This is by far the best game I've played this generation, but it's also the most buggy and rage inducing. Because of said bugs mostly, but also some IMO terrible design choices. As I do with every game I've played I jumped straight to hard mode and played the game. I don't recall how many times I died, but they were a lot, and the most frustrating part is that 90% of those deaths were due to bugs and other stupid stuff.

Bugs ranging from enemies spotting me from behind a wall, enemies attacking me from behind the walls (srsly wtf?), suddenly my melee not working (a.k.a. I swing my pipe or wtv at the enemy but it does nothing, this happened at least 3 times). Also, whoever was the reviewer that said that the friendly AI was amazing and never got in your way either didn't really play the game or played it in the easiest difficulty and "let some things go". The friendly AI caused some of my most infuriating deaths, either because the AI decided to stay in front of me while I was shooting, so I couldn't see the enemy and got shot in the head in the process, or when I was trying to go to the corner of the cover to stealth kill an enemy and just would NOT move, or when I was trying to back away from a clicker or a bloater and couldn't move because they were in the way, etc.

These wouldn't be that bad if the majority of the enemies weren't 1-hit kill. And this is my biggest gripe with the game, it feels so cheap. One hit, really? Sometimes clickers were a bit away from me and it still counted as a death for me, it's not challenging, just annoying. I mean, in Dark Souls, for example, one of my favorite games of all time, you were challenged - if you died you knew it was because you screwed up, here it's just unfair and there's no feeling of success when you manage to pass one of these encounters, it's just a feeling of relief for not having to deal with that part anymore. Also, the sniper dude shot me through a wall once, what the hell?

I am replaying the game in Survivor mode and I've been counting the FAIR deaths, and it's 4. And I have way above 40 deaths by now (nearing the end of the game).

Did anyone else have any of these problems? IMO, the decision of the majority of the enemies being one-hit kill is just bad. I can see where they were going with it, it would create fear on the player of dying, and it worked for the first few times, then it just became unfair and rage inducing.

The clickers and the bloaters are the only one hit kill enemies, definitely not the majority. I played through the game on hard the first time through and am about 25% of the way through new game plus and have not experienced any of the problems that you mentioned.

I'm about 10 hours through my first playthrough on Hard and have yet to experience a single bug. Every death has been earned, and if I had to guess I'd say about 5% of the enemies I've faced so far have been one-hit kills.

Of course this is one of the best games you've played this gen. If it's also the most buggy then you've probably only played like, a dozen games since 2005.

@starvinggamer: Same. Completed it on hard first time through, took 12 hours. Only bug I encountered was the save game glitch that caused me to lose about 3 hours. In-game I had no issues whatsoever.

There are only two enemy types in the whole game that are one-hit kill and the majority of the time you can completely avoid any confrontation with them.

@starvinggamer: Lolno, I play a lot of games and this has been one of the buggiest of the last few years. Maybe it's my copy of the game, I don't know, a friend of mine never had these kinds of problems either and he finished it twice, but I managed to reproduce some of them when he came to visit, so I'm not crazy or something. My game also crashed my PS3 thrice now.

@carcass427: Ok then, maybe not the majority, but half (what's left? Runners and humans basically). I still think it's a horrible design decision.

I played for like 1 hour and it froze on me 2 times already... great start!

@thedeathofdeath: You only fight bloaters 3 to 4 times in the game and its best to kill clickers first before alerting other enemies if possible.

So yeah I haven't had any crashing, freezing or any of the bugs you mentioned. Weird.

@scroll: I was just skyping with a friend who bought the game yesterday, he has many of the same bugs I have plus the freezing. I'm starting to think it's only affecting some copies of the game. Other bugs I've had: 3D character models resetting animation in the middle of cutscenes (you know the standard 3D model position, with arms open, they stay like that for a few seconds), I've had my character also run with the arms straight open like the standard position, only the legs were moving as they should. Enemies going through walls as I said, but also their arms going through walls (this happened with clickers, I died from a clicker grabbing me from behind a wall, amazing!), voices and subtitles not showing (this happened to me first when Tommy was yelling at Joel to go to the highway in the beginning, I saw him opening his mouth but heard nothing, had to youtube it to find out what he said), sometimes the building I'm in disappears for half a second and I can see the surroundings, it's weird.

@thedeathofdeath: That kind of sounds like hardware failure of some sort. Because I have seriously had a flawless experience with the last of us and if these bugs were wide spread wouldn't a few reviews mention them?

Its a shame you've had such a buggy experience.

Youre not getting seen through walls, but actually heard. The only time that will ever happen if you try to melee kill a dude while sneaking around. It makes a lot of fucking noise. Choking someone out could also get you noticed if a clicker is nearby. Stepping on bottles can also get you noticed

I haven't found any problems with bugs or A.I. I have been frustrated occasionally, but it's usually because I'm not taking my time and thinking about what I'm doing. For some reason a lot of people try to force every shooter to play the same. They want to play everything like it's Gears of War or Call of Duty when it's a completely different game with different restrictions. I'm not saying that's what you are doing, but I can see how The Last of Us could be extremely frustrating if you try to force your own preconceptions onto the game instead of playing by the game's rules.

If you realize it's a stealth game and play smart, it actually becomes fairly easy. That's not to say you won't get completely destroyed if you try to run out and engage like a chicken with your head cut off, but the clickers are much easier to deal with when you realize you can pretty much stealth around them fairly easily by holding down R2.

Lastly, it does sound like you've got a bad disk or something. Maybe it's a bad install or something like that because I haven't had any issues like crashing or anything. Maybe you're just unlucky.

@naru_joe93: Not making noise, just standing around. I've had that happen a lot.

@scroll: I hope it's not hardware failure since this is a new PS3 I bought a few months ago after YLOD... My friend's PS3 is also new.

I can't get it to load past the prologue (Specifically, as I walk past the crashed ambulance carrying Sarah, it cuts to black and keeps playing music). Deleted everything, and I'm currently re-downloading the whole game.

Before that, it was failing to load textures properly, but a reboot fixed that.

It really bums me out that what seems like such an awesome game is so buggy.

@bassguy: I've had some textures take a long while to load as well.

Game occasionally has immersion breaking bugs (mostly horse related), haven't seen any that effect the gameplay though; stealth games cones of vision have always behaved a little weird; it's just something you get used to (though on normal you don't have to stealth exclusively and that makes the game a fair amount more fun)

I havent finished the game, I'm at the elavator holding Ellie,the doors open and my screen goes black, frozen, I cant finish.

A few of the encounters had way more clickers than regular infected, this was more annoying in the beginning of the game when you didn't even have the last ditch shiv escape unlock.

I bought the game digitally and experienced little to no technical problems. In the 17 hours it took me to complete the game, I had two situations where I couldn't progress due to them. There was one sequence where I had to take out all the enemies in an arena while ellie covered me with a rifle. Once I had done this, the game didn't recognize it and I found myself wandering around the arena for about ten minutes until I fired off a round from my rifle and an enemy randomly spawned in behind me, so ellie could take him out. The other was when ellie wouldn't respond to button prompt and I had to reload. Also, I can only think of one time where the textures didn't noticeably load.

There were definitely several sections where I grew agitated at the stealth, but it was usually my fault. I did however have one stealth sequence with the two brothers where the enemy detected me every time despite me being completely in cover. I consider myself somewhat lucky I never got the save glitch, since I started downloading the game immediately after it unlocked and played it the following morning.

But...but...10/10 guys. Don't worry about flaws. GOTY mi rite?

@kishinfoulux: Despite a few technical problems, I still consider it GOTY material. Even the best of games have flaws.

I haven't had any problems. I thought there was a scripting bug because I couldn't boost Ellie up a wall, then I realized I just wasn't looking around enough and you have to pull a dumpster over to it.

I did have Ellie get in my way once, but compared to other games AI, thats nothing short of a miracle.

Besides the save bug, I didn't encounter anything major either.

Had the save bug, luckily i only lost about 10min. Other than that i had the game hard lock the ps3 at only one area pretty late in the game, and it kept doing it . Here was my issues, late game spoilery so i put it in the block

Overall didnt have any major AI issues or general bugs

I had the game freeze once, I got stuck in the ground, and once I even disappeared when I entered some water. Nothing too major, though, since I could always hit the "restart encounter" button in the pause menu and get loaded back maybe a minute.

@somedelicook: I guess I didn't run into these problems because I used stealth as much as I possibly could. I can see how they would be a lot more annoying if you are doing open combat more often.

It was more when you failed the stealth and then every infected got alerted to your location. Like in the subway, it was such a small area you couldn't escape and there was maybe 2 runners and 6 clickers.

I hated that section so much, I can't wait to get to it in new game plus now that I've played the game through and refined my playstyle

After deleting the whole game and re-downloading it, everything seems to be working properly.

If you're having problems (And have bandwidth to burn), I would recommend trying a complete re-download and re-install.

I just got the game today, started it on hard, and that section and even the building section before it was a pain in the ass. The Clickers are a really crappy enemy and fighting them is just frustrating and not very fun. I'll be honest don't really like the feel of the combat/stealth in general but at least with other enemies I have some fun. I'm actually thinking of just bumping it down to normal so I can just enjoy the story and breeze through the encounters.

I haven't run into a single bug/glitch... So I don't know.

I had one part where the scripting broke and I had to restart a checkpoint, but no bugs other than that.

If you think this game is buggy, I am assuming you didn't play Skyrim?

Man, lmao, i just started the game and in the first encounter i threw the bottle to distract the guy, snuck up behind him, and as i went for the kill, he fell through the map.

lmao, wtf. I also had trouble walking on the first plank, dude just got stuck.

Those two parts are probably some of the hardest in the game the first time through. I started on hard as well and those parts gave me a lot of trouble, but once I got through them I had a lot of fun with the rest of the game. I would stick with it a little while longer.

I've had a lot of the bugs theDeathOfDeath describes, and so do some of my friends. My game also crashed twice (but funnily enough, only on multiplayer). In addition, enemy AI also went berzerk at times (started running around in circles, or running around aimlessly). I also think it's more frustrating than challenging, but I still think it's fun, but could really be more rewarding, most times I feel like I passed a section due to luck and not skill, which is, like you said, different than how Dark Souls makes you feel. Just finished it in Survivor with around 60 deaths, and most of them were because of stealth breaks that were uncontrollable to me... Now onto Survivor+!

I also hope it's not a hardware thing... I had to replace my PS3 last year because of the YLOD as well. *sigh*

I only had one major bug so far when the bandits attacked the dam. The game would not recognize that I had cleared out all of the enemies and would not progress forward.

I agree that this game can be very aggravating at times, but I am playing through it on hard so I guess I am kind of asking for it.

I felt there were too many to overlook. Even without them it still wouldn't be GOTY anyways.

@carcass427: See I'm starting to think the game might not be for me. I kept the difficulty on hard and played a bit more today and hit another Clicker encounter and ended up turning it off. This one at least didn't force me to kill everyone but I don't enjoy the stealth and getting noticed and having them one hit kill me is just frustrating. I'm starting to think I'd rather just watch the story on youtube than suffer through gameplay that doesn't really interest me.