The Last of Us Part II Review

The Last of Us Part II
Developer: Naughty Dog
Publisher: Sony Interactive Entertainment
Reviewed on: PlayStation 4
Available on: PlayStation 4, PlayStation 4 Pro 

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“Okay.”

When Ellie uttered that final word in The Last of Us and I watched the credits roll, I was firmly of the belief there did not need to be a second game. I was content to let Joel and Ellie’s story live on, in all of its moral ambiguity, and allow them to become two of the most dynamic characters to ever grace the long-running lineup of PlayStation icons.

My expectations for The Last of Us Part II were high. I was expecting Naughty Dog to deliver a high-quality game worthy of the first one, of course, but (and probably most importantly), I wanted the reassurance that The Last of Us Part II was actually necessary and could properly expand on the legacy of the original game, with the potential to be even greater.

Now that I’ve finished The Last of Us Part II, I can say that whether or not the game lived up to those expectations is…complicated.

Since The Last of Us Part II was officially revealed in 2016, we’ve known this game would be a story about revenge and hate. We knew it’d be extremely dark. After just a couple of hours into the game, those themes and the overall bleak tone were more than apparent; but somewhere in my nearly-twenty-four hour play through, they expanded into something greater. Soon, this became about unexpected loss and justice, and questions such as “how far is too far?” surfaced and ultimately permeated every aspect of The Last of Us Part II.

The Last of Us Part II opens in Jackson, WY, with Joel giving a recap of the first game’s ending to his brother, Tommy. At this point, it’s been approximately one year since the events of the first game, where Joel took Ellie from the Firefly hospital and prevented them from using Ellie to reverse engineer a vaccine that would save humanity. When Part II opens, we see Joel and Ellie living comfortably in Tommy and his wife Maria’s community, where things are, at least for now, peaceful.

The game then flashes forward another four years, where our main events will take place. As 19-year old Ellie, we explore a bit more of the Jackson community, go on a routine patrol around the area for infected, and interact with new characters, Jesse and Dina, the latter of whom is Ellie’s love interest in the game.

SPOILER WARNING:
This review contains *major* gameplay and story spoilers from this point forward. Read at your own discretion.

Jesse and Dina aren’t the only new characters we’re introduced to at the beginning of The Last of Us Part II.

Not even an hour into the game, we meet a handful of new characters, who later turn out to be ex-Fireflies and are now part of an anti-military group known as the Washington Liberation Front (WLF). In Seattle and its surrounding areas, the WLF have been involved in an ongoing conflict with an extreme, religious group called the Seraphites- a conflict that will carry on throughout much of the game and bring characters together in unexpected ways.

All that said, it’s in this small group of WLF members that we’re introduced Abby, our other protagonist in The Last of Us Part II.

Abby is not only one of the two playable characters throughout the entire game, most notably in its second half, but she also serves as the other major side of this story, opposite Ellie, allowing players to witness the primary conflicts in the game from her perspective.

The game eases players into a familiarity with Abby, having you take control of her almost at the start of the game, shortly after your time with Ellie. It’s soon revealed that Abby, along with her WLF friends, have been scoping out the gated community of Jackson for a while, determined to exact revenge on a beloved character from The Last of Us: Joel.

The events near the beginning of The Last of Us Part II escalate pretty quickly from there. Ellie’s world is shattered in the most violent way, as Abby brutally murders Joel in front of her, and this event is what drives Ellie’s desire to kill every WLF member who was present for his death. It’s a desire that leads Ellie and her girlfriend, Dina, into the heart of Seattle, on a four-day journey of revenge at any cost.

I went into The Last of Us Part II completely blind.

I’d managed to stay away from all the major leaks that happened a couple of months ago and even went so far as to mute game-specific names and phrases on social media. Because of that, the switch to playing as Abby in the game’s second half genuinely took me by surprise, to the point where I was unsure whether playing as her was supposed to be a permanent feature of the game, or was something of a quick interlude until I finally got back to Ellie. By the end of Abby’s first day in Seattle, when it became clear that we were, in fact, meant to play through the second half of the game from her perspective, it brought on a mix of varying (and somewhat unpleasant) emotions.

“I don’t want to play as Joel’s killer,” was a sentiment I’d uttered several times in my play through, and always in anger. “Why are they making us play Abby?”

Having grown to care about Joel and Ellie’s journey from the first game, as a player, that desire to avenge Joel’s death was just as strong as Ellie’s; but the game switching perspectives, while understandably necessary to convey the story that Naughty Dog wanted to tell, seemed to wrongfully take away some of that anger and momentum from the player’s quest for revenge.

At least in the beginning.

As I settled deeper into Abby’s perspective, her backstory and the way it intertwined with Joel and Ellie’s, put the larger world of The Last of Us, including Joel’s life-altering decision at the end of the first game, into perspective. The Last of Us Part II grapples with some murky themes concerning the cycle of violence, and the foundation of its narrative seems to have been built on the adage, “there are two sides to every story.”

Whether other hardcore fans of the original game will be receptive to that other side of the story will be up for debate. If anything, the polarizing nature of The Last of Us Part II exemplifies this game is able to walk that same morally-gray line the first one delivered so well.

Even by the end of The Last of Us Part II, I had to allow the entire 24-hour experience to sit with me for several hours before I could put my thoughts into this review. It’s a challenging, yet thought-provoking game to discuss in terms of its story and themes. Its gameplay, thankfully, is a little more straight forward.

If you’ve played The Last of Us, then you’ll feel right at home in Part II, in terms of the game’s crafting and mechanics. Both the character and weapons upgrade system have been tweaked and given a more modern look, but they’re both still simple to maneuver. There are plenty of items to find throughout the world that can be applied to Ellie’s (and eventually Abby’s) skills, and I’d even go so far as to say, these items are maybe too abundant.

I played the game on its normal setting and within just a few hours, I was able to max out one branch in the crafting system. For players who may be looking for more of a challenge and a scarcity of resources, I’d definitely recommend playing at a higher difficulty.

There are also new combat mechanics that make the game more interesting during enemy encounters. Players are able to dodge, jump, and even lie prone in the grass to avoid detection. Of the three, the dodge mechanic is the one that takes some time to perfect, due to fast-moving enemies and your timing needing to be perfect.

There are also new types of infected in the game, and the veterans that are making a return are even more deadly due to their incredible speed. I found myself attempting to use the stealth mechanic in nearly every encounter with the infected, but even then the slightest noise was somehow able to draw a horde of infected. In fact, there are several enemy encounters in this game, with both infected and humans, that come close to being downright frustrating, and it’s attributed to the game’s open environment feel. Enemies are positioned in places that you won’t even be able to see, unless you move and hear the warning noise that you’re about to be spotted. The “listening mode” ability is back in Part II, which allows Ellie to hear if there are enemies in the area; but even with this ability maxed out, I didn’t find it to be as strong as it was in the first game.

In The Last of Us Part II, you won’t always be able to tailor your play style to the game. From what I’ve found, you’ll be forced out of your comfortable playing style more times than not. If you’re someone who prefers stealth over offensive gameplay, there are several enemy encounters where stealth will only take you so far; and vice-versa. Outright attacking enemies, regardless of how many Molotov cocktails, smoke bombs, or pipe bombs you have, will only get you so far before you’re taken down.

The game forces you to be strategic in combat and even make split-second decisions when you’re in the middle of gunfire or a group of infected. Enemy encounters are as dynamic as they are fast, and each encounter requires you to switch up your approach. My best recommendation would be to sit and scope out the area as best you can, because, unlike the first game, enemies are hidden everywhere and come from the most unexpected places. The AI is also smarter and more reactive than we’ve ever seen.

In several areas, The Last of Us Part II manages to put its masterful storytelling at war with its gameplay, to the point where the two struggle to compliment and balance each other. Once Ellie and Dina leave Jackson for Seattle, there are some long stretches of gameplay and exploration that become incredibly tedious to play through and eventually slow down the movement of the story and that hunger for revenge that drove Ellie to leave Jackson in the first place.

After the first few of hours or so, the game falls into a “rinse and repeat” mode of gameplay, item-hunting, and exploration that drags on for far too long, uninterrupted by cutscenes, in-game dialogue between Ellie and Dina, or even music to make things less…well, dull. The bit of music we do hear in these moments almost goes unnoticed because it’s so quiet. Ellie and Dina do converse in-game (mostly in combat) and share a couple of jokes, but they’re brief and forgettable. The Last of Us Part II is a solemn game that demands you feel every ounce of its weight, but for the first several hours, it comes at the expense of remembering to be enjoyable to actually play.

The journey from destination to destination is lengthened by obstacles like locked doors, collapsed pathways, and broken ladders. It’s exciting to find your way past these areas in the beginning of the game, but after the tenth or even twelfth collapsed bridge or platform, when you’ve been impatient for the next story moment for the last two hours, it simply becomes tiresome and predictable; and the first half of the game greatly suffers in pacing because of it.

It sounds strange to remark on this about a video game, but The Last of Us Part II contains some of the longest stretches of uninterrupted gameplay that I can recall in a major Naughty Dog game. It got to the point where a couple of hours could pass, trekking across Seattle and its abandoned buildings, before I hit the next major story beat. It only became noticeable because there wasn’t much else to supplement those long and quiet moments of the journey.

During my play through of the game, I remarked several times on the openness of the world, and on the beauty and impeccable detail of the environmental design. When Ellie is making her way through Seattle, and even in the early setting of Jackson, it was rare that I encountered a door or garage that couldn’t be opened, or a store window that couldn’t be broken. The moment the gates of the Jackson community open for Ellie to go on patrol, and those snow-capped mountains take up the view in the background, you can just feel the vastness of the world.

That semi-open world design made exploration enticing in the beginning and made enemy encounters with the WLF and the Seraphites especially compelling because of the various objects Ellie (and eventually Abby) were able to hide behind. The world, however, is open to a fault. 

There came a moment fairly early on, where I thought The Last of Us was just moments away from needing a HUD. The game is twenty-five years into the apocalypse, so it’s natural, of course, to have everything wildly overgrown outside. Naughty Dog does an excellent job conveying that passage of time through fully-realized environments that are rich with decrepit buildings, tall grass, and even buildings that have been completed flooded. The look of the game is simply fantastic.

However, because every environment in The Last of Us Part II is either overgrown, abandoned, flooded (or sometimes all three), the majority of the environments tend to take on a similar appearance, and it’s not always clear where you should be going. That uncertainty is made even worse due to the size of the game and the fact that directional cues that are normally present in games to subtly guide you in the right direction, aren’t always as apparent in The Last of Us Part II.

There were a handful of chapters- playing as Ellie and as Abby- where I found myself running in circles, back and forth, struggling to find a minuscule crawl space between vines, or a small gap in the wall. Due to the size and many of the environments looking alike, especially near the middle of the game, it’s easy to lose track of the places you’ve already explored and begin to feel like you’re aimlessly wandering. That open environmental feel, however, became more linear near the end of the game.

The final confrontation that happens at the end of The Last of Us Part II is, without a doubt, one of the most visceral things I’ve experienced in a video game. It was excellent. Being forced to play through that moment makes the entire trajectory of Joel and Ellie’s relationship feel like an impossible weight in your gut. It makes you uneasy, questioning if Ellie is doing the right thing. If she’s better than this. If she’s gone too far.

If she’s gone far enough.

Regardless of your feelings toward The Last of Us Part II as a whole, the end will undoubtedly leave an impact on you.

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Final Thoughts:

The story and structure of The Last of Us Part II are masterful, forcing you to consider that there really are two sides to every story and that all actions, regardless of how insignificant they may seem in the moment, have future consequences. In several moments, though, the greatness of the story far outshines the monotonous gameplay moments in the first half.

This is a game about how selfishness and an insatiable desire for revenge have driven every character involved to their breaking point, and it’s presented in such a visceral way that makes The Last of Us Part II an undeniable standout of this generation.

*My completion of The Last of Us Part II took 23 hours and 57 minutes.*