Third person shooter engages, pushes players
“The Last of Us” is a post-apocalyptic third person shooter, but like none you’ve ever played. The game’s basic premise — that the deadly, host controlling Cordyceps fungus has spread to human beings — is simply another excuse for a zombie outbreak. But saying “The Last of Us” is a game about zombies is like saying “Citizen Kane” is a movie about a newspaper; accurate, but nowhere near the whole truth. “The Last of Us” is a game about a small cast of complex characters trying to survive, deal with loss and maintain hope in unimaginable circumstances.
At the core of the game’s cast is the rough-and-tumble, fifty-year old Joel and the rarely frightened Ellie, a fourteen year old girl who has never known civilization as it once was. Together, this unlikely duo travels west from Boston to Salt Lake City, searching for the few people still actively pursuing a cure to the Cordyceps outbreak.
Unlike developer Naughty Dog’s “Uncharted” games, which found their narrative inspiration in the cinematic styling of “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” “The Last of Us” has more in common with the novels of Cormac McCarthy than with Spielberg’s films. It’s longer and more methodically paced, with emphasis on exploring its characters’ fears and flaws.
The game channels brutality and desperation in every facet of its design, from the way enemies feebly attempt to claw at Joel as he strangles the life from them to the fact that the “med-kits” consist solely of rags soaked in liquor. The game is constantly finding new ways to make its players feel vulnerable. Even small encounters, with three or four enemies, can prove to be an ordeal, and the fear of death looms heavily over each successive environment.
The game features stealth mechanics for the player to take advantage of. “The Last of Us” has all the trappings of the genre: a bow and arrow for silent kills, bottles which can be thrown as distractions, the ability to hear enemies through walls, etc. However, the game does not expect, encourage, or even want its players pulling silent perfectionist playthroughs. Much of the game’s tension is derived from the feeling that everything could go wrong at any second.
The end of combat scenarios are typically met with a hard earned sigh of relief. Where most shooters present firefights as things to get excited about, in “The Last of Us,” guns are incredibly loud, getting hit looks very painful, and the subsequent gore can appear just a bit too real.
This might make the game seem like quite an unpleasant experience, and perhaps it would be, were it not for Ellie. She is the heart and soul of “The Last of Us.” Her relationship with Joel and her perspective on the state of the world are what make “The Last of Us” so interesting.
“The Last of Us” can be an ugly and incredibly oppressive experience, but because of that, those rare, fleeting moments of beauty, become all the more meaningful.
This is a rare big budget game that manages to feel intimate in its narrative and laser-focused in its intentions. Every aspect of it, from design to animation and even music, reinforce one another, forming a cohesive whole.
“The Last of Us” will terrify you, exhaust you, break your heart and stay with you in a way that few games can.