Y'all get mega heated about vidya games lads. I finished the game and I've had a little more than a day to think about it. I get it though, a lot of people loved Daddy Joel and a character you love getting the BAD END scenario always sucks.
I think it's a 8.5-9/10 from a video game review standpoint.
What do I mean by that? Let me ramble a bit about the game.
Sound Design - Was excellent, ND can make a world feel alive with an attention to details that very few dev teams can even come close to matching. The music was great, Gustavo really captured the theme of hate and revenge in the game. Many tracks felt suffocating, because you were forced to feel it, and such emotion are uncomfortable especially from an outsider's point of view. Too many attention to details to list here, just very immersive.
Gameplay - A step up from TLOU. With the motion matching technique ND has been utilizing and refining after every release. The movement and actions of the characters has never felt more responsive and fluid than in this game. In the first game, many times I did something and I felt like the character did something entirely different. I think ND has been able to do what Read Dead Redemption 2 was not able to do. The animations and realism is strong, things like pulling your weapon and all the little things have delay, but it's not damaging to the overall experience because there's still a sharpness to it. The ways to approach encounters is so varied. The prone mechanic adds a decent amount for those who like sniping the shit out of things. I'll have more to say about how the combat feels and is varied in the level design part.
Level Design - Dawgs, this wide-linear shit is the bomb. The implementation of this in TLOU2 is way better than in Uncharted 4 and TLL. I think this is just a development studio getting better at things as they work on it. Also I think TLOU is better suited to the concept, because exploration for loot,lore items and side narratives works better. The exploration is way less linear and more organic than in TLOU, probably because the Ps3 only had 256 ram, and they were very limited in terms of how their set pieces could be built or else you'd be facing mega loading screens. Loot is also more believable about where it is, also I liked that sometimes you got 1 bolt and sometimes 16, same with pills. Instead of being like 5-10-15 type of things. Makes the world immersion much more believable. The rope usage was cool.
Sometimes I'll be critical about, I played on hard and I think could've handled Survivor for a first playthrough. The game gives you a lot more items than in the first one which makes the whole starving for resources feeling of TLOU and games like the RE lesser in this one. I think they did this because there's clearly more things to kill in encounter in this game. Even the start when you arrive at Seattle you start by fighting many wolves in two different waves. Very different from the tutorial vibe of the first one.
Prone and characters being able to climb things really helped the world and how you traverse and talking combat encounters much more believable. If you didn't go the full stealth route, the game forces you to run and hide and relocate. Much more frenetic if you chose to play guns blazing/melee. Enemies never miss if you just charge em, you have to play smarter. I liked the added difficulty that was brought by the fact that enemies had an AI upgrade. I think the dogs and Scars talking to one another from far away via whistle was a clever way to do AI as well. Dogs forces you to move around a lot or else at some point you'll be found out, scars whistling to each other means you have to be smarter about how you take them out. Just this little fact makes fighting the Wolves vs Scars a decent amount different even though they're both human enemies.
The Infected had an overall upgrade, very good imo. They ran faster, more chaotically than in the first game. The stalkers are real pieces of shit in this game. That one combat encounter where you're forced to fight a bunch of them in some office space is the stuff of nightmares fuck em bigly.
Also, Abby had way more of the "quality" set pieces for sure.
Art Direction- Jackson in winter was great, although we weren't there for long. Main story in Seattle was fucking gorgeous, so many awe inspiring vistas. If you compare locations of the real Seattle, post Apoc Seattle looks much better
Many of the views and the overall presentation of the city was game of the generation for me in terms of visuals. Vegetation was #1, beats any other game for me.
California was cool as an epilogue, but again very brief and we saw only the sort of suburb areas. I think they did land the seasons even better this time. Winter in Jackson, Spring in Seattle, Summer in California. Shame we didn't see Fall in this game, I love that season.
I think everything above, the sound design, gameplay, level design, Art Direction is Top dotch Naughty Dog outdone themselves pretty much on every point. This game took a long while to finish and it shows in almost every facet of the game.
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Now let's get to the part where there's a lot of differing opinions, the story. And the reason why this game can't be an objective 10 if you scale every category the same 2-2.5~ points
For me the story is an 5.5-6/10~ Which is not bad by any means, most video game stories I rate way lower than that. Most of it is atrocious, which is why gameplay, to me, is always king. Does the game feel good to play when you're in control?
I think, the game suffers because the story WANTS you to feel a certain way. And it's trying so hard to guide you to a certain emotion, sometimes straight up being manipulative about it and that ultimately it makes the player not be able to feel that emotion because it's so blatant in some story beats. This game's story has been focus tested so much and it shows. Sometimes when a story is too narrowly crafted, many people aren't able to connect with it the same way the author intended to be experienced.
One thing I will say, is that even though the journey was uneven in terms of quality of story, the ending I felt really ended on a high note. In terms of themes that Neil set out to talk about. The cycle of violence, hatred and it's transformative effect on a person, etc.
Now, there is the Story and the themes and then there's the DELIVERY of the story. Which is where the game falls hard. Delivery is like a 2/10 God the pacing was atrocious, flash backs galore. And when you play as Abby, you're getting a flashback and then inside this flashback you're seeing some flashbacks and even one flashback which is a dreamlike sequence. Come on now, what am I even watching here. It's hard to process Jesse's death when you only come back to the scene after it cuts 8 hours later.
I will say, Abby's section of the game was much more pleasant to me. I think the surrounding cast of characters was more endearing than Ellie's and it's deliberate. I think much effort was put in this second section of the game because the game would fail hard the game shows you this other side of the conflict and it would utterly fail to make the players connect.
Now, this is not to say that all people connected to Abby and the cast of character. But I think a large part of that is because of Joel's demise. I think this was unavoidable. Some people really like Joel and his story and you couldn't convince them otherwise. People connect to characters, and once they do they're sort of on "their team" so to speak. Can't accept such things happening. I'm into RPGS and shit so I can disconnect myself from how I feel about a character, to further understand what the writers were trying to do.
So yeah, a 8.5 or 9 depending on how much I feel like the story should matter in a score. That changes literally every 2 minutes so that's why I give myself a .5 leeway and not give a hard score. There's no way the game can be lower than that because the game sounds, looks, feels, plays the way it does. At least to me, I'd have to give the story 5 points of out 10 or some shit and I'm playing a video game not watching a movie.
This post was edited by Helloween7 on Jun 23 2020 06:02am