![]() Navigating any given combat scenario is a puzzle in which you have to figure out exactly how to get from point A to point B with the resources you have. You can also easily get surrounded and die horribly, whether you're fighting people or infected. You can accidentally alert an enemy to your presence only to slip through a tight space in the wall, vault through a window, and outrun your pursuer through a building to reestablish your cover and gain the upper hand. Her movements are smooth enough that they almost look scripted you can duck and dodge in a fight and deliver a return blow with a series of button presses that translate into a strangely graceful dance. Ellie is scrappy and agile, and moving through a combat arena is an art. ![]() The Last of Us Part II's combat is tense and exhilarating, though confronting in its brutality. The biggest issue is that the most impactful of her kills occur in cutscenes rather than in combat, and that obscures the purpose of combat's more upsetting aspects. Being helpless as a player in the face of Ellie's destruction serves a grander purpose that I won't spoil here. There are narrative reasons for that, though, and they do work. I knew her revenge quest was bad news before the killing and maiming really began. From the very beginning, I wanted to reach out and shake Ellie, as her proxy in all this, and get her to do anything other than what we were about to do. The game gave me stress nightmares, not because you kill a lot of people per se, but because playing as Ellie felt more like being dragged by my hair than being immersed in her mission. But as a character study, The Last of Us Part II is beautiful and haunting, and I found myself completely overwhelmed by the emotional weight of it. It's a devastating, gruesome story of revenge in which the purpose of violence gets muddied by its intensity. And when everything falls apart and she sets out in search of vengeance, you see her pain in its rawest, most brutal form. This life is clearly not enough for her she's distant and brooding, obviously conflicted about something. The Last of Us Part II grapples with Joel's decision not through Joel, but through Ellie. Four years after Joel saved (kidnapped?) Ellie from the Firefly hospital, this is the life he wanted for her. Its residents grow food, care for horses, tend bars, and even have dances and movie nights. ![]() If it weren't for the walls surrounding the town, you could almost forget that the world is crawling with infectious monsters that would kill everyone in sight its main road, blanketed in snow, is a charming row of old buildings with decks for sidewalks, more Old West town than post-apocalypse settlement. That review has the same score and just serves as a deeper, more detailed analysis for those who want to read more.Īt the beginning of The Last of Us Part II, you get a glimpse of Ellie's life in idyllic Jackson, Wyoming. We've done our best to explain certain parts of the game and our critique without discussing any story spoilers however, if you want to understand the full context of our analysis here, you can read the spoilery version of this review, which discusses the story in greater detail and further explains our thoughts. Speedrunners can enjoy the official speedrun mode, which measures a player's time as they go through the game.Editor's note: Due to embargo restrictions around spoilers, parts of this review are intentionally vague. The Last of Us Part 1 features a permadeath mode, where dying will send you back to the very beginning of the game. Thanks to the PS5's ultra-fast SSD, initial loading times for the game will be much faster, so players who resume their journeys won't be greeted by the lengthy loading times of the original experience. The team has also introduced numerous new accessibility features, including audio description for cutscenes, removing obstacles that may have kept some players from enjoying the original game. The game may technically play the same way, but the feeling has been drastically improved thanks to the DualSense haptic feedback and adaptive triggers, which convey more realistic sensations regardless of what the player is doing. This means that enemies react more realistically and will flank players in more intelligent ways, making many of the game's combat encounters more difficult.Ĭompanion AI has similarly been improved, especially when sneaking around, so there's reduced awkward situations where a Clicker clearly sees Ellie but doesn't react. Outside of the extensive visual changes, The Last of Us Part 1 features improved AI, with Naughty Dog pulling from the advancements made on The Last of Us Part 2.
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