![]() ![]() Enemies use each other's names and cry out when you kill their friends. Should you kill the blind clickers first because they're strong and deadly, or should you kill the infected runners first because they can see you? Can you retrieve an arrow from a corpse to be reused on their friend? Most importantly, where's the exit?Īnd, of course, it is brutal. I'm partial to stealth when possible, and it's especially rewarding to decide how you're going to silently kill each enemy with only a flimsy silencer, two arrows, and your default knife. Navigating any given combat scenario is a puzzle in which you have to figure out exactly how to get from point A to point B with the resources you have. Ellie with her bow and arrow, a favorite weapon for stealth. You can also easily get surrounded and die horribly, whether you're fighting people or infected. You can accidentally alert an enemy to your presence only to slip through a tight space in the wall, vault through a window, and outrun your pursuer through a building to reestablish your cover and gain the upper hand. Ellie's movements are smooth enough that they almost look scripted you can duck and dodge in a fight and deliver a return blow with a series of button presses that translate into a strangely graceful dance. Like I said in my spoiler-free review, the combat is intense and exhilarating. You collect resources and weapons, upgrade those weapons, unlock new skill paths, and generally get very used to killing people (and infected) as the scrappy, agile Ellie. They're all members of the Washington Liberation Front, or WLF for short, and much of your time is spent killing random "Wolves" from one combat scenario to the next. As Ellie, you play three days in Seattle as you hunt down any and all the people present when Abby killed Joel. It was hard for me at first to understand why she'd want to risk all that for a dangerous revenge quest when she could process her grief among friends and loved ones in relative safety.īut Ellie decides to get revenge, so you go. Ellie's life in the settlement of Jackson is a good one-she has a new girlfriend, and it's about as nice a place to live as you could expect from a post-apocalyptic community. Joel's death sends her on a relentless quest for revenge, and I had a hard time buying into it. Throughout the game, I often wanted to stop Ellie from making the choices she was making. The bloodshed is very much a part of that story, but it's far from the most effective one, and it's where the game stumbles a bit. On that front, the story of Ellie, her playable foil Abby, and their quests for revenge and redemption is a gripping and harrowing one, and I found myself deeply emotionally entangled with each woman and her strengths and flaws. Now Playing: The Last Of Us Part II Spoiler Review Videoīut while the scale and severity of death and loss in this game is incredibly high, The Last of Us Part II is more a character study than a musing on the nature of violence. Either way, that brief glimpse of happiness at the beginning is left very much in the dust.īy clicking 'enter', you agree to GameSpot's Some happen whether you want them to or not, in intimate cutscenes that are hard to watch, while others happen just because an NPC got in between you and your objective and killing them was the easiest thing to do. It's the first of many, many gruesome deaths. One moment, Ellie and her close friend Dina are becoming more than friends in a basement filled with weed plants and Naughty Dog porn puns the next, Joel is being savagely beaten to death with a golf club. The Last of Us Part II begins with serious tonal whiplash. We also have a full spoiler chat covering every story beat in the game if you're looking for even more in-depth analysis of the story. Note that this review contains spoilers, including one major character death. Now that the embargo has lifted and the game is now available, I've expanded on my thoughts here this review has the same arguments and score as the first one and is simply more detailed in my analysis. Due to a strict embargo, we were limited in what aspects of the game we could touch on in that review. Editor's note: You may have seen our spoiler-free The Last of Us Part II review, originally published on June 12, 2020.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |