The Last of Us

The Last of Us, from the makers of the Uncharted series (Naughty Dog), came out to almost universal acclaim.  It has a solid 95 metacritic score, with 10/10s running rampant across both critic and user reviews.  People praise the graphics, the gameplay, and most of all, the story.  We all know the situation here.  Whenever a game gets such amazing praise like this, I'm basically sure to follow suit.  Here's the thing:

I hated it.

That's right.  Hated.  So let me tell you what went wrong for me, and why I simply cannot understand why so many people fell in love with this tedious, poorly executed, poorly written game.

First up, let's summarize what this game is about.  The Last of Us takes place 20 years after an outbreak of a mutated cordyceps fungi turns people into, essentially, zombies.  The story mostly follows Joel, a grizzled survivor who lost his daughter in the initial outbreak, not to zombies, but to a soldier who was ordered to shoot them in case they were infected.  After an initial mission that reveals Joel has gotten into some shady dealings in the past 20 years (and introduces you to the essential gameplay mechanics) you are introduced to Ellie, a young girl who you are asked to escort to a rebel group calling themselves Fireflies.  It's quickly revealed that this girl is immune to the fungus, and must make it to the Fireflies so that a vaccine can hopefully be made and thusly the world saved.  The rest of the game is their journey through various dilapadated cities and sewers, fending off bandits and infected all along the way.

So let's look at that zombie survival horror checklist shall we?
-Grizzled male anti-hero (check)
-Damsel in distress (check) that is also the...
-Golden child that could save the world (check)
-Humanity often worse than zombies (check)
-Abandoned and/or infected cities (check)

Along with many other familiar tropes that unfortunately reveal too much for those looking to avoid spoilers.  But you get my drift.  Original it isn't.

This could be made up for if the characters had any degree of a unique personality to them, but they don't.  Joel is a take-no-prisoners, survive-at-all-costs stock character.  I was frankly astonished he wasn't also a drunkard (especially with the aiming system...I'll get to that later).  Ellie is your stock headstrong, foul-mouthed, scared-but-doesn't-want-to-show-it girl who starts off hating our chisel-jawed protagonist but then grows to love him.  There are a couple refreshing characters who show up, but they're only refreshing in the sense that they break up the monotony of Joel and Ellie's utterly predictable banter and relationship.  Even these side characters are stock characters.  The woman who could never replace his wife, the crazy guy who has his own town, a friendly black guy and his kid.  They're all just so horribly generic.  I will give them that at the very least they're well-acted and voiced, and believable for what they were.  But the script here truly let them down.

And since I've said one nice thing, let me say the only other nice thing I have to say.  Everybody is praising the graphics, and they're right to.  It's a very pretty game, and the environments, while never truly unique, also never feel repetitive despite practically every other scene being in a sewer.

So, the setting and characters are overused, uninteresting cliches, but at least it's pretty to look at!

My true gripes with The Last of Us come in its gameplay.  Even with it's cliches, the story does manage to pull out some truly gripping moments.  But when each redeeming point of the story leads back into this truly awful gameplay, there's no saving it.  Here's the problem, and if this entire review is to be summed up in one quote, this is it:

The Last of Us tries to do too many things at once, and fails not only because of that, but also because each of those things has already been done better in other games.

This game can never decide whether it's a stealth game, an action game, a survival horror game, a puzzle game, an open-ended choose-your-own-path game or a straightforward narrative-driven game.  It tries to put them all together and it doesn't...work.  It tries to do what Deus Ex did with each encounter, where you can stealth or fight your way through.  But it fails because it also tries to do what Uncharted and the new Tomb Raider did in terms of cover-based shooting, where stealth is only a means to get rid of one or two enemies before the rest converge.  But it fails again because it also tries to do survival horror in terms of limited ammo and a drunken aiming system that only gets steadier with upgrades.  But it fails again because the purposefully survival horror sections are more like stealth puzzle games in that the infected all follow circular routes and you must take them out or avoid them in a certain order to advance, and if you make one wrong move, you die and restart at a convenient checkpoint, meaning the stakes for each encounter are ridiculously low (also meaning the ammo restrictions and wavy aiming become more annoyances than anything).  And, you guessed it, it fails again as a puzzle game because unlike I Am Alive or Splinter Cell which have very specific solutions to each enounter, they try to keep each situation open to either stealth or combat like in Deus Ex and oh look here we are back at the beginning of the fail cycle.

There were so many times I wanted to scream at the screen because it would literally force me into combat despite my having stealthed through an entire section.  I got to a door at the end and it wouldn't let me open it until I had killed every enemy on screen.  When you penalize combat so much by making each and every weapon slow-firing and slow to reload with a wavy aiming system on top of it, combat no longer becomes enjoyable unless you like severe handicaps.  It becomes a game of chance of whether you happen to get off a lucky headshot, or run out of ammo and resort to punching everything and hoping you have enough supplies to make more medpacks.

The crafting system I didn't actually have a problem with.  Basically you collect various types of ingredients throughout the game, and each type of ingredient is usually required for 2 or more recipes.  Do you want to make a medpack, or a molotov?  A shiv which allows you to stealth kill Clickers (one-hit-kills-you infected), or a bomb that can take out multiple enemies but makes a lot of noise?  You're limited to only three of each item, but I almost always had enough ingredients that I never found it that difficult to decide what I needed to craft.

This leads us into exploration.  When you're not dealing with an enemy encounter, you're free to wander whatever area you're in looking for supplies.  That said, these areas are often extremely linear, and even when there is a little nook or cranny that in practically any other game like this you would find something...all you find is more rubble.  Supplies tend to just be in side rooms, or down a side path, which makes the people like me who want to explore every little corner feel like it's a constant waste of time to do so.
I should also mention the upgrade system here, since it relates to gathering ingredients.  Often you'll find these pill bottles alongside ingredients, which you can then use to upgrade things like the drunken aiming, your listening mode distance (which let's you see through walls when enemies make noise), your health, and the time it takes to craft.  As far as I could tell there's nowhere near enough to max out everything, so you do have to choose carefully what you upgrade, but I personally found it to be an easy choice: health, and aiming.  The rest are barely useful.  You can also upgrade each weapon, and here is where you're faced with harder choices.  Each and every weapon has roughly 3-5 different categories of things you can upgrade (reload speed, clip size, etc.), but each and every upgrade costs anywhere from 20-70 spare parts and for me, at least, whenever I found a workbench to upgrade at I never had more than, say, 130.  This means you really need to choose carefully about which weapons you upgrade.  Unfortunately, the system once again gets frustrating here, because you often have NO IDEA which weapons will be available in the next section.  There was one weapon that literally showed up for a single section and then never showed up again.  Still had it in my inventory, but never got more ammo.

Speaking of ammo, the ammo drop rate from enemies is wildly inconsistent.  There was one section where I was forced to kill off something like 8 bandits, practically all of whom had a gun.  Does that mean I got to take their ammo after they died?  Nope.  I think I got 6 bullets for one gun from that encounter.  Yet in another section, practically every other enemy was dropping something for me.  When ammo is a forcibly limited commodity, it's going to break immersion when you see a gun lying right in front of you and can't do anything to it.

Oh immersion.  Probably the worst victim of this game.  This is where I truly cannot understand why so many people fell in love with this game.  Practically every single thing in this game breaks immersion.  Lurking through an area full of infected where one wrong move or audible sound means your death?  Here's Ellie running directly into a zombie with no reaction.  The partner AI is just plain stupid.  I get that you need to make them invisible to enemies, but when their first instinct is to literally run ahead of you or into you or into other enemies, there's a problem.  Especially after the exceptional partner AI in Bioshock Infinite.  How about with that ammo situation?  Turns out if you run low/out, the game pops in more where none existed before.  Found that out during an enclosed-quarters boss battle where I was truly starting to get pissed because they had already sent three waves of infected at me and I was out of ammo, and then more was there.  So I used it.  And then there was more that spawned in.  I rolled my eyes and finished the battle, all urgency having been wiped clean.  Speaking of spawns, there was one section in particular that was teeeerrible about random enemy spawns (the sniper).  You're being shot at by a sniper and have several options for cover: the ruined buildings on one side, random cars down the middle, and intact houses that might have supplies on the right.  But here's the thing.  If you go into the houses, you have this handy listening mode that lets you see enemies through walls.  You can scout and scout and see no one's there, until you pass a certain point and then WHAM enemies are on you.

Truly the biggest breaker of immersion though is from its puzzle-game tendency to have very generous checkpoints with almost no loading time after you die.  All agency, all stakes, are removed from practically every situation because there's no real consequence for getting things wrong.  Run into those random spawns and get killed?  No worries, let's put you back to right before you entered the house so you can deal with them now that you know they're going to be there.  Did you try to go Rambo on all these enemies but kept missing thanks to crappy aiming until you had no ammo and then you died?  No worries, here's a handy checkpoint with all your ammo back and you can try that again and maybe get luckier with the aiming.

So, let's summarize.  Stock characters in a familiar post-apocalyptic zombie world.  Crappy gameplay that tries too much and fails.  Linear environments masquerading as open.  And immersion-breaking elements around every corner.

But you know, none of this, NONE, got me as riled up as the ending.

****THERE BE SPOILERS AHEAD.  YE BE WARNED.****

The final section sees Joel and Ellie finally making it to the Fireflies.  But it turns out that in order to make the vaccine, they have to kill Ellie because the fungus grows on the brain.  Joel then has to shoot his way through an entire hospital of soldiers to get to Ellie and save her.  But then...there's this pivotal moment.  Joel grabs her from the doctors, he's about to escape through the parking garage, and he runs into the leader of the Fireflies, the same woman who sent him on this mad quest in the first place.  And she gives him the choice.  Leave Ellie, save the world.  Or be selfish, take her, and doom it.  The scene then shifts to Joel driving away, no sign of Ellie.  He has this haggard, depressed look on his face, and I was just like OH THANK GOD, IT ENDS ON A LEGITIMATE QUESTION.  Did he give her up, even after all they've been through?  Or is she in the back seat, and they're on their way back to his brother and the relatively safe town that had been set up on a hydroelectric dam?  What a beautiful way to end it, I thought.  What a wonderful question to ask.  Sure, if you've paid any attention thus far you know she's probably in the back, but the question is still a powerful one...

And then it kept going.  It didn't go black.  And I literally sat there saying "No...don't...don't you dare...."

And then the camera shifted to Ellie lying down in the back.

The rage...I felt...was incomparable.  They had the perfect opportunity to save what little they could of this game with a powerful question of an ending...and they ruined it.  They just straight up ruined it.  What followed was a brief and utterly inconsequential scene where Joel and Ellie approach the town.  Joel lies to Ellie in the car, saying dozens of immune people like her had been found to no consequence, and they had given up finding a cure.  Ellie talks about her first friend to fall from the infection, Joel tells her it's important to find something to fight for to survive, she questions him about his assertions about the Fireflies, he promises he's telling the truth, she says "Okay."  And that's the end.  They end on the questions of "Why did Joel save Ellie, and why did he lie to her?" instead of "Did he try to save the world, or has he doomed it?"  See the difference?  One question deals with internal character motivations from a one-dimensional character and is easily answered.  The other quesiton deals with character motivation AND larger ethical issues and ramifications for the world and doesn't have a clear answer.

They could've redeemed themselves with the ending...and in one more thing, they failed.

****END OF SPOILERS BE HERE****

The Last of Us is a tragedy on almost every front.  The story, the gameplay, the characters, damn near everything is a shadow of other better games.  I am honestly baffled how so many people played this and thought, "This is the greatest game ever!"  It's not.  It just mimicks the greatest games by smashing them all together and praying it works out.

It doesn't.

The Last of Us gets a 4/10.