OK, my TLOU status is I played about 3 hours of it and lost all my progress due to the save bug, but I definitely had some gripes about the game during that time. My general impressions are pretty good, despite that, but there's definitely stuff that sticks out at me. If these complaints are common for Naughty Dog games, then I wouldn't know, because I haven't played any of the Uncharted games. OK, here we go:
- Sometimes, combat and movement feel really stiff. There are times where I feel like I want to look at something without turning my whole body towards it, and the game doesn't want to let me. I don't think the combat is especially tight, but I suppose it makes up for it with just the sheer tension that surrounds it. A lot of enemies absorb a lot of bullets, which sucks since if you're playing on hard, you're super fragile, and can't take many yourself.
- I thought the prologue was pretty good, but I'm rather baffled by people describing it as one of the greatest sequences in recent gaming memory. Yeah, it was a pretty cool cold open, but I kinda just dragged myself through it without feeling like I was really feeling the moment. Too mechanical for its own good.
- The game's basic premise is sooo tired. I know it's like that TWD thing, where it's not about doing something groundbreaking or original thematically, but it's about taking an idea and taking it to a dark and deeply emotional place. But so far the game has just felt like deja vu all over again, and there's nothing that stands out about the world they've created.
- Sometimes the game is drop dead gorgeous. Sometimes the textures look a little grungy, and the animation stiff. The flaws stand out more when the rest of the game looks so good.
- It's yet another goddamn third person game where you walk into a room, see a bunch of chest high walls, and know immediately that you're entering a combat area. And I am so fucking tired of it. They're trying to create this tension about the combat which at times is completely undermined by the level design.
- I appreciate them not feeling obliged to tutorialise the player to death, but there was one sequence I had to redo about six times because the game wouldn't tell me a very basic interface/inventory thing. Maybe modern games have just made me soft, but it seemed like an egregious oversight to not tell me that.
But overall I think the game's biggest fault is that I feel like I can nitpick it until it falls apart - I wouldn't be doing that if I was more engaged in the drama of the world, and in the characters. But in spite of some really good character modelling, and some pretty good writing and voice acting, my experience with the game so far has mostly been pretty academic; I'm playing it like a critic, not like a player, and there's something wrong about that when I'm not a critic. It's the same problem I had with The Walking Dead.

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