This game is terrible. Here's why.
Everyone says that with games, graphics don't matter. It's all about the gameplay, man. That's the core. Gameplay.
Here's the thing -- the gameplay in The Last of Us is absolutely atrocious.
All of my issues are with the gameplay. The story and cutscenes are fantastic, and the only reason I stuck it out as long as I did (about halfway through, judging by a chapter list), even after that autosave bug made me lose 2 hours of progress. It's funny, this has been called The Anti-Uncharted, and that's true in this case. Uncharted 3 was awful not because of core gameplay (good thing they could copy-paste the code from U2), but because of the absolutely horrendous story and level design. Of course, ND admitted U3 was made by their "b-team", with pretty much no upper management, so its scattershot approach and complete lack of closure on almost every storyline made sense.
The Last of Us was Naughty Dog's darling.
"This is it," they must have thought, "this will be lauded in the future as a perfect example of Games As Art, as an example of what kind of emotional bonds can be established between a player and a fictional character."
In a way, it's successful. If you removed the cutscenes from this game, you'd have a pretty good movie, in all honesty. Playing the game, though, is counter-intuitive to this effort.
Most of the game is stealth. When it's stealth against human enemies, and you're by yourself, it's actually good. Those very few moments, when the game just works, it WORKS. Most of the time, you're accompanied by an AI character of some sort. They can't trigger the enemies (though you don't clip through them, so they can luckily still get in your way when you try to navigate), and it's a good thing, because these fuckers run around like maniacs. I hate to be all, "MY IMMERSION!" but when I'm sneaking through a house, hop out of a back window silently, and the guy I'm with just busts through the front door and hauls ass around the side of the house, alerting no enemies, I can only shake my head in disbelief that this is a "finished" product, released in stores.
That's the core of it. This game seems straight-up unfinished. Every time I reload the semi-auto pistol, the magazine just shoots out of the gun and bounces around the room. Once when I restarted at a checkpoint, Joel stood there in a complete void, endless white in all directions. When Ellie was given a bolt-action rifle to cover Joel, she was somehow firing two-shot bursts. Eyes often flicker white, there are lots of visible texture seams, animations or events that don't trigger properly, and enemies spawning/despawning very obviously (thanks to Joel's Magic Hearing, which I guess allows him to hear someone standing still breathing from 30 feet away through walls). Once there were two zombies in front of me, and one to the left down an alley. I sneak to the left, grab it, and hit square to strangle. Instead, Joel tosses him to the ground and stomps his goddamn head in, which I would have thought would alert the other zombos. Turns out they despawned, about 10 feet behind me. Quality game design.
Of course, the zombies themselves are another issue. They're not fun to deal with. Their patterns are often erratic, making them irritating to sneak around, and strangely, they seem to have far better eyesight than humans. The "rules" of the clickers are confusing -- it's stated that they use echolocation, hence the clicking, but it seems they're actually just completely blind. You can be right in front of them and they won't notice you unless you move quickly. Whoever decided to include the fat ones should be fired. Unless it was Jason Rubin, and he felt so badly about this decision that he jumped ship to THQ. Or maybe he just caught a glimpse of this pile and thought THQ at least stood a chance of being salvaged.
It's almost as if, and hear me out on this, because I know it sounds absolutely cuckoo wing-wong crazy, but it's almost as if this was rushed out the door to be the PS3's final gasp at relevancy.
... But that can't be true, can it?
