The Last of Us is a game about stealth-killing zombies is the most conspicuous ways possible. Only in The Last of Us does the moaning and flailing of head-locked enemies go undetected by enemies with their backs turned five feet away. For the first half of the game I was certain all that noise meant I was somehow screwing up. Ditto for smashed bricks/bottles and arrow shots. But oh no, alarms are triggered the moment an enemy sees you, even if you kill them before they can make a sound.
Stealth aside, the battle system is your typical third-person shooter. It’s a solid battle system, but with stealth being such a huge part of the game, weapon use is significantly limited and therefore not as fun.
Storytelling is the most impressive point of The Last of Us. The story itself is very good, nothing spectacular, but it’s told surprisingly well through cut scenes, items, and gameplay. The one exception to this was all the item scavenging during conversations. The Last of Us was relatively low on puzzle solving bitch work. Scavenging is bitch work for sure, but it made perfect sense in the context of the game. Quite a few times, however, you’ll be walking and talking. Then you’ll pass an empty room and have no choice but to search for items while your conversation partner keeps walking down the hall, causing the conversation to trail off. It kills the scene.
The various settings were all fun to play in. It was particularly nice to see that Pittsburgh wasn’t impacted by the zombie apocalypse.
The zombies themselves were pretty cool. They’re fast and hungry, just like raptors, but much less capable of opening doors. The downside is that there was only one zombie boss, and that boss eventually became a regular enemy.
I played on Normal mode and died more than enough to times to justify not playing on a harder level. At the same time, I wasn’t forced to explore certain battle tactics that probably would’ve made the battle system seem richer.
I played the game with Japanese voices and English subtitles/text. The voice acting was fine in Japanese, though I’m told it’s superb in English.
The Last of Us is considered by many to be the best game for the PS3. I say it’s nowhere close. Of the 9 PS3 games I’ve played, The Last of Us ranks right in the middle. (I’m generally not into ranking, but I’ve played few enough PS3 games that it didn’t hurt.)
- Valkyria Chronicles (+++)
- Dark Souls (++)
- Uncharted 2 (++)
- Tomb Raider (++)
- The Last of Us (++)
- Uncharted 3 (++)
- Catherine (+)
- Final Fantasy XIII (+)
- Uncharted 1 (+)
Final Grade: ++
My review would normally end here, but this being the first game I’ve played since Gamergate popped up, I figured I’d try analyzing it through the lens of social justice.
My understanding of Gamergate is as follows. Women were historically underrepresented in video games, which caused them to get sexually assaulted and paid less than men. Women protested their depiction in video games by having sex with video game journalists, and sympathetic gamers brought mainstream attention to the plight of female gamers by anonymously threatening to rape and murder them. This brings us to where we are now: any game that’s allowed to be considered good must be politically correct.
The Last of Us is considered the best game for the PS3 because it’s the pinnacle of political correctness. Remember how Ashley was totally helpless Resident Evil 4? (Ignore for the moment that it made the game more exciting.) Unlike Ashley, the women in The Last of Us are all hard-nosed, assertive, and can do everything men can do! Plus, while the zombie enemies are mixed gender, the human enemies are all male, thus not offending anyone with violence against women.
The black characters are family men, because it’s racist for black people to come from broken families. Yeah, there are black enemies, but it’s not racist because they work together in perfect harmony with white enemies.
Is it sexist and racist to have a white, male lead? Not if he’s going to…make morally questionable decisions, especially by way of emotion and violence, which would pretty look bad for women and black people, respectively.
In conclusion, you can safely play The Last of Us without worrying that you’re empowering white men, thus making it the best game ever.
To make the GamerGate issue clearer:
– Guys writes a blog post about his ex-girlfriend, a little known indie dev, saying people should stay away from her because she cheated on him with 5 guys. Tries to mitigate any damage control.
– People discover that one of the 5 guys was a journalist who gave positive coverage (not a review) 2 times to the indie dev’s game without disclosing their relationship. Note that the guy was way later revelaed to be in the credits of the game and that he gave 800$ to the indie dev before her game released. Kotaku refuses to fire that journalist.
– A guy on Youtube talks about it, gets DMCA’d by the indie dev.
– TotalBiscuit comments on it. Reddit thread on that comment gets over 25,000 messages deleted. This activates the Streisand effect. People can’t trust sites, video game developers and how close they are to the journalists reporting on them
– People start digging stuff.
– Games Journalists write a series of circlejerking articles all around 24 hours calling for the Death of the gamer identity. This pisses people off and seeing how different sites have the same stupid PC agenda. This leads to Adam Baldwin making the first tweet with the hashtag.
– GamerGate pressures sites into disclosing close ties to developers, updating their ethics politics and try to bring down all the sites together. Pretty much all big shots who were anti-GG were demoted, fired or apologized. Gawker is bleeding money and anything else is secondary to the issue.
Ashley was great in Resident Evil 4, you could use her as bait, hide her in a dumpster. Ada Wong was also a great female character and violence could happen to her, I image she’s hated by feminists for flimsy reasons. Also haven’t played the game but isn’t there hamfisted stuff about gay characters in TLOU? That really seems like the least important thing to consider in a post apocalyptic world.
Thanks for the summary. While I’m totally with Gamergate on the issues of censorship and SJW bitching, I can’t say I fully get the issue as far as journalism and the industry are concerned (perhaps because anime journalists have no power over the industry whatsoever). Shouldn’t it simply be a matter of:
– if the games suck, don’t buy them
– if the articles suck, don’t read them
Things can get screwed up in the short run, but the people who actually buy and play games are going to get what they want (i.e., pay money for) in the end.
Just looked up the allegedly gay character in TLOU. I guess he’s gay if you read into it? It’s kinda like Dumbledore being gay. Or pretty much anyone being gay.
Shit mate this was a funny review. Not even a gamer but i love the gamergate attitude.
I agree, this review was hilarious.
At the risk of repeating other people, and despite my distaste for anger=humor Youtubers, it’s a pretty worthwhile expenditure of time to watch through Videogamedunkey’s “dunkview” of The Last of Us. I don’t necessarily agree with it, much like everything else the ADHD-addled fucker says, but it does raise some valid points.
That one actually got a lot of flak at the time because at the moment, everybody but everybody who played (read: watched on youtube) it was praising it as the most validating thing since sliced Jesus because of the underaged tiny lesbians that it had, which…SOMEhow… magically made their LIVED EXPERIENCES as PROUD GIANT LAMPREY-HUMAN HYBRIDS suddenly all worthwhile in the grand scheme of things, because they’d really been going through a rough patch of not having enough throats to bleed dry…
And then everybody else who wasn’t blasting the review said it was all a joke because Dunkey being serious about what he says is flatly unfamiliar to any of his fans.
It really needs to be said that his game reviews are the only moment in his entire Youtube channel that Dunkey is ever dead serious.
It was actually a bit odd being one of the few naysayers back then, even if I was totally disconnected from the entire latte-sipping internet douchebag from San Fran crowd who said The Last of Us was any more or less than Uncharted With Zombies And Feels at the time. I remember even running the game’s totally incongruous e-reception by my sister for a shred of verisimilitude only to get a baffled shrug, and that woman chugs soy lattes like a CHAMP.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I have theoretically infinite numbers of sinuous, voluptuous women to objectify with my stylus and paint program….You see, it’s objectification because THE GUN IS GOOD, THE PENIS IS EVIL.
You almost made it sound like the video would be more than 2 minutes and 49 seconds long.
I mean, yeah, it’s a perfectly valid review, though I don’t see how he can complain about the ladder/dumpster/floating crates filler in TLOU while praising Uncharted, which had, and this is a conservative estimate, 1000x the environmental puzzle filler.
I was going to compare TLOU to Uncharted myself, but I didn’t want to come off as a n00b who played no other games he could reasonably reference.