The Last Of Us Part 2 Review – There are no words…
The Last Of Us 2, to be frank, is a mess. It feels absolutely like it doesn’t have a destination or goal. And even when it does the message it sends is poorly written and clumsy at best.
To start off I’ll be honest about where I stand with the original. I liked The Last Of Us. I certainly didn’t love it so bad that I became a massive fan but I liked it enough to think it warranted most of the love it was getting. It was well written, the characters we’re relatable and, in some ways tragic. And it was a story that focused on building a story around the characters and their actions and choices, which made it feel real. All of this made the dire situations the characters found themselves in all the more tense as you progressed through the unforgiving post-apocolyptic world.
Now, considering TLOU2 is a direct sequel. You’d think all of this would be carried over and improved upon. Apparently not…
Gameplay
The gameplay for TLOU2 hasn’t changed a huge amount from TLOU. One thing I praise the game game for is having more open areas. However this also creates it’s own unique problem as you find yourself running around randomly murdering someone and then running around again. Before long it gets very tedious.
It’s obvious that Naughty Dog have heard the fans when they complained of the annoying as hell puzzles in the first installment. There are fewer puzzles in this one, however the few that you do come across aren’t necessarily improved upon they’re just different. A couple of rope puzzles here and there and that’s about it. It’s a bit like putting a fresh coat of paint on a broken car; it may look shiny and new but it’s still broken.
Combat and stealth
The other thing I have to give a backhanded compliment about is the stealth system. Because of the new, bigger areas. The stealth system really works in favour of choosing how you’re going to go about the situation you find yourself in.
In the previous game the areas felt like video game levels, in this they don’t. However, this too has a fatal flaw; the AI of the enemies are some of the dumbest I’ve ever encountered.
They suffer from a severe case of dead body blindness. You can sneak right up to them and they won’t notice at all as long as you stay out of their pre-determined path. There are a group of enemies you go against who are smarter than the average grunt. But even they suffer with the same programming issues. However you can change the settings to how smart you want the enemies to be by changing the difficulty so I gotta give props to ND for that. They make customising the difficulty of the game to your own standard very easy and accessible.
The combat itself is largely unchanged besides that. It’s very much just a polished version of it’s predecessor. ND have added a jump command but it’s used so scarcely that it may as well not be there to be honest.
Story and plot
Oh boy. Here we go…
I’ll be honest, most of TLOU2’s plot can be summed up in one sentence; “what in the ever loving hell!?”
Honestly. It’s just so badly written that I went and looked for information on if the same people had written this game as opposed to the first. If I had to describe it, it would be the season finale of Game of Thrones.
There are plotholes so big you could dance through them and none of the characters are likeable or interesting in any way. There is one interesting character but they die unceremoniously pretty early on by doing something so incredibly stupid I wondered if I’d seen what I thought I’d seen.
There’s lots of moments like that in TLOU2 but none more so than the end…
The ending
I’m not even sure if the ending will divide fans so much as unite them in understanding just how stupid it is. It singlehandedly renders everything you do in the game up until that point as useless and not needed.
Think about this, you spend a 45hr game being forced into situations where you have to kill or be killed. Becoming a merciless murderer, being made to make those cold blooded decisions. All for it all to end with “murder is wrong guys, let’s not do it.”
Honestly I can’t go into too much detail because it’s spoiler central and I don’t want to ruin it for other players but you’ll see what I mean if and when you play it. What a mess…
General thoughts
I think I’ve been honest enough. The game isn’t trash but it is laughably bad. I mean, I spend most of it thinking it was a parody of some kind.
The only real compliment I can give it is how stunningly beautiful it looks. It looks next gen beautiful. The landscapes are gorgeous and the settings are fun. (If it weren’t for all the murder porn.)
I’m not a squeamish person. I don’t flinch at overly violent games but this one seems to have no reason behind any of it. There’s no reason for all the brutality it seems to just be there because it looks cool. That may keep you excited for about 2 hours at most but eventually you get bored of it.
TLOU2 isn’t necessarily awful it’s just very average. Everything it tries to do is average. And the one place they really could’ve made up for it (story and characterisation) seems to have been possessed by something. Let’s be honest, TLOU worked because of Ellie and Joel. Their relationship and their reaction to their world made the game interesting. TLOU2 is what happens when you don’t have that strong foundation of a well written story to carry the weaker parts of your game.
It’s an almost comical violence-fest, with an unsatisfying ending that handles delivering an anti-revenge story as subtly as a nine iron to the head.
