From a narrative perspective, there’s no real need for The Last of Us Part 2 to exist. The gripping, tightly paced, very human tale told by the first game is an almost perfect example of self-contained video game storytelling. That game’s ending—where the “hero” condemns the world to continuing disaster out of love for a companion he has slowly grown to love like a daughter, all while betraying her wishes and shielding her from the truth—is a deeply affecting and thought-provoking moment that has resonated with gamers for seven years now. The idea of adding anything to that quietly confident, freestanding narrative package feels superfluous at best and gratuitous at worst.
But the difference between a happy ending and a sad one often depends on when you decide to stop telling the story. And it would admittedly be something of a waste to condemn The Last of Us’ top-notch world building to a single short game. Thus, we now have The Last of Us Part 2, a game that can't seem to decide if it wants to continue the core story of the first game or pull the camera back to provide a wider view of a fallen world still ravaged by the threat of the zombie-like Infected.Nothing good can last
Things pick up four years after the events of the first game in the amazingly calm settlement of Jackson, Wyoming. After the almost overwhelming death and decay of the first game, it’s a shock to be thrown into a thriving community full of electricity, commerce, gossip, food and drink, and even happily playing children. Small groups still regularly patrol the perimeter to keep the Infected at bay, but humanity, it seems, has gained a bucolic foothold.
The sense of a slowly returning normalcy is made all the more bittersweet because we know Ellie is fated not to enjoy it for long. The Ellie we see here is no longer the sweet, energetic, eager pre-adolescent who forged an endearing bond with gruff Joel through the first game, either. Time and knowledge have made her harder, more reserved, and more unforgiving than ever. By the time external circumstances and a drive for vengeance force her out of the comfort of Jackson and into a dangerous, murderous trek to Seattle, it’s not exactly a surprise.
We do get occasional glimpses of the old Ellie, especially when she’s taking her first tentative steps into a truly adult relationship. Love interest Dina is a gently teasing foil for Ellie’s developing affections here, and their extended casual banter during the trip to Seattle brings to mind some of the best bonding moments between Ellie and Joel in the last game.
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Find someone who looks at you like Dina looks at Ellie.
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The way that nature has slowly retaken the urban environment in this game is hauntingly beautiful.
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Beautiful vistas like this are so common as to become routine in this game.
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I mean, you turn another corner and boom, hauntingly beautiful landscape. Again!
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Good use of lighting effects for gameplay right here.
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How's Ellie gonna get out of this one. Or... wait... is Ellie going to get out of this one?
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Looks bad.
These conversations take place amid the beautiful desolation of a city that has quickly been retaken by the nature surrounding it—a “Nature is healing” meme made vividly real. The environmental design in Part 2 is top notch, with every single location feeling like an actual, inhabited place that was fully built and then slowly left to rot. I could aimlessly wander the beautiful desolation for hours, picking out ominous touches of environmental storytelling even if I wasn’t scrounging for materials to ensure my in-game survival.
Out of focus
For roughly the first half of its run time, Part 2 provides an engaging and emotional ride that also makes some good progress in unpacking the events of the first game (thanks in part to some wonderful playable flashbacks). Unfortunately, about halfway through, the game quickly starts to lose its focus.
Developing bonds between characters struggle for space to breathe as the game makes frequent changes to the characters’ circumstances and perspective. Without giving too much away (and with plenty of intentional vagueness to avoid spoilers), there’s a sudden mid-game twist that takes this idea to its extreme, creating a parallel narrative that quickly saps any story momentum that had been building to that point.
In the place of that momentum, the narrative takes a left turn into a largely unrelated side story about former enemies turning into unlikely allies. In the process, the game leans heavily on dramatic irony, giving a winking nod to an audience that often knows the result and coming consequences of a scene before the characters involved. This occasionally lands with the genuine impact of new perspective and understanding. More often, though, it hits with the wet thud of unsubtle emotional manipulation.
By the time the game attempts to reconnect its disparate plot threads, any semblance of structure or connective, overarching themes has been ground into dust by a meandering lack of direction. After the extremely focused and relentlessly paced story of the first Last of Us title, it’s a shame to see a sequel that can’t seem to figure out what it wants to be.
A muddied message
Through its overly ambitious story structure, The Last of Us Part 2 is plainly trying to impart some sort of universal message about the painful cycle of trauma and revenge in a violent and uncaring world. No one in the game is truly good or bad, the game seems to be screaming at the player, but people are all simply driven by circumstance to take what seems like the best action for them and theirs at the time.
That message never fully lands. Partially, that's because the game still relies on groups of shadowy antagonists that are effectively “othered” into nothing more than an unsympathetic, malevolent threat. But it’s also in large part because major characters seem to change their motivations on a dime—full of murderous rage one second, defaulting to mercy out of what appears to be exhausted resignation the next.
The narrative by and large doesn’t do the necessary work to sell these abrupt changes of heart, so these moments often seem constructed for plot convenience rather than to stay true to the nature of the characters as they’ve been presented. The player is left having to do too much work to fill in the blanks to make pivotal moments make some kind of logical sense, even from the characters’ own point of view. This holds true right up until the ending, where some baffling decisions and a truly unnecessary final fight scene seem to exist just for the sake of padding the game out a little extra bit.
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Oh, hey everyone.
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I'll admit I was surprised when Ellie broke into a full version of Lonely Island's "I'm on a boat!" in this scene. Am I kidding? Play the game and find out!
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Horsemanship isn't as integral to this game as it is in Red Dead Redemption or anything, but it provides a nice interlude from running.
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Someone please make a theme park that captures the beautiful decay of TLOU2's Seattle.
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OK Ellie, you're not Batman, get moving.
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For a basement with this much water damage, you're gonna want the industrial dehumidifer. That costs extra.
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Motion blur!
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Sure, bring a knife to a gun fight. See how that works out.
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That lighting ring looks even better with an HDR color gamut.
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Guitar solo!
That’s a shame, because in between the plot problems, the game has flashes of some of the best interpersonal relationship building in gaming. Naughty Dog is still the master of the quiet, slowly developing cut scene, letting subtle facial movements or non-verbal tics do the work that lines and lines of dialogue could never hope to.
Part 2 offers plenty of moments of genuine relatable humanity to be found in the long, lingering conversations between two characters simply inhabiting space together, searching for a way to the next area or a solution to a simple environmental puzzle. There are also a few truly thrilling action set pieces, which borrow heavily from the tradition of the Uncharted series to make for some quick, fast-paced thrill rides.
In the end, though, these moments never build into a satisfying and cohesive whole, much less anything like the impactful conclusion of the first game.
Sneak and shoot
This is still a Last of Us game, of course, which means there is plenty of sneaking and shooting to fill in the space between the storytelling. I waited this long to even mention it in this review because if you played the first game, you pretty much know what to expect here.
Be prepared to once again cower behind low cover and crawl through tall grass, using a well-implemented “listening” ability (and some intense, effective sound design) to “see” shadowy outlines of enemies through barriers. Be prepared to wait for enemies to wander carelessly towards your hiding place so you can take them out with a well-timed chokehold from behind.
If you’re like me, be prepared to get caught when you can’t figure out exactly where you’re expected to go while sneaking. Then be prepared for the game to descend into some frenetic firefights that use up the limited resources you’ve been able to find flashing around the game’s environs. Be prepared to often “outsmart” the enemy by running away to a new hiding spot really quickly (at least on the game’s “medium” difficulty setting).
Part 2 does an admirable job with the pacing of these encounters, balancing the tension of its stealth sections with the relative calm of free exploration. There are just enough jump scare transitions from one state to the other to keep you on your toes, but not so many that you never feel like you can relax.
The most notable addition to the combat this time around is the occasional attack dog that can accompany a group of human enemies as they sweep the area looking for you. Dogs can pick up on your scent even if you’re completely hidden, requiring a quick relocation or a noisy distraction to shake them. It can be incredibly tough to get past this new threat without resorting to lethal force, but players that feel worse about virtual animal killing than virtual human killing will have to learn how to get around them (and even the best players won’t be able to avoid all of the canine killing, unfortunately).
While the focus is more firmly on human antagonists in Part 2, you’ll face your fair share of zombie-like Infected hordes as well. This time around, though, they come off as more of an occasional, aimless annoyance rather than an ever-present threat. A new Shambler-type of Infected, which sprays toxic gas when it gets close and with its dying breath, does little to meaningfully change what quickly become rote Infected encounters.
The most interesting combat situations combine both human and Infected threats, or two different human factions fighting against each other. Learning to play these competing threats against each other, and use their divided attention to your advantage, provides some of Part 2’s most engaging gameplay moments. That’s in sharp contrast to the largely superfluous “boss battle” style of fights, which serve as a chance to dump copious ammo into a bullet sponge and/or jam that dodge button to respond to highly telegraphed attacks.
As the game approaches its conclusion, the difficulty starts to spike via the time-honored video game tradition of “throwing a ton of enemies into a single encounter.” These extended crawls through heavily occupied territory can start to feel like a slog after a few failed attempts. Luckily, the game has plenty of options for adjusting the difficulty on the fly if you just want to power through to see the rest of the story (see above sidebar).
Was this trip really necessary?
Trying to extend the story of The Last of Us in a meaningful way was always going to be an uphill battle. What’s so frustrating about Part 2 is that the game seems to have all the pieces necessary to do just that. But those pieces end up getting lost as the game also tries to tell an entirely new story, one that tries to expand the Last of Us world into a generalized setting for an anthology of loosely connected stories. The end result never comes together in a satisfying way.
That doesn’t take away from the many enjoyable, memorable, and even emotional moments as Part 2’s barrels from promising start to messy conclusion. But it also serves as a marked comedown from the quiet, directed, self-contained confidence of the first game.
I don’t regret the time I spent back in the world of The Last of Us. But a big part of me was left wondering if its creators just should have left well enough alone.
The Good
- Enthralling world building and environmental design
- Top-notch voice acting and motion capture performances
- Well-paced combat encounters that expertly balance tension levels
- Deep, meaningful accessibility options
The Bad
- Story loses focus quickly and fails to get it back
- Character motivations are often hard to parse or seemingly nonsensical
- Intentional themes on the cycle of revenge get muddied beyond recognition
- Dull boss fights and “enemy flood” late-game challenges
The Ugly
- Shooting an attack dog right in the face just to survive
Verdict: Try it if you long to return to the decaying beauty of The Last of Us. Just don’t expect a repeat of the original’s impact.
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June 12, 2020 at 02:01PM
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The Last of Us Part 2 review: A less confident, less focused sequel - Ars Technica
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