I never got to playing The Last of Us on PS3, but I just played it a couple weeks back on PS4. The game is great but not Game of the Year or Best Game EVER!!! awesome.
Let me get the good stuff out of the way first. TLOU's story is actually quite good and holds up unlike most games that are renowned for their good stories. There's very very few games where I feel the writing is actually good because writing in games is so bad that any game that doesn't have shit writing gets so overrated just due to it not being shit. There was only one cliche part in the whole story:
The characters are really well done and the game almost feels like a mini-character study on both Joel and Ellie. Ellie's gameplay sections are really great and do for Ellie what the new Tomb Raider game couldn't do for Lara. The overall gameplay itself has a great visceral feel to it.
Now onto the not-so-good stuff:
- The friendly AI is just horrible. I'm not even mainly talking about the whole thing about friendlies just running around in front of enemies, which is an issue. I don't get why the friendlies can't stay a piece of cover behind you instead of trying to move past you thus looking like idiots, it's something so simple to do. I'm mainly talking about how bad they are in combat. One of the times playing as Ellie, I noticed the guy I was with literally turned around and started walking up some steps as an infected came running to him. There's a time when you're in a cabin as infected come in from both sides and you have to cover both sides because you can't cover one side while the AI covers the other side because the AI is horribly incompetent. There was even one point when I had to reload the game because a character was walking into chest high piece of cover and he needed to move to trigger the cutscene. Enemy AI does some weird things as well.
- There are a few sections of the game where player agency is taken away from you. There's a point where there's a guy with a rifle in the 2nd level of a house shooting at you and you have to move down the block to take him out, it's a good setup and all. HOWEVER, the sequence is so SCRIPTED. Firstly, you can't take out the guy with the rifle until you actually get in the house he's in. Joel's plan is for the others to distract the rifleman (again, good setup) as Joel gets to the house but the rifleman always knows where Joel is. There's this wall (at exactly 4:20 in the linked video) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fSG-N-K6hI4] that once you jump over, enemies come out no matter what you've done beforehand. The game forces combat and action on you for no reason, and you actually can't carry out Joel's plan just because the game wants you to play through the section a certain way. The other section is similar as you have move towards a guy with a spotlight, you can use stealth all the way and reach under the spotlight. The little triangle prompt even comes up on the door you have to go through, but the door won't open until you take out the spotlight guy thus causing several enemies to notice and drop down where you then have to take them out for no reason, action and combat is forced upon the player.
- Naughty Dog just needs to fucking stop using yellow as a tip-off for where you have to go. I've noticed this since Uncharted, all you have to do is go towards the thing with yellow tape or yellow paint and that's where you need to go. It became quite immersion breaking for me in TLOU, even the Capitol Building you head to has yellow on it. The yellow bridge is the one thing that gets the pass as it is actually yellow. Just in the 1st minute of this video [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VbPeTxCGGIE] you'll see where you have to put the plank is yellow (a yellow strip and a freaking yellow sign on the building you're going to) and you see the Capitol building in the distance has yellow. Naughty Dog's games are freaking linear as shit, I don't need such blatant help in where to go next.
- Level design is still pretty obvious for when there's going to be a shooting section. When you get to Tommy's place in the game, there's chest high cover EVERYWHERE and you just know that there's going to be a combat section even though it may be the safest place in the whole game.
- Naughty Dog still doesn't understand how to make a 3rd-person shooter. The contextual cover system doesn't work (contextual anything control-wise doesn't work). It takes several tries bumping into the wall to take cover the way you want to with Joel 1) taking cover to begin with and 2) taking cover while over the correct shoulder. For example, if take cover along the left corner of a building, I want to be looking over my left shoulder, not right shoulder. Naughty Dog still doesn't know how to properly implement a shoulder swap in their games, you can shoulder swap AFTER aiming but you can't aim off your left shoulder INITIALLY. This is the case all the way since Uncharted. The free look camera is sluggish as hell and you can't change its sensitivity, it's so sluggish there's a control to turn around. You aim with the free look camera in a TPS; when you press L1/L2 to aim, your reticule should be on the enemy already. I'll give TLOU a slight pass with this because it's a survival game so it just might've been done on purpose, but I'm not fan games limiting natural human abilities to make the game scarier or more tense, humans are already feeble enough. All the Uncharted's are the same, and those games have no excuses. Lastly, the stealth grab is contextual for some reason and Joel quite often will not grab an enemy when the Triangle prompt is up and you can grab enemies quite often as they walk by you in cover but the Triangle prompt doesn't come up. Metal Gear Solid has done grabbing perfectly fine, without a 2-handed gun equipped, you press the shoot button to grab no matter if there's an enemy there or not, I don't get why other games can't learn something so simple to do.
- Listen mode is just game breaking as seeing through walls (especially in an unlimited capacity) in a game with stealth just breaks the game. Thank god you can play with it off. I just don't understand why it's even a mechanic because you can just fucking listen to the surround sound and know where enemies are, it's just so pointless. You can turn it off, but not in multiplayer.
- Lastly, a minor nitpick. The skills in the game are shitty. The only decent ones are the Shiv and weapon sway skills.
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I just don't get professional game reviews. There's so many objective flaws to TLOU that you have to take off points, but only 10 of the 98 reviews on Metacritic gave TLOU below a 9/10. I feel the game connected with me just as well as it could for anyone, I had a blast playing it for the most part and loved the characters and story. However, I'd only score the game somewhere between 7.5-8.5/10 just due to the game's flaws. Criticism is supposed to be about criticizing, not about saying how awesome something is, which is what we get with game criticism.
Let me get the good stuff out of the way first. TLOU's story is actually quite good and holds up unlike most games that are renowned for their good stories. There's very very few games where I feel the writing is actually good because writing in games is so bad that any game that doesn't have shit writing gets so overrated just due to it not being shit. There was only one cliche part in the whole story:
After you take out the gun with the gun in the house, then all the infected come out attacking Ellie, Henry, and Sam as they get to Joel's position. The second Henry asks if everyone is OK, I just knew Sam had been bit.
Now onto the not-so-good stuff:
- The friendly AI is just horrible. I'm not even mainly talking about the whole thing about friendlies just running around in front of enemies, which is an issue. I don't get why the friendlies can't stay a piece of cover behind you instead of trying to move past you thus looking like idiots, it's something so simple to do. I'm mainly talking about how bad they are in combat. One of the times playing as Ellie, I noticed the guy I was with literally turned around and started walking up some steps as an infected came running to him. There's a time when you're in a cabin as infected come in from both sides and you have to cover both sides because you can't cover one side while the AI covers the other side because the AI is horribly incompetent. There was even one point when I had to reload the game because a character was walking into chest high piece of cover and he needed to move to trigger the cutscene. Enemy AI does some weird things as well.
- There are a few sections of the game where player agency is taken away from you. There's a point where there's a guy with a rifle in the 2nd level of a house shooting at you and you have to move down the block to take him out, it's a good setup and all. HOWEVER, the sequence is so SCRIPTED. Firstly, you can't take out the guy with the rifle until you actually get in the house he's in. Joel's plan is for the others to distract the rifleman (again, good setup) as Joel gets to the house but the rifleman always knows where Joel is. There's this wall (at exactly 4:20 in the linked video) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fSG-N-K6hI4] that once you jump over, enemies come out no matter what you've done beforehand. The game forces combat and action on you for no reason, and you actually can't carry out Joel's plan just because the game wants you to play through the section a certain way. The other section is similar as you have move towards a guy with a spotlight, you can use stealth all the way and reach under the spotlight. The little triangle prompt even comes up on the door you have to go through, but the door won't open until you take out the spotlight guy thus causing several enemies to notice and drop down where you then have to take them out for no reason, action and combat is forced upon the player.
- Naughty Dog just needs to fucking stop using yellow as a tip-off for where you have to go. I've noticed this since Uncharted, all you have to do is go towards the thing with yellow tape or yellow paint and that's where you need to go. It became quite immersion breaking for me in TLOU, even the Capitol Building you head to has yellow on it. The yellow bridge is the one thing that gets the pass as it is actually yellow. Just in the 1st minute of this video [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VbPeTxCGGIE] you'll see where you have to put the plank is yellow (a yellow strip and a freaking yellow sign on the building you're going to) and you see the Capitol building in the distance has yellow. Naughty Dog's games are freaking linear as shit, I don't need such blatant help in where to go next.
- Level design is still pretty obvious for when there's going to be a shooting section. When you get to Tommy's place in the game, there's chest high cover EVERYWHERE and you just know that there's going to be a combat section even though it may be the safest place in the whole game.
- Naughty Dog still doesn't understand how to make a 3rd-person shooter. The contextual cover system doesn't work (contextual anything control-wise doesn't work). It takes several tries bumping into the wall to take cover the way you want to with Joel 1) taking cover to begin with and 2) taking cover while over the correct shoulder. For example, if take cover along the left corner of a building, I want to be looking over my left shoulder, not right shoulder. Naughty Dog still doesn't know how to properly implement a shoulder swap in their games, you can shoulder swap AFTER aiming but you can't aim off your left shoulder INITIALLY. This is the case all the way since Uncharted. The free look camera is sluggish as hell and you can't change its sensitivity, it's so sluggish there's a control to turn around. You aim with the free look camera in a TPS; when you press L1/L2 to aim, your reticule should be on the enemy already. I'll give TLOU a slight pass with this because it's a survival game so it just might've been done on purpose, but I'm not fan games limiting natural human abilities to make the game scarier or more tense, humans are already feeble enough. All the Uncharted's are the same, and those games have no excuses. Lastly, the stealth grab is contextual for some reason and Joel quite often will not grab an enemy when the Triangle prompt is up and you can grab enemies quite often as they walk by you in cover but the Triangle prompt doesn't come up. Metal Gear Solid has done grabbing perfectly fine, without a 2-handed gun equipped, you press the shoot button to grab no matter if there's an enemy there or not, I don't get why other games can't learn something so simple to do.
- Listen mode is just game breaking as seeing through walls (especially in an unlimited capacity) in a game with stealth just breaks the game. Thank god you can play with it off. I just don't understand why it's even a mechanic because you can just fucking listen to the surround sound and know where enemies are, it's just so pointless. You can turn it off, but not in multiplayer.
- Lastly, a minor nitpick. The skills in the game are shitty. The only decent ones are the Shiv and weapon sway skills.
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I just don't get professional game reviews. There's so many objective flaws to TLOU that you have to take off points, but only 10 of the 98 reviews on Metacritic gave TLOU below a 9/10. I feel the game connected with me just as well as it could for anyone, I had a blast playing it for the most part and loved the characters and story. However, I'd only score the game somewhere between 7.5-8.5/10 just due to the game's flaws. Criticism is supposed to be about criticizing, not about saying how awesome something is, which is what we get with game criticism.
