The Last of Us Part 2 Review: A Gritty, Gruesome Sequel About Revenge

It’s easy to forget the kind of climate in which the original The Last of Us was released. While 2013 marked an era when games like Beyond: Two Souls inundated us with alternate endings and Bioshock Infinite was still fiddling around with a karma system, Naughty Dog’s post-apocalyptic road trip across America was notable for being unwaveringly committed to a single narrative. There were no dialogue options in sight.

Seven years later, the same is true for this second part, which Naughty Dog creative director Neil Druckmann famously teased is “about hate” this time around rather than love. Up until recently, we could only speculate as to what this statement meant exactly. But now, after completing this 20-hour follow-up journey, the final product is much grimmer and far more disturbing than even returning players might be prepared for. Pacing issues aside, The Last of Us Part II is a grueling experience first and a third-person action game second that asks who exactly are the real monsters when the world ends: them or us?

Taking place four years after its predecessor, we catch up with Ellie and Joel, who’ve taken on roles within the remote, walled-off settlement of Jackson, Wyoming. Both have matured a lot since we last saw them, not always for the better, as Joel is still struggling with being too overprotective of his surrogate daughter while Ellie attempts to form new relationships and questions her place in the world. It’s clear that the previous game’s gut-punch ending has caused a rift of trust between the two, and it isn’t long before Joel’s actions spell disaster for the pair and lead to a horrific inciting event.

Release Date: June 19, 2020
Platform: PS4
Developer: Naughty Dog
Publisher: Sony Interactive Entertainment
Genre: Action-adventure

What follows is a revenge quest of the most bitter proportions, centering on a hate-fuelled Ellie as she ventures to a post-apocalyptic Seattle that’s being ripped apart by civil war as well as the ravaging Cordyceps virus. Letting you roam, explore, and investigate this nook of a city is one of the best things The Last of Us Part II has going for it, setting it distinctly apart from the state-spanning jaunt depicted in the original game and laying the foundation for Ellie to get more intimate with just one setting. And what a setting it is!

Naughty Dog’s ability for nigh on perfect environmental storytelling has been never called into question, but The Last of Us Part II takes the concept much further. Decimated music stores smack of unused instruments and songs never written, an innocent-looking courthouse features its own underground secrets, and even the once-proud city bank reeks of a heist job gone wrong during outbreak day – before it succumbed to infected investigators. It’s not that hard to piece these bite-sized stories together, and not once do you question whether locations like these feel lived-in. All this you discover through the simple act of exploration.

The technical panache continues when looking at the improvements made to character models both during gameplay and in cutscenes. Never before have the performances of Troy Baker, Ashley Johnson et al been so keenly felt, especially during the brief moments of quiet where you’re afforded the chance to take in every subtle bite of the lip or eye-flicker. In a year where Resident Evil 3 impressed with its new renditions of Jill and Carlos thanks to the power of the RE Engine, The Last of Us Part II easily usurps it by pushing the PS4’s graphical capability to its absolute limit.

Something tells us you’ll be hard-pressed to find another AAA game in 2020 able to so effortlessly convince you that the characters you’re watching are real. The Last of Us Part II uses this graphical flair to great effect, combining it with a general fondness for cinematic framing and thoughtful writing so that you always feel engrossed n what’s happening on screen. Regrettably, this does also mean that it’s not uncommon to wince or look away when the violence being depicted dips into the overtly gruesome.

Official The Last of Us Part II Gameplay Trailer