The Last of Us Grounded Mode Review

            You might remember from my TLOU review that I thought survivor mode could be exploited to make it not so hard. Imagine my surprise and delight when shortly thereafter a new harder mode was announced as DLC.

            In Grounded Mode, The Last of Us has the hard mode it always needed. There is no HUD, so you don't know how much health you have. You also don't have an onscreen indicator for details about your weapons. So you don't know how many hits are left on your melee weapons, what's going on with your shanks, and most importantly, you don't know about your ammo situation. When you switch weapons, you can see how many bullets you have on the inventory screen, but from there you are counting in your head how many shots you have. And of course there is no listen mode.

            Other than that, enemies seem to try to move, hide, and flank you more often. And the checkpoints are sometimes very far apart. I've played certain longer battles for close to a half-hour without an autosave to help me out. And the final scenario in the game has no checkpoint, which is crazy.

            Everything is a tad harder in grounded mode. Runners are almost worse than clickers as they can take you out in an instant if they run up and tackle you and you don't interrupt their animations with bullets or melee attacks. The crazy amount of ammo drops you can generate in survivor mode have been toned down. You can still get ammo by killing enemies when you are low on ammo, especially when you use your last bullet. But it isn't as pronounced as in survivor mode. You will leave some encounters with little to no ammo. The game's loot drop AI makes sure to give you just barely enough supplies to scrape through the current segment without coddling you like it does in survivor mode. And Ellie never gives you anything! Well done.

            Enemies are so deadly in Grounded Mode that you often need to methodically take them all out before trying to get through an area (although there are still a few encounters you can totally bypass by some sneaky sneaking, especially if you throw in a couple of stealth kills or distractions). If you're anything like me, you'll have to adopt some new tactics to get through this mode. In wide open areas, I often had to run from runners and then turn to fire on them since they are so deadly. I also used bricks by the dozens. Throwing them at peoples' heads is essential to survival to the point where if I were Joel I would empty out that backpack and fill it with a dozen bricks. Bricking someone, taking them hostage, and then shooting their friends before killing them is something you do in Hard and Survivor Mode, but you'll be doing it constantly in Grounded. Or just getting someone alone and bricking them when they spot you. Getting the angle on people and sniping them out of nowhere to reduce the amount of dude's you have to face is also very useful. Using the bow to stealth kill from a distance is also more important than ever. Lots of fun to be had and new things to try. And I got through the game's infamously hard (in my book) final encounter by using a “stealth flamethrower” technique, something I never would have thought of it I didn't run out of options. You gotta experiment.

            My disappointment in Survivor mode is now forgotten, replaced by the absolute blast I had with Grounded Mode. I sort of wish I never played Survivor, but I did learn a lot of tactics that applied  very well to Grounded Mode. Learning the hard way in Grounded Mode might have been too much. But maybe not. 16+ hours of too easy Survivor mode is a lot...
            I had some weird trophy things happen on this playthrough. I got a bunch of the trophies for collectibles near the end of the game despite not getting them all in this playthrough. I had a few conversations and jokes not trigger for me this time around when they were supposed to, so I didn't get those trophies. But then when I went back on level select and triggered the jokes I missed, still no trophy. Oh well... I doubt I will re-play the game, so I'm not going to get all the trophies anyway. I still haven't gotten any of the new game + trophies since I'm not into new game + for TLOU (see review).

            Grounded Mode is great. It's a near perfect balance of really hard but doable. A few segments took me many tries to get through (like 20 tries...), making my total playtime a lot longer than my first playthrough. But TLOU's mechanics are so great and shine so well at this level that it was a great experience. I definitely recommend putting a few months between your first TLOU experience and this one, especially if you played the game more than once. Forgetting a bit about the story is key to enjoying it again. This time around I really enjoyed the beginning of the game story-wise, which is odd since I disliked the beginning a lot during my first 2 playthroughs. Tess is a great character and I got some more insight on her this time around. And re-playing again was the perfect warm-up for Left Behind, which I will be playing soon. And I will most definitely be playing it on Grounded Mode. It's a great game, Tier 2.