Four years have passed since Joel and Ellie's epic trip across North America. They have found a safe haven and new home in Jackson, Wyoming, which has been fortified against the threat of the infected, but have grown estranged. A chance encounter outside the town with a woman named Abby, a member of a group based in Seattle called the Wolves, sees Ellie making her way to that city in search of revenge. But both young women are being driven by circumstances to make harsh choices to survive.
The Last of Us: Part I is regarded as one of the best video games ever made, its combination of a strong narrative, some of the best voice acting in gaming history and survival-horror-combat mechanics being quite compelling. Inevitably, its massive commercial success and critical acclaim demanded a sequel, which Naughty Dog Studios finally delivered in 2020, with a remastered version for PlayStation 5 and PC now available. The question is if they could satisfy the orbit-high expectations for that sequel.
The answer is, sort of? The Last of Us: Part II is larger and longer than its forebear, with way more action setpieces, massive explosions and furious last-ditch battles than you can shake a stick of dynamite at. It also ramps up the emotional and storytelling stakes with shocking deaths, brutal injuries and hardcore moral questions which don't have pat answers. The Last of Us: Part II is a lot to take on board, and some of its ideas work incredibly well whilst others fall flat on their face. At its worst, Part II is bloated and messy, not always confident of what it's trying to do or trying to say. At its best, it's a compelling horror story where the horror doesn't come from its slightly expanded repertoire of fungoid-zombie monsters, but from humans and what we are capable of.
The game divides its 26-ish hour narrative into four distinct sections: an opening section in Jackson where we touch base with the characters from the first game (and some newcomers), followed by two sequences in Seattle and an epilogue taking place elsewhere. The core of the game takes place across three days, which we see from both Ellie and Abby's perspectives. From Ellie's view Abby is a monster who needs to be eliminated, whilst from Abby's her actions are fully justified in retaliation for some of the more questionable things Ellie and Joel did in the first game. The game switches perspectives to allow the player to experience both points of view. This is an interesting device as I can't remember too many games that allow you to play as the protagonist and antagonist; Grand Theft Auto V flirts with the idea through Michael and Trevor's opposing viewpoints but doesn't fully commit (both being frequently forced to team up against much more threatening, obviously outright villains).
Much more common are those games where the player commits heinous acts which they try to justify through self-defence or the ends justifying the means, but this doesn't stop the moral corruption of the soul from such heinous acts. Far Cry 2 and 3, Grand Theft Auto IV and, most notably, Spec Ops: The Line, all explore this moral murkiness in a full-on manner. The Last of Us: Part II isn't quite as alone in this space as it seems to like to think.
Graphically, the game is beautiful, with impressive character models (that extend to more than just the main protagonists this time around), outstanding scenery and very good lighting. It's not quite cutting edge (and some of the skybox city backgrounds feel distinctly archaic), but still impressive, with responsive controls. The game's PC port isn't the most technically stable, though, with my play-through blighted by a memory leak that caused it to crash every two hours or so without fail. It doesn't seem like a universal problem, though.
From a gameplay perspective, things are pretty similar to Part I. You move through an area looking for the way to progress forwards, whilst evading or defeating enemies and scrounging for supplies, ammunition, collectibles and new weapons. Areas can be large or small, sometimes relentlessly linear but sometimes a more open area consisting of multiple houses, shops or rooms. Part II encourages thorough exploration, although sometimes at the expense of logic: the narrative constantly urges you to get a move on, so it can feel weird to take ten minutes out to thoroughly explore a laundromat, sliding through a skylight to open a locked door and toing and froing between neighbouring buildings to solve a puzzle to open a safe filled with supplies. The game has a good stealth system, allowing you to distract and eliminate enemies silently, even the mushroom-fuelled undead, but this can be a bit hit and miss at times. The game continues to cheerfully (and stupidly) refuse to let you move bodies, meaning you have to either trick enemies into going where you want them or "steer" them there whilst holding them at knife-point.
Direct combat is more satisfying this time around, with a more robust shooting model and a better selection of weapons, including silenced SMGs, pistols, revolvers, crossbows, shotguns and longbows. You can also create tripwire-bombs and shrapnel grenades as well as molotovs. If anything, the game gives you so many options for direct combat that it's often faster and more efficient to simply cause some noise and obliterate the enemy as they converge on your location, especially since looting enemy troops is also the best way of acquiring ammo.
This combat-heavy focus is a bit bewildering after the first game, which emphasised stealth and made most encounters with both human and myconoid enemies tense affairs throughout the game. Part II by contrast turns both Ellie and Abby into action heroes, each fully capable of storming a camp of a dozen or more highly-trained enemies and eliminating all of them in short, bloody order. It's hard to invoke terror in your horror game if your characters can fairly casually blow that horror away with a shotgun firing napalm shells like something out of The A-Team. However this does result in the very fun roguelike optional challenge mode, where you guide a character through several maps in succession before fighting a boss, unlocking new characters and weapons as you go.
Whilst the gameplay is solid, this is a story-focused game and it's fair to say that the game has been divisive. The game is not particularly interested in giving us too many likeable characters or sympathetic factions: the Wolves and Seraphites have very different motivations but ultimately are two sides of the same coin, and the late-emerging Rattlers are just cliches. The characters are also put through the ringer so much that some scenes start to feel like torture porn. The Last of Us: Part I was a story driven by hope, but Part II is fuelled by rage and vengeance instead. It's a darker game that flirts with outright nihilism, like writer Neil Druckmann wants to be the Cormac McCarthy of video games but doesn't have the chops for it, and sometimes risks being the "late-stage Walking Dead showrunner of video games" instead. Similarities between the two franchises are inevitable and sometimes possibly intentional, but I'm not sure that's what he had in mind. It largely falls to our protagonists' sidekicks, Dina and Lev, to keep some kind of beacon of light shining for them, but it's a mighty thin light at times.
The game's length (half again that of the first game) and structure is also a bit questionable. When we switch perspectives, we rewind three days and play through those days again from Abby's point of view, but it takes a good seven or eight hours of gameplay for her storyline to synch back up with Ellie's, which is a long time to leave a cliffhanger dangling. Abby's storyline is pretty good, and paced better than Ellie's (though you might feel like you could go a while before visiting an aquarium ever again), but it doesn't feel like the structure entirely works. Maybe intercutting between the two would have been better, though that may have impacted the mystery that Ellie is investigating in Seattle.
Ultimately, The Last of Us: Part II (***½) is a game that doesn't make life easy for itself. Turning in a cookie-cutter sequel of "moar adventures with Joel and Ellie" would have been safe and easy. Instead, embarking on this Heart of Darkness trip of duelling demands for revenge and "whose righteousness is more righteous anyway?" was a riskier path, and easily more interesting. Games don't take enough risks, and taking this kind of risk with a major AAA franchise is impressive. Structurally and in terms of pacing the game can be a bit of a mess, but its action is far more satisfying than the first game. Whether players are prepared to put up with 26 hours of bleakness and moral murkiness is another question, one that five years of (at times, combative) discourse has failed to fully answer.
The Last of Us: Part II is available now on PlayStation 4 and 5, and PC. The Last of Us TV series is currently airing its second season, based on the first half of this game, right now.
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