It was a hard battle to keep myself
spoiler-free on The Last of Us for the last however-many months, but
I mostly did it. And, as usual, that's what I recommend for you too.
The Last of Us is talked about in revered tones by many as a stellar
achievement in gaming. Did it live up to the hype for me? Keep
reading to find out, or skip to the wrap-up at the end.
The Last of Us is a
stealth/action-adventure/zombie game. It takes place in a
zombie-style dystopian future where society has broken down in the
wake of an infectious disease outbreak that makes people mindless and
violent. The source of the outbreak is not something I'd seen done
before in zombie fiction. I won't spoil it here, but it's disturbing
to note that it has a real-life analog in nature. You play as Joel, a
survivor of the initial breakdown of society who now struggles on
with his life some time later. At some point he gets tasked and
motivated to transport a young girl, Ellie, to a militant group
outside of the quarantine zone he lives in. That's about all I'm
going to tell you about the story. There's actually a whole lot more
to even the set-up of the story, not to mention where it goes from
there. But I'll leave it at that. The story is excellent. It's in the
top echelons of gaming story-telling. It's very well written and does
some things I haven't seen done in video game stories before. It's
not my favorite gaming story, but it's very high on the list. It's
hard for me not compare this game to
The Walking Dead games
that I've been playing lately. Fortunately, the games are very
different. I will say that I personally think The Walking Dead's
story is better.
The left analog stick moves Joel, the
right moves the 3rd person perspective camera. Select
opens your backpack, which lets you craft items and use pills to
upgrade Joel, as well as look at stuff you have collected. Note that
this doesn't pause the game, so you can't do it in the middle of a
fire fight. Square is your melee attack. If you have a melee weapon
equipped, you'll automatically use that. If not, you'll use your
fists. You want to mash it as fast as you can to get your melee combo
going. Triangle lets you pick up objects you find. Circle make you
crouch down. This makes you much quieter and slower, and lets you use
cover during firefights. Cross makes you climb obstacles and ladders.
The directional buttons let you equip stuff. Left and right select
your guns, up and down select other items, like bombs, bricks and
bottles, and health packs. While you are picking a weapon, you can
hold down cross to open up your backpack to pull out another weapon,
as you can initially only carry one rifle-size weapon and one sidearm
at a time outside of the pack. This also doesn't pause the game,
meaning if you run out of ammo in your gun and need to pull another
out of your pack, you better hide first.
L2 causes you to run. R2 activates
listen mode, which makes Joel crouch down and move slowly, but he can
see enemies through walls if they are making sounds, such as
footsteps or talking. This is really cool, as when you are trying to
figure out where enemies are you need to use a combination of looking
around and listening, just like real life. And finally, L1 makes him
aim, and R1 fires. While aiming, you can press R2 to make Joel switch
hands. This allows you to get the proper angle around cover if
needed. When shooting, the reticle widens and becomes less accurate
if you move, and shrinks and becomes more accurate if you hold still.
If you sneak up on someone from
behind, you can grab them by pressing triangle and then strangle them
by pressing square (which takes a few seconds) or shiv them if you
have a shiv (which is almost instant). You can also hold people as a
human shield during a fire fight, which let's you fire your pistol.
If you wait too long, however, your prisoner will break free from
your grasp.
So, what is it like to play this game?
Well, you typically explore abandoned and destroyed cities and
buildings and stuff. A lot of times, you'll run into infected people.
Most of these encounters involve an interesting balance of 2 types of
infected; runners and clickers. If a runner sees you, it will run at
you and attack you. Clickers, on the other hand, are blind (due to
the...problems going on with their head area), and hunt you by sound.
You can sneak right past them if you crouch down and move slowly.
However, if you go too fast or run into something that makes a sound,
they go into attack mode, flailing about wildly. If they grab you,
they instantly kill you, unless you have the skill that lets you stab
them if you have a shiv available. So you have this great tension
between enemies you can sneak by and enemies that can spot you and
make you have to fight them, thus making a lot of noise and making
all the clickers come running at you.
Encounters usually start with you not
being seen, so you can try to eliminate some infected by stealth.
Runners can be choked out if you sneak up behind them. Clickers
cannot be strangled. If you grab them, you have to have a shiv
available to kill them (I probably should have mentioned that shivs
break after 1 use awhile ago. You can start making better shivs later
in the game though). You also can't kill a clicker by punching it,
you must use a melee weapon or a gun. So you usually try to take out
some runners without them seeing you, cause if they see you you'll
have to shoot or beat on them, which will cause all the clickers to
charge you, and then you are in trouble. Most of these situations are
tense and fun as you try to take out a few infected and then get out
of the area before any of them see you. Sometimes you'll get away.
Other times you'll take a few out only to have a clicker hear you and
attack and then you end up running for a defensible position and
fighting off runners and just barely getting away or killing all the
infected. Very fun stuff. Straight aggression will usually get you
killed in these encounters, you need to have a plan and adapt on the
fly to survive. There are a few more specialized types of infected as
well, but they are much rarer, and I'll leave them up to you to
discover.
Other encounters are with gun and
melee armed humans who are out to get you for one reason or another.
Fighting them is quite different than fighting infected, as you might
imagine. Often you end up in an area a group of guys is patrolling,
and you have to try to take them out secretly before a firefight
breaks out. Often you need to wait until people separate and then
strangle them one by one. Trying to stealth kill people out of the
sight of others is an art form, and you'll have many thrilling close
calls trying to pull this off. If a firefight breaks out and you are
outnumbered, that's real bad news. Coming out of cover means you will
get shot, and you can only get shot a few times before dying. If
stealth fails you, your best bet is often to run to a new position so
that the enemy doesn't know where you are, and then shoot some of
them from your new angle, or wait for them to split up looking for
you and take them out. Fighting human enemies is just as thrilling
and tense as fighting infected, although things play out totally
differently. The differences between these two kinds of encounters
and the multitude of locations and situations around these fights
keeps the combat fresh throughout the whole game. From claustrophobic
office buildings to wide open suburban neighborhoods and everything
in between, there is great variety to be had in the tactics you'll
have to employ to evade and defeat both crazy infected people and
smarter, armed normal people.
When you're not fighting, you're often
scrounging for supplies; rooting through drawers and shelves in
abandoned homes and offices. This part of the game has a very
Bioshock feel to it, and just like in that game, it's pretty
enjoyable. You can find parts that you can use to upgrade your guns
at workbenches that you find from time to time and pills that you can
use to upgrade Joel, increasing his max health and giving him new
skills and making him a better shot. You can also find materials that
you can use to make stuff. For example, finding blades and tape lets
you make shivs. Oil and rags let you make either molotovs or health
kits. Explosives can be combined with blades to make shrapnel bombs,
or with sugar to make smoke bombs (protip – molotovs, shrapnel
bombs, and smoke bombs are all super effective). Supplies are not in
abundance. The world has a feel to it like it's already been combed
over several times. You might open several drawers in a row and find
nothing. But then, just when you are about to give up on searching,
you might find some precious ammo or a cache of parts.
Speaking of ammo, it's pretty limited.
It's in stark comparison to many games where you might have hundreds
of bullets at your disposal. Looking at your inventory is pretty
pitiful. If you have 5 guns, your ammo counts for them might be,
like, 3, 2, 1, 6, 0. That's why you need a plan in your fighting.
There are many open, large areas in
the game, but there are also some that have a linear feel to them.
Many times in the larger areas, I didn't know where to go, and would
have to explore. This was fun, and really added to the mood of the
game, or the desperate feel of being pursued and not knowing where
you are. Other times the guiding hand of the design is a bit too
obvious. It's frustrating to see many, many stairwells in the game
blocked off with furniture. If Joel wanted to go up those stairwells,
he could move that furniture very easily.
When you're not fighting (and also
when you are) you'll be talking to Ellie, and whoever else you might
be with. The game has conversations running all through it the entire
time. They are great too. It's a great story (repeated for emphasis).
One interesting choice is the way
Ellie and your other companions behave during enemy encounters and
the way enemies react to them. Namely, unless you are seen, enemies
can't see and won't react to your companions. This is good, because
your companions are very dumb when you are being stealthy, and will
do stuff like run into clickers for no reason. Obviously the ideal
thing would be if your companions had good enough AI to hide and be
stealthy themselves, but this system actually works alright since it
means your companions won't ruin your stealth plans. You just have to
get over them doing obnoxious and stupid stuff and watching enemies
totally ignore them. It's a shame and takes you out of the mood, but
you get used to it, and at least it avoids the pitfall of your friends
ruining every stealth sequence, which would be really broken.
Fortunately, your friends do well when the non-stealth fighting
starts to go down. They assist you and kill enemies on their own.
It's pretty amazing when they actually save you from dying in a
dramatic way that is often relegated to cutscenes, like jumping on
the back of someone who is about to kill you, or smashing someone
over the head with a bottle right when they get the drop on you.
The game is long. It's longer than you
probably think it is. I won't say how long, 'cause that's kind of a
spoiler. It doesn't get old though, and the length really adds to the
feel of the games.
In the category of realistic graphics,
it's the best looking game on PS3. The in-game graphics are great.
Faces are expressive and environments look real good. There are some
glitches in the environment, such as plants that move strangely when
you touch them (plant-life glitches, just like The Walking Dead!).
There are also pre-rendered cutscenes that feature some really
realistic people. Ellie, Joel, and almost all of the other main
characters actually look real in these scenes. 10 years from now, we
might laugh at these renders, but right now my brain is fooled into
thinking I'm looking at real people about 50% of the time.
The music is mostly understated,
adding a little mood hear and there. There isn't much in the way of
epic scores highlighting a climatic scene, and that's a good thing
for the feel of this game. Some acoustic guitar parts highlight the rustic feel of many of the locales and their denizens.
The game is a really great experience
on your first play-through. There are some genuine problems in
re-playing the game though. First, the trophies set you up to play
the game three times, which is one too many in a game this long and
linear. First, you should just play it on whatever difficulty setting
you want (I went with hard first). Then, you'll want to play it on
survivor, the hardest setting. But there is a trophy for beating new
game + mode. You won't want to play survivor on new game + mode as
the whole point of survivor is to have it be hard, and new game +
mode makes it easier. Survivor is probably too hard for your 1st
play-through, so if you want all those trophies, you're looking at 3
play-throughs (at least if you follow my philosophies). Also, new game
+ is totally inappropriate for this game. There is only basic
character growth and weapon modification in the game, which is fine.
It's just that there is absolutely no point in carrying over that
growth into another game. New game + is for games that have a lot of new content in their re-plays, such as new character growth, areas, and challenges. It's a great feature in many games with robust post-game content, but is pointless here.
Second, about half-way through my 2nd
play-though I discovered a game breaking fact about the game that
makes it much less fun. I won't say what it is here because it is
forbidden knowledge that will ruin your fun. After figuring out
this... trick... the game became super-easy and a whole element of it
was removed from the picture entirely. I was playing on survivor
mode, which isn't that hard to begin with. It was disappointing that
survivor mode wasn't as hard as it could be, and then to figure out
this...idea... made it laughable as a challenging experience. I'd
heard so much about the great challenge of survivor difiiculty, but
unfortunately it is a joke.
And even though I adored my first
play-through of the game, re-playing a game is a big part of the
experience for me, so it pains me to say that the game went down in
my esteem quite a bit due to my lackluster experience with its
supposedly hardest mode. I'll have a spoiler post up soon that goes
over what exactly I am alluding too, but please don't read it until
you're done with the game.
Despite this disappointment in the post-game, The Last
of Us is a stellar game. It's a compelling and different story that
is extremely well-written and well acted. It draws some obvious
inspiration from The Road, but I actually like it's resolution better
than the end of The Road (I'm talking about the book, I haven't seen
the movie). This story is coupled with a convincing world and a very
fun stealth/action gameplay system that is a blast to play through
the whole adventure. If you've heard that The Last of Us is very
realistic, you might be surprised at some of the abstractions
present, such as the generic parts and pills you use to upgrade
weapons and Joel. But if you view these abstractions as tools to give
you a feel for what's going on, the desperate, realistic theme shines
through. It's a Great Game, tier 2.
