The combat is still cover based, and feels very much like Uncharted, but the ammo conservation issue means that gun confrontations deplete precious rounds quickly. In many ways this is the game that Ubisoft’s I Am Alive aspired to become. Every combat encounter is a tense affair because every shot needs to count, and going “Rambo” every time guarantees that the next encounter will be fought only with fists. Like Resident Evil games of yore, this is a third person action game, where the characters is weak, ammunition and other supplies are sparse. There are moments of fright in the game, but it’s not specifically focused on a horror experience, so maybe “survival survival” is more appropriate. The Last of Us is a triumphant return to the genre of survival horror, minus the horror. People will be discussing and arguing the ending of this game in the years to come, and not because it’s bad, but because it’s so human and divisive.
Druckmann has written every Uncharted game to date for Naughty Dog, but TLoU makes it clear that he’s capable of much more than a snappy buddy story. But Naughty Dog’s writer and creative director, Neil Druckmann, has finally nailed it, with a tale that invokes the bleakness of The Road and the speculative social insight of Children of Man. Noire have aspired to the creation of immersive, cinematic games. The likes of David Cage with Heavy Rain and Brendan McNamara with L.A.
In that regard, The Last of Us truly is something special. On the way, Joel and Ellie contend with horrors both human and mutant, undertaking a journey that is the most surprisingly compassionate, sophisticated and unsentimental examination of father/daughter relationships ever seen in a game. Joel is the gruff smuggler turned guardian of the story a man who’s lost too much and is now compelled to escort 14 year old Ellie across the USA in a bid for a new, desperate hope for a human race that is clearly in the twilight of its existence. The Cordyceps virus is a fungus that grows in the brain, first turning the host into a rage crazy homicidal maniac, before gradually morphing into a blind cannibal that clicks like a bat as a form of echo location to track prey. After a prologue that will undoubtedly go down as one of the most gut wrenching in years, the game proper begins, 20 years after the outbreak of a humancentric Cordyceps virus. The Last of Us is a post-apocalyptic tale, but one with a premise unique to the genre.