The Last of Us: Part II

First thing's first, play the game for yourself. Buy the game, turn the lights off, and get cracking. In the end, this is a video game, and the only thing that matters is your own personal experience. You might hate it, you might love it, but it's your opinion, and nobody should be able to change that. I have played all the way through the game, and I took my sweet time. What follows are my honest opinions:

The Gameplay: Putting everything from the story to one side, this is stellar, top class gameplay. Combat is fluid, tense, and really exhausting in the best possible of ways. It takes everything we loved from the first game and only builds on it. You're able to approach encounters however you please, but playing smart (using stealth and your tools) feels immensely rewarding. I thoroughly enjoyed scavenging for materials and planning ahead to decide how I could be the most effective predator in combat while utilising as little resources as possible. Whether you're up against human foes, or the infected (Including the absolutely terrifying new infected types!) it's up to you as the player to determine how you can be the most effective against each very different enemy type. This is a true post-apocalypse experience.

The Story: It's extremely difficult to talk about the narrative, for many reasons. First and foremost, spoilers. (I won't be spoiling anything!) Reading the leaks and not playing the game will not give you the faintest idea of the direction this story takes. It's a video game, and it must therefore be played in full, by you. In my opinion, the story is truly complex and multi layered. Sometimes you want to cry, sometimes you want to laugh, sometimes you want to throw your controller through the TV. There's a lot at work here, and my understanding is that most of these emotions you feel are intentional. There are points in the game where you will NOT be satisfied with the outcomes of events, and this is the way it's designed. This is a story about the cost of revenge, sins of the father, and the near impossible ability to swallow hatred. The game is a message, and only by playing through the entire story could I piece together -and comprehend- the message I was being taught.

But given this, I believed the story was far too long, with some really odd and dissatisfying decisions mixed in. There's a particular sequence of the game that has you go back in time to relive events from a new perspective. There are moments here that are crucial to the overall narrative arc and your understanding of the plot, but it turns into a 10+ hour deviation. I found myself wanting to get back to "the game" as if I was playing something completely different. The game lost it's flow for me here, and I began to feel disconnected from all of the characters on-screen. There are moments (that I can't go into) Where the game wanted me to perform actions that I simply did not want to perform. This did not feel intentional to me, all I was feeling in these particular moments was confusion and disappointment. But, the final hour brings it all back together, and finally concludes what the game is setting out to say in a really intelligent and hard hitting way. I am likely to carry these feelings for years to come!

In conclusion, I saw this as a heavily flawed masterpiece. It added upon things I loved about the first game, and it took away things I loved about the first game. It was an exhausting journey through just about every emotion a person can feel. It was incredibly intelligent, well constructed, and beautifully rendered. I often found myself admiring random, totally unimportant spots in the game world, considering just how much work had gone into creating such gorgeous environments. But it's far from perfect, the concept of "If you don't like it, you don't get it" is preposterous, nobody can tell you how to feel. You are perfectly in your right to dislike this game, but only once you have played it for yourself.

Like damn, this 30-hour game hasn't even been out for a day in most countries and y'all act like you finished it already

This game has gotten way too much critisism for the decisions that the creators made. Even when this came out, I strongly disagreed with some of the critisism, because I felt people misunderstood the plot and the motives of the characters. Now that I'm playing the game for the second time and I can kind of relax, knowing how the story goes, I can focus more on how the story and the characters proceed, and the game is still amazing. It looks amazing and I love the characters because they seem like real people. Real people do things wrong, they are not perfect.

I feel like haters just concentrated on what happens to Joel. But the game shows that everything has consequences, even for the characters that everybody adores. If you cannot handle that, you should never watch movies, read books or play games, because it happens in every form of media. People that are loved, suffer or die. That is just life.

I have no other choice but to give this a 10/10. I'm having so much fun and I'm excited to see pt III.

I simply can't understand all the disappointed low reviews. I imagine it's people who don't like to think and simply want to point and shoot.

This game is a master class of storytelling, character creation, paradigm shifting... all wrapped in a beautiful shell. No other game had ever made me throw the control away because I simply couldn't decide which character to hurt. And that's the whole point: this game makes us question violence in games and the futility of violence in general as a response to conflict. If nothing else, just for that, it deserves every recognition in the world.

The way it introduces the different characters and makes you realise that your antagonist may be someone else's protagonist, is flawless.

The characters are full of life and truth. They're believable and 3D, not flat archetypes.

I could go on and on. And I genuinely feel sorry for those who feel disappointed by this game. I honestly believe they missed the whole point of it.

10/10.

It was a pleasure to experience what TLOU series have created. The flow of emotions while we play through this Part 2 is enormous, its like a roller-coaster. The gameplay is so much better than the Last Part. The graphics is life like (even by 2025 standards).

Now lets talk about the story, many people like, many don't. I understand why some people may not have understood, its not a Happy ending with bittersweet feeling like Part 1, its way more complex.

The pacing, the character switches can be a bit frustrating at times, else its a perfectly written story with everything else perfect. Ellie goes all out in this Part to get what she wants only to realise its not worth it. The maturity which she gains at the end of this is what will carve the path to the next Part (Hopefully there will be a Part 3, probably the final chapter lets see).

I would recommend this game to everyone, they all should witness what Gaming actually is. They will know gaming is way way more than Button smashing. It can have stories better than 99% of the movies.

Ellie will always be our Favourite <3.