fun for me.

You wanna get Clickers quickly and quietly, because they will ruin your day if you miss em.

There is a problem with that too, though. Gear is super limited. Shivs break easily, you don't get a lot of bullets, and the game doesn't have regenerating health. So as you walk around each area, you really want to turn over every nook and cranny for parts and supplies so you can make more med packs, shivs, or grenades. This all takes place in real time so you'll want to do it in clear areas immediately or look in completely safe places.

You are gonna die in this game. You are gonna die a lot. Much like Uncharted before it, The Last of Us has a lot of trial and error game play to it. There are a number of scenes where you are going to have to wait and see where people patrol around and pick them off one at a time. If you get impatient and alert one they will all rain down on you. And trust me, one of those one hit kill infected will always be around to fuck your day when you are fighting with 3 others. You can count on it.

Naturally, because the game features a scavenging mechanic in order to build things, there is also a complimentary exploration aspect to the levels as you play. I guess I could best describe it to be most similar to the Tomb Raider remake that came out earlier this year. They provide relatively nice sized maps that from an objective standpoint are pretty linear. But because you need to scavenge for parts and ammo so you will often find yourself exploring every nook and cranny of each area to find cupboards, drawers, or lockers to find any spare parts you can.

The locations in this game are very well detailed, but perhaps a bit lacking in variety. I mean, you've seen one dilapidated building covered in foliage, and you've seen them all. Much of the game has you traveling in cities that are living in very slum like conditions, or out in the wastelands of a ruined America. Some of the settings get changed up as you play through the game over the course of different seasons, which is a nice way to show the passage of time but ultimately it does feel a little samey after a while.

So the combat is good, the stealth is fun, and the locations are alright.  But the real sticking point to this game is Naughty Dog's whole bread and butter, the superb story telling. This game is really good at keeping you engrossed as you play it. Right from the previously mentioned beginning, they wrap you up with the the first two characters you see, and make you play as both of them when the shit hits the fan. It invests you in with the characters so shit inevitably goes wrong, its that much more of an emotional punch.

And the game does a very good job of emphasizing that point through the length of the game. For a game called The Last of Us there is really one a handful of segments where you are left completely alone. You usually have an accomplice or two. Its very cool because there are a lot of these little unscripted characterizing moments that take place as you are walking around and exploring. These little back and forth dialogs that take place that really characterize that Joel has become jaded and lonely in the 20 years since the infection, that Ellie despite here maturity for her age is still just kid growing up in a post apocalyptic world. They are well paced, and they have a number of non story related conversations just dealing with the world they live in.

All the little side dialogs make the game worth playing through multiple times.
Things like Ellie asking about movies or coffee shops give this honest feeling that
she really is just a curious kid asking about a world she's only ever gotten to hear about.

What I hated however, and this is probably my biggest complaint is that my AI characters would sometimes get a sudden case of the retarded. There has been more than one time that I would be slinking along behind some cover, getting ready to pounce on my target to find one of my idiot cohorts would run right out into the open and run right to my cover and plunk down next to me, instead of following my safer path.

There have also been firefights where this happens too. I'm picking my shots and trying to advance on a thug so I can club them with a brick, only to watch my partner run right out into the open and firing their shots and getting themselves taken down because an infected pounces them, effectively blowing my plan right out of the window. It was always funny/annoying when I saw it happen, but it didn't seem to happen so much that I felt it was a major issue.

Lets be honest here though. The Last of Us is a zombie game. You might not think that from the trailers or what you know about the story. And the monsters aren't explicitly referred to as zombies, and if it was just a matter of a evolved fungus infecting people and controlling them like a cordyceps fungus does with bugs then that would be enough. But when they are able to transfer the infection by taking a bite out of you, causing youto turn over time? That's zombies. I love zombies as much as a the next guy, but the market is kinda super saturated with them. Still, interesting new take on them.

Lose the headwear and yep, its a zombie.

Usually when I play a game like this I expect to maybe be done with it in about 8 hours or so. Surprisingly, the game boasts 20 solid hours of gameplay, and the story manages to deliver though the entirety. There has been a bit of complaint about how the game ended. I'll admit the ending is a little underwhelming when compared to the length of it, but I wasn't overly upset about it. Its one of those things where you have to really take in the entire last section of the game as the ending, rather than just the last few cutscenes. I guess I could say that the ending overall has a very indie movie feel to it.

At the time of writing, I haven't played the multiplayer yet (because I've been playing SNES games on my ouya) but will probably to try to do so for an online video. From what I've heard from the RoosterTeeth Patch podcast, they've managed to find a way to put the tension of the single player mode into the multiplayer mode. If that is the case then that can only be a good thing for the multiplayer. Online multiplayer games are starting to get pretty homogenized so anything that makes it feel different is a plus in my book. I will have to give that a try before Sony starts charging for online play.

So really to drive to the crux of this article, how good was The Last of Us. Very. VERY good. There was a lot of hype before the game even got released that this is a potential game of the year candidate. Many people giving it perfect and near perfect scores. To be completely honest I would be pretty hard pressed to disagree with what a lot of people have said about the game.

But it's not flawless, not by any stretch. There are some occasionally glitchy moments, there are points where I felt the lighting could have been more clear, and the aforementioned AI issues come to mind immediately. Much like review of Bioshock Infinite, if I am able to come up with a number of flaws quickly and off the top of my head then it doesn't get a perfect score in my book.  But make no mistake about it, The Last of Us has generated a metric butt-ton of hype behind it, and it delivers on almost everything it's promised me. It stands an incredibly good chance of  taking game of the year and is absolutely worth your time.

Naughty Dog knows what their fuckin' doing.

Ellen Page, so one of the characters looks like you. Get over it. You should be flattered and you would have looked better than if you got all pissy about it. I'm no longer a fan of yours (even though I'm still getting Beyond).