The Last Of Us – Review – Great Story, Crap Videogame

Ok so I’ve finished The Last Of Us…

I give it 5 out of 10.

Warning: contains more spoilers than a Fast n Furious street race.

TL;DR – Loved everything about it, except the gameplay.

The Hype Machine

Lucky for me I don’t really follow media, so I first heard Naughty Dog were releasing a new game probably late 2011, and then never heard of it again until I happened to see it on the shelves. Put it this way – I had no idea it was basically a zombie apocalypse game until most of an hour into it. Point is – I picked it up and played it without having heard any hype – the only preconceived notion was that it was by the folks who did Uncharted – which I loved.

After I finished it I tossed it aside and thought the story was great and the characters fantastic, but I enjoyed watching it more than playing it. In fact, I didn’t really enjoy playing it – I just played it to get to the next part of the story.

Since then I’ve looked up other reviews – noticing that it has garnered “perfect” scores across like 25+ major game review sites, and then you go to sites like Reddit and it’s unbelievable the amount of schoolboy gushing is going on over it.

I simply don’t understand all the praise and hype – many folk talk about this being the most emotionally draining experience they’ve ever had and stuff like that… Seriously? Maybe I’ve just lived a bit more than the average gamer, I certainly got sort of involved with the characters, but any chance I might have really become emotional about them was destroyed by the gameplay which most of the time completely yanks you away from it.

Oh The Emotion

People focus on the times the characters seem to react realistically to a situation, even the little things like when Joel does a brutal murder and Ellie makes a taken-aback retort. Thing is – this happens maybe a dozen or so times, the game took me 17 hours to complete. Granted much of that time may have been me going to get a drink or taking a dump, either way – you can expect one interesting/realistic reaction per hour – the rest of the time there’s nothing particularly interesting to report. The immersion moments ARE great, but if I watched a 2 hour movie in which only 2 interesting things happened I’d be pretty annoyed – and let’s not put lipstick on a pig – TLOU really IS just a movie where you control the point of view for some of it.

Natural Stupidity

Oh the AI – oh dear lord, so tedious. It’s like they just put battles in there because otherwise the story would be too short to sell for $109 (luckily I went next door to Big W and they had it for $78). I’ll admit here and now – about half way in I changed the difficulty down to the lowest setting, because the only palpable difference is the resilience of the enemies and yourself. After the 13th swarm of zombies I got fucking bored of dying 15 times before I figured out how to take out this one over here without triggering this mob over here and just wanted the battle scenes over and done with.

Get this – putting more/harder enemies in a battle does not make it more enjoyable.

Play Battlefield 3 or Red Dead Redemption or freakin’ Pacman – tense battles, cat and mouse, sometimes you’re overwhelmed – sometimes you’re doing the overwhelming (never just whelming). The majority of the action in TLOU was basically: try to stealth through; fail a bunch of times; lure enemies into a single area and molotov them; clean up remaining with sheer brutality. You can argue it’s cos I suck – I’ll take that – but the point is it’s just not enjoyable. For examples of enjoyable overwhelmed fisticuffs scenarios, play Batman: Arkham City – it takes actual skill and timing to deal with 5-20 enemies, button-mashing gets you killed, and when it’s over you get to recover from an adrenalin rush and feel great about something you did.

Now before you get all butthurt about me comparing completely different games – the point I’m making here is that the fights in these other games are REWARDING. 90% of the battles I had in TLOU I was just like “well thank fuck that’s over”.

Oi, Henchmen

BTW some of the enemy placement is surely a joke, rewind back to Wolfenstein and you’ll get a picture of the enemy-standing-around-for-no-reason that makes up 90% of the zombie scenes, and the dialogue from the soldier enemies is just cringeworthy. That scene where you have to sneak up on a sniper and he calls out your position all the time, oh dear, I was physically telling him to shut the fuck up. Sadly there are more scenes later which feature this morbid taunting.

In the end, it’s completely immerse-breaking to see baddies sitting around a corner in a silly pattern. Another thing that made me not want to engage in battles – so artificial.

Ghost Protocol

My companions also appeared to be invisible to the enemy – I’d be crouching behind cover and fucking Ellie would run out and stand in front of an approaching soldier, to be totally ignored. So many dozens of other moments like this throughout gameplay that just completely break you out of the mood. Crouching tiger, fucking Ellie!

Listen Mode – Makes Stuff Visible

The “listen mode” thing, I think it makes you too reliant on it. Also I’m already sick of all these god modes that are coming into games – but this echolocation thing was interesting. FWIW I think it was actually well done as a feature, but sadly I found myself using it all the time because it’s otherwise too difficult to figure out where the hell anyone is. I guess it’s a tough trade-off when you have a game that doesn’t include an on-screen map to show where baddies are. (Note that I’ve also tried playing GTA with this switched off, and it actually makes it a better game, forcing you to become more knowledgeable about locales and stuff) Also – got pissed off many times when making a sweep of the surroundings during/after a battle to find nothing, then an enemy pops up randomly right behind you. Grrr.

Just Fucking Run

There were however several battles I escaped from by sprinting and savagely skullcrushing anyone who stumbled in my way to the exit scene. Those were actually really heart-racing – so I posit that the game is best played not as either stealth nor combat, but maybe as pure escape/survival. Certainly some scenes seem to express this ideal. *IF* I play this game again, I’ll do it with this in mind – trying to just run through every battle to the end point, sadly I think some of them require you to eliminate all hostiles before it triggers the next scene.

Don’t Play It Again, Sam

That brings up another point – replayability. Hmm, I’m not at all considering replaying TLOU again – ever. There’s nothing in it that is particularly memorable for me that I’d like to do over again. If anything I’d like to simply re-watch all the cut-scenes. It’d be nice if someone hatched together all the cut-scenes with the plot-relevant human controlled bits. I’d suggest people just watch that.

Update: a good version is now available here.

Charted Territory

In Naughty Dog’s previous franchise, Uncharted, the adventure aspect was amazing. It was like being part of an Indiana Jones movie and then being inspired to do something adventurous in your own life. TLOU is a great story – but it’s not inspiring. It doesn’t make me want to do anything except NOT be in a zombie apocalypse. Uncharted legitimately makes me want to discover stuff that other people haven’t and travel to strange places – even if I know I never will apart from dozens of different types of gin from around the world.

MacGuyvering

So onto crafting… the weapon improvement model caught me as meh, even more so than in Tomb Raider a couple months ago. The fact you can do it is great – the way it was weaved into the story was not particularly good. I love the idea of creating stuff out of makeshift things you can find – but after the first couple caches of stuff you discover you realise that for some reason pre-apocolyptic people (that’s us) just left alcohol and half scissors and explosive materials laying around everywhere. Also, in order to defeat the current enemies you would require what other people left laying around – over and over again.

But seriously, why are there so many half scissors laying around?

Fat Floats and Puzzledome

What was with the “Ellie can’t swim” meme? It seemed to serve nothing to the story, and it was just an annoying “puzzle” in half a dozen areas where basically you had to find a wooden crate to bring to Ellie, and then transfer her to another location several feet away hoping she wouldn’t say lines from Titanic.

This brings up another area TLOU was majorly deficient – after the 2nd time saving Ellie from her inability to float I was severely bored, there were also two other instances where I had to climb stairs to start a generator to open a door – this was the pinnacle of problem-solving?

I hate to revert back to Uncharted (actually, I don’t), but reading Drake’s journal and solving decent puzzles set forth by ancient history actually made you feel good – it was palpable. Me searching for 9 seconds for a fucking palette to put in front of someone to sit on and then move them for 30 seconds was a waste of my time. Just make a cut scene. Or let Ellie swim. Or skip the water crap altogether.

Beating A Red Dead Horse

Oh the horses… I think we’ve been spoiled by Red Dead Redemption, the horse-riding sequences were just comical. Not to mention where you get ambushed and have to kill a bunch of guys, only to follow Ellie’s trail through the battle you just had which she somehow just pranced through on her donkey?

They Might Be Useful If They Weren’t Essential

Oh and as for pointless props in the whole scenario – it was really built up that sometimes planks and ladders would be useful to get to places you might otherwise not. Yeah well guess what – whenever a ladder/plank was required, a ladder/plank was somewhere nearby. Whenever a ladder/plank was nearby, a ladder/plank was needed.

Interactivity – Brought To You By 1986

There’s a bunch of other completely unnecessary “interactive” bits – starting a generator, seriously why did they waste time programming this mechanic into it when a cut-scene would have done just fine? Same with some of the bits where you have to open a door – is it REALLY that important that I mash the square button a few dozen times? It doesn’t add any sense of achievement, just open the fucking door. Also the flashlight dims every hour or so – shake your controller and it’s all good again. Yet again no point I can fathom.

I never once in the entire 17 hours felt like I was exploring, it was all a tight narrative that I was just occasionally modifying the viewpoint.

Holy Decision Making Climax

Yeah, kinda not.

After all you’ve been through you’re held back by a doctor with an itty-bitty scalpel?

So, what do you – a sort of anti-hero – choose to do? Well, again there’s no choice as far as I can tell. These are medical specialists in a dying world – I don’t want to kill them. I tried every part of the room to get around him, or just hit him, even went back out into the corridor and just hung there staring at them for a couple minutes.

In the end you HAVE to kill him. And then the other doctor curls up on the floor whimpering, I’m not sure if you have to put them down too – by then I was just finding things too ludicrous so I stuffed my flamethrower down her (?) throat to be done with it.

But Seriously, It’s Great

Don’t get me wrong, the story and characters were great – the cinematics, the lighting, the sound, the score – all first class, I just don’t see the point in adding lots of random battles and hallway explorations in order to make it into a video game rather than just a movie, the story stood on its own. For that reason I’m not going to bother expanding this wall of text with all of the possible praises I could – that’s fairly well covered elsewhere.

Basically – I’d have preferred that 90% of the “action” was covered by cutscenes, and in the end it should have just been a movie instead of wasting our time with the rest of the useless stuff.

Please Do This

BTW here’s to the next big thing: proper interactive movies. Not like TLOU where you actually partake in action, just a movie made in a game environment where you simply control the camera. Eg, imagine each scene of TLOU being more like one of the opening scenes in the car where you are Sarah in the back seat – choosing what YOU want to focus on.

Multi-player

I’m not an online gamer, I grew up playing the kinda games where you sat on the couch with your mates, the whole online thing just irks me.

However, a while after finishing the campaign I figgered I may as well try it out – I played maybe a dozen games that night, and have to say I was very impressed and entertained.

It appears to have NOTHING to do with the main story apart from featuring much the same weaponry. Makes me wonder why they didn’t just make a movie and a multiplayer game, the single player campaign seems like a complete waste of time in the end.

This Review Totally Ties The Room Together

Here’s my stats for the game in case anyone cared.

So yeah, that’s just like my opinion, man.

Pics randomly mostly used from Imgur/r/TheLastOfUs.