The Last of Us Part II

The beauty of The Last of Us Part II is entirely undeniable. The story, however, is completely over hyped, muddled and not really what I expected after The Last of Us.

Let us first address the glaring issue with the main antagonist/protagonist, Abby; those arms, come on guys we all appreciate strong women but those arms are just a little bit off. I understand the emotional effect at the very end of the game, how the mighty fall, gods are human too, etc, etc, but throughout the story they were just distracting because they seem to expand and contract like the unnatural change from Bruce to the Hulk.

Right, now that’s out the way, the story. We all know that The Last of Us had a fantastic premise, Children of Men and all that, it was executed well but felt very repetitive from my recollection; Kill bad guys in area A, move to area B, repeat, with excellent cinematics thrown in. The game was also beautiful, the level design was spot on and the performance was excellent; these latter three statements remain true in The Last of Us Part II, but the former, the story, not so much.

SPOILER ALERT. The whole story is basically a revenge plot around two groups of good people who do bad shit to each other, this forces the player to come to pretty obvious conclusions about how life is complex and shit. The end of the game is like lukewarm, flavourless rice pudding; it wasn’t bad, it looked good but you can’t help but feel like it was a waste of time eating it. Actually, rice pudding is an excellent analogy; at the start of the bowl everyone is enthusiastic, half way through you lose interest and by the end you just want it to be over. That’s why there was a temporal gap of about 8 months between starting the game and finishing the last 2 hours.

The story has flaws but it is presents in a classic Naughty Dog way, which everyone loves and the game has had raving reviews. I’m just a simple guy who loves games, don’t take anything I say as gospel and try the game for yourself.

All that being said, I did complete The Last of Us Part II and I did genuinely enjoy the gameplay loop, the environments and combat was excellent, the campaign length was good, some of the death sequences were savage (that one with Ellie hunting Abby in the back of the theatre, shotgun + face) and overall it is a fine example of a single player game, it should definitely be on every gamer list, or at least in their backlog.