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).