Thoughts on: The Last of Us Part II (Remastered)

After dragging myself through The Last of Us Part I two years ago, I have once again forced myself to go through its sequel now that it has been released on PC. I didn’t like the original game much, but it was an important title to learn from, mostly storytelling wise, and I was somewhat curious about how the sequel could improve upon the foundation. In the end, while I didn’t like The Last of Us Part II all that much either, I did find it to be an overall better game.

Just as it was the case with the first game, now known as “Part I” after the re-release, this is a third person stealth action adventure game with a certain survival-ish element and a horror theme to it. The world (or at least the North American continent) have fallen to an infection that turns people into mindless killers and while some societies have formed in different pockets of the land, the cities at large are dead remnants of society that collapsed. As expected, in gameplay terms this leads to stealthing and action-ing around levels where enemies can be both infected and the last remnants of humanity who want you dead for various reasons.

Both stealth and shooting mechanics of Part II feel considerably better and more refined in comparison to the first game. Which is important as you still spend most of your time in the game on enemy encounters in levels that mix more linear sections with slightly more open parts, which have lots of different paths to go through. The way you can deal with the threats feels better, the guns and melee combat feel improved, the skill upgrades feel better thought out and crafting returns, still feeling far better here than in most other games that decided to copy the idea and turned it into crap.

The storytelling, just on its own, is also still extremely solid with great transitions between gameplay and cutscenes, lots of optional interactions that bring more character to the world and, well, characters. And it still feels very “interactive movie”, while also being a “real game” in ways no other game I’ve played before. Which is still not something I ever asked for, but hey – it’s impressive. The script is solid, the performances are top notch, both in terms of voice and in terms of how they are acted visually. And, of course, the game looks great visually.

However… For one, it’s still way to damn long. I get how it’s been very popular over the past decade to make everything very slow, brooding and serious, because that’s what “adult storytelling” is. But just as with its predecessor, cutting about third of this game’s length would’ve improved it by a lot. Gameplay-wise it’s simply not very interesting stealth or action-wise, because of how grounded and “realistic” it attempts to be. And due to that, after about seven hours you’ve seen almost everything in terms of pure gameplay that the game is going to keep throwing at you for over a dozen of hours more so it gets very tedious very fast. While the few attempts at boss fights this game has are absolutely atrocious.

But of course if the story was gripping the whole way through it would be easy to excuse the lacking gameplay. And it simply doesn’t. To the point where I’m not even sure why Ellie’s section of the game exists as it does now, given that Abby’s story is the only one that seems to have any sort of pacing to it. I think I understand what the developers were trying to do, but the end result is that I spent over twelve hours kind of aimlessly going from location to location on a supposed “hunt”, bored out of my wits, until the game switched characters and suddenly things started moving somewhere and have interesting goals seem to go somewhere. The Last of Us Part I, despite being horribly long too, at least had a benefit of being a road trip with a clear end goal and lots of obstacles on the way. But here – if you’d write down the plot of the game, it would feel more driven than it actually is in practice throughout most of Ellie’s section.

And as for the technical issues – while the game is in a far better state than the PC port of The Last of Us Part I, it’s still quite messy. It can crash, it can have disruptive visual glitches, controls or interaction indicators may break and the performance is uneven. Due to certain changes of how the game works, it also is now in the odd in-between of being better with gamepad or keyboard and mouse, unlike the first game that was straight up better with kb+mouse. Also, the port being based on the Remastered PS5 version, this version includes a few playable level sections cut from the finished game, developer commentary and other stuff that is quite nice.

Would I recommend The Last of Us Part II? Just like with the first game – yeah, I guess. It is an impressive game with cool storytelling on a level surpassing most other games and if you’re interested in its gameplay, then why not. Did I like it? More than the first game, but also still not that much. The game could’ve easily been made shorter, punchier without losing any of its drama and it’s really frustrating to me that instead the developers chose to indulge themselves just because they could.