The original Last of Us was nothing short of a masterpiece, an emotional roller coaster that had an unprecedented maturity in it’s story telling. 7 years ago Joel and Ellie’s plight captured the hearts and minds of gamers around the world, including mine. Never before had I been so moved by a video game, so fiercely attached to its protagonists.

So when The Last of Us 2 released on June 19th, it’s safe to say I was chomping at the bit for more.

In an unfortunate turn of events, the build up to TLOU2’s release was mired by leaks, open season defamation of Naughty Dog and in particular Creative Director Neil Druckmann and upon release was subject to “review bombing”, users of metacritic sites leaving negative reviews having not bought or played the game, in an attempt to sabotage it’s commercial success.

For me this was very hard to watch, not only because of my affection for TLOU2’s predecessor, but also because of my affiliation to the so called “gaming community” who were now behaving so deplorably. I’m not proud of it but I left more than one snarky comment on YouTube videos created by more militant personalities.

That being said, in fitting with one of the TLOU'2’s strongest themes, I must choose to be better than them, however badly they have wronged me and so, with gritted teeth, I will attempt to review TLOU2 without further commenting on the political backdrop. Please be warned, to properly review this game I will have to discuss elements of its second half, which inevitably means “SPOILERS” are coming, but I have not included any “spoilers” that would significantly impact your ability to enjoy the game and be shocked by the story beyond this.

TLOU2 takes place 5 years after Joel makes his now infamous decision and both he and Ellie have found some solace in a large settlement in Jackson, Wyoming. Life is practically peaceful, trade has been established for meats, metals and mead and there is a real sense of community permeating the air, of course this peace doesn’t last long. Ellie witnesses a horrific and violent murder and vows to have her revenge, thus casting us on a tempestuous journey. TLOU2 manages to extend the original narrative so that a sequel feels entirely justified, whilst delivering a very different story, from new perspectives.

Anyone that has been following the build up for TLOU2 will be familiar with the term “cycle of violence”, its a term Naughty Dog writer Halley Gross was very liberal with in interviews and various press events, but it’s also a term that perfectly encapsulates the overriding theme of TLOU2’s story. During your campaign you will do deplorable things, kill senselessly and endanger all those who care for you, all in the name of revenge. You will watch Ellie lose her very humanity in her relentless pursuit for blood. It’s an incredibly uncomfortable experience and often you will be forced as the player to do things you know are inherently wrong.

Around the halfway mark, the perspective flips and you are thrown in to the shoes of the very woman Ellie has been hunting, Abby. Through the latter half of the game we come to understand Abby better and her motivations for committing the barbaric acts at the beginning that set Ellie in pursuit of you. But far more importantly you come to understand Abby as a human being, flawed, fragile and fierce. Capable of forming relationships, of loving and caring and putting others before herself. Suddenly any hint of murky black or luminous white is muddied, any semblance of good or bad is shattered and you the player are left with a deep hole in your stomach and a slurry of questions forming frantically in your mind. Never before has a game caused me to be so introspective, to question my motivations and instilled in me such a deep feeling of nihilism. TLOU2’s story never reaches the same lofty emotional heights that it’s predecessor did, but instead takes a much more adult approach to depicting the horrors of simply trying to survive a post apocalyptic world devoid of law determining right and wrong.

Whether or not you agree with the direction Naughty Dog has taken the story (certainly many don’t), it’s hard to objectively argue that the way in which they deliver it hasn’t evolved. Of course it’s been 7 long years and in that time, it’s not only the writing that’s improved.

Throughout the 25-30 hour campaign you will find yourself in a variety of locales across America, with the majority of your time being spent in Seattle. Each locale is gorgeous and boasts an unprecedented level of detail. Its been 26 years since the “Outbreak Day” and in that time nature has reclaimed much of the city. Cars lay hidden beneath tall grass on broken high ways, skyscrapers are obscured by gargantuan creeper vines and of course lurking in the bowels of these concrete giants are fungal forests populated by hellish infected.

When you first ride in to Seattle atop your trusty steed, Shimmer, it’s hard not to be impressed by the spectacle, the game is drop dead gorgeous and is a crowning achievement to the capabilities of PS4’s hardware, just as the original was for the PS3. Light plays a huge part in creating TLOU2’s atmosphere, almost every blade of grass casts a shadow, god rays filter through canopies and when you first emerge from the ruins of a derelict building the blinding light is a welcome relief. Your flashlight is perhaps your most essential piece of kit in TLOU2, as more than ever you will find yourself in absolute darkness, surrounded by the infected. Navigating these claustrophobic corridors is a horrifying affair made all the more horrifying with the increase in graphical quality. In effect the graphics are so good they tangibly effect the gameplay.

The leaps forward in quality have also had a significant impact on story telling and character building. Mocapping in TLOU2 has reached a level not seen in any previous title, watching Ellie’s face almost imperceptibly shift and contort, be it in anger or grief, is captivating, it’s so subtly done and yet so effective.

Speaking of gameplay, fans of the first LOU will be instantly familiar with the mechanics, nothing has drastically changed but has rather been tweaked and improved upon. You can still pick up disposable melee weapons, from planks of wood to machetes, which will break after a certain amount of use. You can still sneak up on enemies to perform executions or to use them as a human shield, you can still craft a variety of traps and useful items, but each aspect of combat and traversal has benefited from a small face lift and some additional utility. The advances in this aspect are not groundbreaking, but combat and traversal remains extremely satisfying.

As Ellie (and later Abby) you are much more nimble than Joel was and as such can perform new feats of agility both to help you access hard to reach areas and to evade or reposition during combat. Ellie can now jump (as I said not groundbreaking), dodge and even go prone. All of these actions come in to play during frenetic encounters, especially with human enemies as they vie to flank and outmanoeuvre you. Movement feels fluid and I can’t recall ever feeling frustrated by the mechanics failing. I might however suggest that all these new additions to movement do at times make it a little too easy to outwit your enemies, who struggle to keep up with you and keep track of your last position.

The WLF (more on this later), one of the factions you will find yourself up against, employ dogs in their bid to sniff and subsequently snuff you out. These pesky pooches can track your scent, constant movement is always the best strategy to avoid detection, although shooting said canine in the face is equally effective, of course you will have to endure the subsequent screams of its owner. And this is perhaps the most novel new “element” of combat in TLOU2. Every facet of this game is designed to make you feel something, to make you pause even for a fraction before squeezing R2, to see the human being in your iron sights as just that, human.

Enemies will call out to each other as they search for you, sharing tactics and offering warnings to be cautious, if you drop one of them, their allies will call them out by name in despair, before finding resolve in new found rage. Likewise enemies you maim will cry out in agony, writhing on the ground until they bleed out. At one moment in the game I shot an oncoming enemy in the legs with a shotgun, they fell to the ground, immobilised. But before I could pull the trigger again they looked up at me and shouted “Look me in the eyes”. To my shame I shot her in the head and said “what eye’s”, but I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t thinking about it for the next 5 minutes.

Seattle is a veritable treasure chest in TLOU2 and exploration away from the yellow brick road is actively encouraged. As you carefully make your way through the cities streets and suburbs, you will see abandoned shops and homes, you can enter almost all of them (at your own peril), which is almost always worth it, as doing so will reward you with a host of much needed resources and often a poignant piece of story telling that you would otherwise miss. More often that not the unfortunate owner of said business or home can be found, reduced to a mere skeleton, clutching their last will and testament in the hopes that someone eventually reads it. These moments are some of my favourite, completely irrelevant to the main story but so effective in keeping human tragedy central to the game. As you make your way through certain areas, you will sometimes come across multiple notes from the same author, perhaps detailing their story during the initial days of the outbreak and their plight to save their friends and family, before ultimately finding the authors body and his last lamenting writings, thus simply through your exploration an entire sub narrative can play out.

Many of the writings you find provide some background as to the forming and subsequent falling out of the two major factions running Seattle, the WLF (Washington Liberation Front) colloquially known as Wolves and the Seraphites, mockingly called Scars by those opposed to them, (they intentionally scar their faces to represent their imperfections). The former are a military-esque, highly organised outfit with access to an impressive arsenal of vehicles and weaponry, while the latter are a quasi-religious cult who fervently oppose (with minor exceptions) the use of “Old World” technology, favouring bows and scythes and afflicted by an unhealthy penchant for hanging and gutting their enemies.

This civil war of sorts they find themselves locked in is seemingly endless, an eternal tit for tat, the deadliest version of “he started it”. The majority of your interaction with these cultists comes through your play time with Abby and in fitting with every other aspect of the game, it’s nigh impossible to pick a side, both factions are populated with good and bad people who have their own individual beliefs and moral compasses and both are as capable of peace as they are persecution.

Of course it’s not just humans you need to fear in TLOU2, in fact fighting humans more often that not comes as a very welcome respite from your frequent encounters with the infected. 26 years have passed since the original “Outbreak Day” and in that time your enemy has evolved in more grotesque and ultimately dangerous ways. In the original we very briefly crossed proverbial swords with the deadly Stalkers, 50% runner, 50% clicker, 100% fucking terrifying. In TLOU2 they are far more prevalent and are the primary actors in some of the most haunting encounters the game has to offer. You catche glimpses of them as they peek around corners, literally stalking you like prey, you take aim at them and they scuttle away, you see their profiles shift behind the thick smog of pores saturating the air, playing in the funnel of light cast by your torch. Stalkers aren’t the only new threat, sitting just below the infamous Bloater in the infected food chain are the Shamblers, noxious and cumbersome, bristling with throbbing pustules fit to burst, unleashing acidic clouds when they do.

TLOU2 see’s fit to send you to Seattle’s Ground Zero, an area untouched and forgotten (perhaps intentionally) by humanity since the Outbreak Day, what you find their will haunt you.

TLOU2 doubles down on the horror. You will regularly find yourself forced to descend in to increasingly dark and increasingly populated levels of abandoned buildings and the tension mounts to palpable levels. The background music is so minimal that every sound cuts through you like a crash symbol being smashed together by pneumatic pistons. So much thought has gone in to these sounds, just as it has for every other micro aspect of the game. Pipes groan, floorboards creak and the muffled sobs of recently infected are just perceptible behind doors that you know you have to go through. In regards to horror these are the finest moments TLOU2 has to offer, before anything has actually happened, it has you jumping at your own shadow.

However, it’s in this same aspect of the game that my biggest criticism lies (only big however, relative to the lack of any other criticism) and that is the over reliance in TLOU2 on jump scares, they are innumerate. To begin with they are quite effective but before you get halfway through the game you can preempt them, whenever you find yourself needing to squeeze through the crack of a partially blocked doorway or find your view of the other side partially obscured, you assume something is going to jump at you and 50% of the time you will probably be right. It’s a cheap gimmick that provides a good laugh of relief to begin with but becomes somewhat frustrating over time. You wouldn’t expect a comedian to tickle your feet for the ticket price.

The devil is in the detail, as they say, but it’s in the detail that Naughty Dog thrives, whether in developing characters or designing environments, every facet of this game has been poured over. When you have multiple types of shells for your shotgun, you can see them and the amount you have of each on your ammo belt. When you use a work bench to customise your weapon, you strip the gun apart, before using tools to add a variety of mods to it, which all have their own unique aesthetic. Every house you enter has photo frames of their owners and their families or their pets, each store has it’s own unique decor, be it a dog grooming service or a little hipster bakery. At no point does any area you can explore feel like it’s there just for the sake of it, just to populate the screen with decoration as you make your way from point A to point B, everything feels like it belongs.

The Last of Us Part 2 has set a new benchmark for the video game industry, they have boldly said a games sole merit should not lie in the fun you have playing it, but also in the questions it makes you answer, the feelings it evokes in you. This is a game that’s story is uncompromising in its duty to deliver you nothing but grey, to make you decide what, if any of what happens, was right or wrong, you may ultimately walk away from this with a deep feeling of nihilism. You will scream, you will laugh, you may well cry. You will certainly be humbled as you are forced to observe your previous actions from another perspective. When The Last of US Part 2 was first announced, a fair question was asked: “Is a sequel needed?”

Perhaps Naughty Dog would prefer for you to answer that question, I certainly know what mine is.

9.9/10 - Masterpiece