Naughty Dog are no strangers to creating brilliant video games, throughout their history they have been perfection in the form of button slapping goodness. (Maybe with the exception of Rings Of Power back in the day) But they weren’t a PlayStation power house back in 1991. Since then it has been improvement on improvement culminating in the Uncharted series, and now The Last of Us. You can read PlayStationers review on it right here. However it is still missing that actual “perfect” score that I talked about earlier. So… what is the 2% The Last of Us is missing out on? Well prop up a really uncomfortable chair and a can of flat Vimto, and be prepared to browse Imgur or your personal favourite picture based time-wasting website instead.

Big. Morbidly Obese. Spoilers Ahead.

Uncharted 4: The Last of Us follows Joel, and Ellie (primarily, however, there are plenty of other cooky characters left in “Insert American State here”, leading me to believe the title of the game isn’t at all truthful. In fact, the world is rather populated with your average guys and gals) From the start you get the impression this will be a very IMMERSIVE, ENGROSSING and CAPTIVATING game of the highest order as you start messing with the games physics and kicking a football around your bedroom (you being Sarah, Joel’s daughter of course) trying to find your dad in the night because you were cold called about your gas. Lo and behold the ophiocordyceps unilateralis (or something) virus has mutated to affect humans. Some explosions go off, it all looks very nice, and then you get your first sight of the crazies as Joel utilizes his Menace II Society skills and dispatches him with ease.

Your brother Tommy damn near runs you all over and you then start a one girl washing machine in the back of the car trying to get the best visual of the highly detailed panic around you. The intensity rises as you escape the burning wreck of your car after you realise the road is packed with more than just unstable neighbours. I’ll admit, I liked this segment of the game, it’s something which isn’t done enough, but can be so effective, struggling unaided against an unstoppable force whilst those around you succumb to the inevitable. It all turns rather sour, rather quickly though as you beautifully pirouette away from a soldier tasked with the horrible appointment of killing everyone despite having a small child.

The problem here though, is your daughter Sarah was killed in the epic battle (despite you not being hit at all it seems, seems Stormtroopers are still employed) and Tommy was just a little too late to save the day.

This game is so scary you might just …. let loose some bricks?

Next thing you’re holed up in a heavily policed quarantine zone, and you can see where the “I <3 Nathan Drake” team came on board fresh off of making Uncharted 3 ever so slightly disappointing. You walk around… for as long as you want and see plenty of NPCs talking about… apocalyptic future stuff. Some guys get shot, it’s all very gritty and real… and quite dull. You have some kind of task with your not-wife-but-wife character Tess in Boston to find Robert as he recently didn’t sell you his cache of big wily pew-pew guns for some obscure reason, something to do with the fireflies (an evil/good future clan set up to take it to THE MAN) and you find him after some chest high wall combat and beating up blind old men (or so it seems, seemingly being able to coconut dodge your way behind someone to perform a fatality of epic and incredibly quick proportions. Apparently panda cuddling someones jugular from behind completely kills them in 5 seconds flat.) You eventually find Robert, double team his face just as Marlene shows up to give you the goods. The goods being Joel’s heartstrings Ellie, who later we find out is IMMORTAL! … …

There are plenty of heart warming, story building and unnecessary cut-scenes and walking in a linear path to a destination before anything else happens, at which point we find out Ellie can’t swim and Tess can’t survive a round of bullets. However, we do get a first look at the horror element during these segments and the Clickers and Runners show up. I like how they’ve made it so Clickers can’t be killed with simple fists once you’ve been spotted, but even though Joel is a master of martial arts… at some point his timing with a pipe or a plank of wood is extremely off. (This might be the players doing, or the inconsistent melee combat, who knows) However, my first major problem with the game crops up during these parts. Whilst the segments where you battle or stealth your way through the infected humans, you quickly lose any sense of the elusive ‘I’ word, immersion, the second Ellie or Tess start dry grinding the extremities of said enemies. I understand AI is extremely hard to program, even Bruce Willis couldn’t manage it, but by jove it was hard to keep a disgruntled face against the horde when a 14-year-old is riding the walking great barrier reef like a jockey.

Despite this, the combat can still be really exhilarating. … Can. However, as much as I love Naughty Dogs work throughout the ages in terms of combat, stealth mechanics are always hard to get right, and they haven’t … quite managed it here. Whilst indeed sometimes you can feel the sweat on your brow as a clicker raises it’s dinner plate set-face in your direction and the audio excretes bass like Skrillex on the toilet, you end up just waiting for the abundance of bottles and bricks to re spawn so you can get the humanoid toolbench on your desired path so you don’t have to waste any of your shanks… shivs and provide an entertaining reenactment of Titanic on them, you find this is a much better method than wasting your ammo or molotovs on them, and generally takes less time, as you WILL die going in all out.

Might as well just hard-reset the console at this point.

…Unless of course you outrun them, as you do and hide behind another wall. Despite their echolocation, you can still play a rowdy game of Mousetrap behind a sheet of A4 paper 3 feet behind them and they won’t notice you. Or indeed just get their attention and let your NPC allies take center point and use their unlimited ammo to destroy the infected. And that’s the combat, you will be doing a lot of this, right up until you meet the bloater enemy type, which is easily my favourite part of the game, it incites such fear and struggle into the player as it genuinely provides a challenge which can’t be overcome unless you personally shed all your nail bombs at them. (Which contain no nails, and an incredibly advanced form of pressure sensitivity where everything that isn’t Joel Or Ellie set it off).

The crafting is another thing I’m undecided on. It’s nice, something a little different, and having to actually utilize the ‘bag mechanic’ or whatever crazy engine they bought in for this fabrication is an awesome touch to the genre. However, it’s rarely used in its complex form as you can always wait until you get another riveting journey segment (nothing quite as bad as the desert well scene in Uncharted 3, god forbid) but the pacing still shoots itself in the knee with it, before you start crafting more shivs and health packs.

The dreaded alone segments come at you thick and thin though (after you utilize their incredible “Ellie-on-pallet-over-water” mechanic) for a fifteenth time though. However, any tension is broken here when Joel proceeds to fling himself through doors like Agent York from Deadly Premonition heard that The Pickles are on sale for only $12 on the other side. It’s the small things like this which can easily break the feeling the game is going for. I understand you’re trying to pick the pace back up again, but seeing as I can just Batman vision everywhere building up and building down of tension isn’t going to work.

All those years living on alcohol and rags has given Joel super-human strength and hearing

The character animosity really starts pounding through though as we heard all through the game about 1. how Ellie can’t swim, and 2. how you could never be forgiven by your brother. However, like a miracle you stumble across him and his cougar wife (Maria) in a dam making a new life for everyone.

However, Ellie brought more bad luck with her as after you miraculously make out…up with your brother the place gets raided by the Government, yet again invading our privacy and obliterate the happy music with their inability to break through a rusty glass room to get to Maria and Ellie. Ellie grabs a horse, you follow, you have a big argument, you slaughter a load of men and make their families weep with the premise of no daddy coming home, and then with the new-found love for his brother, Joel completely rethinks his life and decides to take Ellie to get her to the hospital for a scan and a lollipop.

At some point you come across and old friend called Bill who is refreshingly real in the circumstances and provides some more entertaining scenes, whereby the camera angle changes so you need to press buttons from a different view whilst a non-visible countdown progresses on someone. And you also meet Henry and his lil’ bro’ Sam on your crazy adventures. These two characters also provide a wonderful amount of chemistry, and are by far my favourite characters in the game. You get to spend some quality time with Sam in the sewers before you are confronted with wild dogs… which don’t actually do anything apart from run into the black abyss, then get gifted the sniper rifle of the gods with its implausible amount of ammunition and ability to be shot and aimed without anyone actually controlling it. Henry does his impression of a motorcycle and Sam skips breakfast and so he can go straight to the Ellie, much to the demise of Joel’s feels and Henry’s mental state and weak to bullets head.

You escape the clutches of death once again and make your way into winter. Whereby Joel slips on some ice whilst grappling with Mr. Standard McEnemy and falls onto a tetanus ridden rebar. Luckily you manage to board your horse again before slumping off it in your weakened state and wind up controlling Ellie in one of the more exciting and actual “Wow” moments of the game.

Saddest game in history. R.I.P Bunny 2033-2033 #BOLO

You begin by setting off into the wilderness without Joel’s backpack full of goodies as that would be stealing, and start tracking a deer after prematurely ending Bugs Bunny’s’ video game career, before meeting up with David and his best buddy James. You defend your dearest deer kill as The Flood attempt to break through Nazi Zombie style into your shack with David before he reveals he is the mastermind behind telling guys much bigger, stronger, fitter… yet less aware of their personal space what to do. It’s here you find out that Ellie and a shard of metal is just as strong as big tough guy Joel is with a pipe. As long as you keep the stealth tactics going, and seeing as you inherited Joels divine hearing, it’s possible. I also appreciate during these parts how Naughty Dog went ahead with showing Ellie too can succumb to the cold hand of death in the form of a fat-ass stretched JPEG image being pulled over her face when attack by a clicker. It was a bold move showing a glimpse of child immortality, but one that added to the paranoia the game sets. (Even if executed a little off) Ellie then ends up being fed minotaur before showing off her radical scars she got in ‘Nam to David. He doesn’t approve and burns down his bar whilst trying to teach Ellie about the birds and the bees.

Joel awakes from his slumber and battles Silent Hills creeping fog to get Ellie to the zoo. They see some giraffes and board the water based train to the final destination. But Marlene beat them to it, we’re unsure how, but she did. and gives Joel the bad news that Ellie might be the first 14-year-old to win Who Wants To Be A Millionaire and wants to preserve her brains. So she leaves Ethan in charge of him and in doing so loses his ability to have children (PlayStation have a way with Ethan and children) and Joel  goes against all better judgement that anyone would do in this situation and massacres his way to the operating theatre whereby you have no choice but to provide a world ending haymaker to the doctor and rescue Ellie in her comatose state.

You disapprove of Marlene trying to save the world (maybe, it’s never quite clear) and blat-blat her in the head before driving off to see Tommy again, Ellie starts giving you grief about how she’s the chosen one and Joel puts her in her place by swearing.

And credits.

It’s thought-provoking, thrilling, makes you cry, makes you laugh, makes you wonder why it apparently better than Uncharted 1 or 2, and you get a few sweet trophies out of it. But, I’m struggling to see why you’d want to play it again. As an experience, I loved it, I would recommend the game to everyone. But the story is such that once its done do you really want to go through all the mundane scenes just to get to the few parts of the game that were actually exciting, in terms of gameplay. Granted there were plenty of cutscenes, and moments leading up to them that were thoroughly entertaining, but on the whole, it was like playing Uncharted when Drake was 78. A little slower paced and without all the fun and genuine thrills that come from being directed by Micheal Bay.

The sexual tension was just too much for Sam to handle… /Obligatory Ellen Page comment

There are too many moments where the immersion was broken by the AI performing incredibly bad, and by the awfully buggy prompts to progress through a level with some Killzone style heave-ho. There were times characters would do… or wouldn’t do what you’d think was the most logical option in the situation. The level design, whilst gorgeous, and kitted out admirably… was just linear straight paths after arena fights. I find it hard to get into a game that tries to wear its fat “real life sim” on its sleeve when you can’t just hop a 3 foot fence to get around a bunch of infected to get to the exact place the game takes you to, but only after you’ve cleared the negligible area first.

And as for the ending, whilst it hasn’t quite split the fans down the middle like Mass Effect, it’s possibly the worst ending I could have pictured for a game which has held nothing back so far on characters deaths. Ending with a line out of a 1950 amateur production was not what I had expected at all. Maybe that’s what they were going for, you’ve done all this work to get Ellie here, let’s give you a jolly happy ending. Where was the epic struggle out ending in flashbacks to Sarah in your arms being shot with Ellie taking her place, you collapsing outside in the rain with the lyrics from Owl City cascading down on you, Tommy flying in on a zeppelin Team Rocket style and lifting you to safety with a prolonged close-up of your and Ellie’s hands leaving each others grasp as Marlene fires a shot at you before. Boom credits, you don’t know what happened. If they are going through with the awful choice of making Joel save Ellie in the first place despite what everyone, and his gut was telling him, why not?

And in the story comes the characters and universe it is set in. I appreciate what they have managed to add in, but there is a whole universe left to explore, that shouldn’t need a sequel or a spin-off to tell. It should have been in the main game, what is Joel’s back-story? Characters would come and go with no hint of why they were in Joel’s life in the first place. If you want me to really feel for your polies and vertices, tell me why, don’t just flash some teary-eyes every now and then.

Whilst the game may very well take some time to beat in terms of story telling (I still prefer Metal Gear Solid 4, hands down) it has delivered on so much, but at the same time left so much out, and could have done with some more polishing in key areas. It’s all trivial and personal taste, and I was annoyed at the fact that there are physics specifically programmed in for kicking some sports ball objects, and not others, some bins, not others and so on, how the loading screen is as non-predictable as the paths of the clickers, how even with your future vision you can’t see squirrels and other wildlife with it and the obscure redundant flashlight sixaxis controls. But at the end of the day, there is still some sweet wet clothing engine going on.

All in all, maybe if Naughty Dog had waited, both this and Uncharted 3 would have been console defining games, just a little later than planned, as they are, they are still must haves for everyone this generation, but by no means are they the perfect games to finish on. The Last of Us if you will.

That is the look I expect Evan Wells is giving me right now.

The multiplayer is jolly good fun though.