[Review] The Last of Us and TLoU:Left Behind (DLC)

The Last of Us is a great, great game and I implore anyone who has a PS3 to play the game ASAP if they haven’t done so by now. The developer, Naughty Dog, has done a great job with this game and they’ve also brought us many great games over the years so it is no surprise. Here are just some of the more popular games Naughty Dog has developed: (Notice these are all Playstation brand games)

Crash Bandicoot (1996)
Crash Bandicoot 2: Cortex Strikes Back (1997)
Crash Bandicoot: Warped (1998)
Crash Team Racing (1999)
The Jak and Daxter Series (2001 to 2005)
The Uncharted Series (2007-2011 along with an unnamed Uncharted coming out in 2014)

They have truly developed some of the great games over the years that have become iconic for people around the world. I believe The Last of Us is definitely going to be an iconic game for Naughty Dog to add to their list of games.

I’m going to do something a little different with this one as I’m constantly trying to improve my writing and my reviews. I am going to be reviewing all the ins and outs of games from here-on out and I believe I have not been putting enough sustenance into my reviews, and for that I’m sorry. I should have done a bit of research first because I found out that I’m missing a lot of things to do with these reviews and I know that’s an integral part of all video games, cinematics, music, general content. All things I believe I have not put a lot of work into doing. So I will attempt to include those here and also not spend as much time explaining the story, because I don’t think people read reviews for the story, they read them for the review itself; how the game is and all of the aspects of it, so this will be a test review for it.

So I’m going to start with some general information about TLoU and the DLC:

The DLC revolves around Ellie and her friend Riley. Ellie is a main character in the regular TLoU game and Riley is mentioned at some points throughout the game. The DLC is a sort of prequel to TLoU because it entails Riley becoming a Firefly and hanging out with Ellie, while switching viewpoints back to at a point in the main TLoU game where Ellie is trying to take care of Joel. Joel is the second main character in TLoU who happens to be escorting Ellie to the Fireflies, because Ellie is immune to the virus.

In the DLC Ellie and Riley chill together and run around an abandoned mall. At the end there is a reference to the beginning of TLoU. It’s recommended to play the DLC before you play the main game, but either one will do, it’s not that important to the story. Each second of gameplay in both games is very gripping and tension-filled.

Story of Left Behind:

Briefly going over the story here, the DLC as I mentioned, revolves around Ellie and Riley. The basis of it is that Riley wants to hang out with Ellie before something happens in the story of the DLC. What that is, I’m not going to say here, but in any case the DLC is roughly 3-4 hours long and is a definite ride. The story in it flips between some time after Joel falls off of a second story mall floor and gets impaled on rebar and to Ellie hanging out with Riley. Riley takes Ellie to an abandoned mall that they run around in. Apparently the military that controls the area doesn’t know about the mall, being that it’s buried under several feet of rubble. The DLC ends in a satisfying way, I’ll just say that. Also it’s slightly frustrating but it’s definitely a good ride.

Story of The Last of Us:

This’ll be a little longer than the Left Behind synopsis but it’ll be brief too.

The game starts out before the outbreak in 2013 with Joel and his daughter living in a house and having a good time. The outbreak starts and his daughter ends up dying. The game cuts out to 20 years into the future (2033) when the outbreak has strangled the world, and you discover that apparently, when you meet her, Ellie is the only cure the world has, and that you have to escort her to the Firefly base in Colorado, and you start playing as Joel in the Quarantine Zone in Boston. There are multiple Quarantine Zones in the U.S., however you find out later most of them have been overrun by the Cordyceps virus (which is the ‘zombie virus’ of the game). You actually don’t stop at too many of these Quarantine Zones, the only one you really stop at is the one where Joel’s brother is. You encounter one of his other brothers earlier in the game and he petitions him to try to take Ellie to the Fireflies since he has more connections than Joel does, but he doesn’t take her and Joel ends up taking her obviously.

However the entire game revolves around Joel getting Ellie to the Eastern Colorado University so the Fireflies can find a cure for the Cordyceps virus. I’m just going to leave it at that because I’m aiming to make the story section shorter here and have less spoilers for the game itself.

General Gameplay:

The gameplay is sublime and fantastic. The gunplay, third person camera (even though it may be slightly annoying at times but I can think of other games that have worse cameras), the characters and NPC AI in general makes for one helluva fight every time you encounter humans. The other thing is that the AI for the infected is very good too, and they really make it scary every time you encounter the infected IMO. Honestly I was not looking forward to dealing with infected as I got more into the game. The parts that deal with infected are ridiculously scary and tense. However it’s more suspense/slight jump scares because you don’t know where the infected are coming from. I can say there’s a part in the DLC that scared the jebeezus out of me. And that happens multiple times in TLoU and that’s what makes it a great game: the suspense of not knowing what is going to happen next in the story, in the next few minutes, in the next few seconds!

The game also has a slight crafting system. You gather materials such as explosive powder, herbs, rubbing alcohol, bandages and scissor blades/parts to craft first aid kits, smoke bombs, explosives, and some more things. Honestly you could probably only go through the game with first aid kits and be fine, but the other things do help a lot depending on the situation and if you have the materials. It’s all about decisions unless you’re cheating I guess, then whatever. But resources are limited so there’s really choices to make in what you craft. Also there’s multiple ways to approach each scenario most of the time, different directions to take and usually, there’s hidden materials if you’re able to grab them I.E. There’s one part in the game where you have to go through a mall, and one room is sort of a maze and you have to navigate with your flashlight while avoiding the stage 3 infected (full blown Cordyceps virus in a host). The hosts that are blown like that are called by the general public, ‘Clickers’. The stage one are just Infected and the Stage 2 are called Stalkers.

The page here mentions a fourth kind of infection but you can see it’s ripped off, but those happen to be a surprise kind of infected that you’ll have fun with. Anyway in that section, there’s a bunch of crafting materials you can pick up if you’re careful about it, that will last you a decent while, probably an hour to an hour and a half tops.

Gameplay Mechanics:

What I’m just going to get into here is the crafting system and a couple of other things. The crafting system is so easy a 5 year old could figure it out. You function through the crafting system by hitting Select and choosing what you want to make. This does not, not pause the game so you have to be careful about where you do it. (This was a sticky thing to do in the DLC.) It’s generally recommended to craft whatever you’re going to need before you go into an infected/human zone where you’re going to have to fight, because if you’re crafting and you get hit by anything, you stop and have to restart.

Also on the topic of getting hit, if you get caught by a Cordyceps Level 3 infected, you’re dead instantly. They can’t see however so you can walk circle around them and they’d never know. The key here is to quietly walk circles though. The Cordyceps virus grows out of the brain and covers most of the face and head, if not all of it. The only thing left exposed is the mouth. This makes it so the infected can’t hear or see, only eat which really puts a spin on the whole ‘zombie’ thing. The level one and level two infected can hear and see though so you have to be careful. Also you don’t run into many level two infected and if you do it’s hard to tell them apart from the level ones, so you generally use the same tactics. Also there’s still that level four infected to worry about…

This Clicker in the image is one of the more milder looking Clickers. They get pretty ugly.

Now onto the player mechanics. What I want to touch on is I think without the stealth element in this game it’d be incredibly worse off than it is. And it’s not, if that makes sense. What I’m trying to say is that if this game didn’t have a stealth element it’d be a lot harder than it is already. Both Joel and Ellie have stealth attack moves. Ellie has a knife that she stabs into people’s backs or the heads of Cordyceps as it were, and Joel chokes them, human or infected. All of these things can be done on all enemies in the game, however I’m not saying to attempt to stealth kill everyone which would be impossible, in my opinion, but you’re free to try!

I wanted to touch on also Ellie and Joel’s hearing mechanic. You can detect enemies through walls by holding R2 I think it was, and you can see their silhouettes through the walls so you know where they are. Both the infected and humans are prone to this.

Music:

The music for the game is awesome. No repeated tracks and just overall awesome music in general. You can always go to Youtube and listen to the OST or purchase it. I can’t commend Naughty Dog enough for their soundtracks for this game. They did a fantastic job and that’s all I can really say about it.

Cinematics:

The cinematics for the game are great. They’re really well thought out and obviously involve the story. Cinematics for me were a break from the stress of the game where I could just watch the story unfold. (Speaking of, I hear there’s a movie in the works for this game, which IMO is going to be awesome.) And what a story it is.

Content:

So here’s the meat and potatoes of the game, the meat’s Joel and Ellie and the potatoes are obviously rival human factions/the Cordyceps virus. You run into a lot of mean people on the way to Colorado and not too many good ones. And the good ones you do run into… well things… happen, I’ll just say that. Good, or bad. And they all just seem to be passing through places just like Joel and Ellie. The general content of the game is well thought out, well placed, and well done. Nothing is seemingly ‘out of place’ unless you’re looking for Easter eggs or something. (Easter eggs are hidden references to real life or pop culture references/trivial references etc.) And even then I don’t think I noted any Easter eggs on my entire playthrough so there’s that. They really did a good job with the atmosphere of the game too. Dark and… not scary but there’s just an eerie aura if you get my meaning. Throughout most of the game there’s just a sense of urgency and I love it, every second.

Controls:

The controls to the game are standard stuff, it’s a PS3 controller, not too much is going to differ from game to game. However I do like the D-pad layout they used for items and how they made it so you can heal yourself from the D-pad menu instead of having to go through like 10 menus while you’re in battle with bandits or whatnot. Everything else the game walked you through the controls for it in the beginning of the game and by the time you’re 2 hours into it, the controls are second nature to your hands. Also as an added bonus for people like me who completed the game way back when, the DLC comes with another control tutorial so you’re not lost by the sweeping action that surrounds you when you start! I was hoping it had this when I fired it up and it did, I was so relieved.

Final Conclusion:

My conclusion of this game: Go buy it, please. It pays for itself in terms of content, story, music, and/or mechanics. You could pick one of those things and it’d still pay for itself by the end of the game. When you beat it you’re just going to be like, ‘I just beat The Last of Us. Yessssss.’ And then you’ll go do something else and/or sit in thought about the game and what you just experienced. I know I did.

9.8/10 game for sure. The only reason I remove two points is DAMN SOME OF THESE LEVELS ARE HARD. I’m not a casual gamer by any means, but I remember dying so much it’s ridiculous. Less than Dark Souls though.

Buy it.

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