The Last of Us is the most emotionally resonant game you will ever play about plank, ladder, and pallet management. To be fair you’ll sometimes scooch dumpsters around. At one point, you scooch a piano.
I hate feeling like I can watch a Let's Play and experience most of what a game has to offer. Seems like that's the case here.
I am also really glad you reviewed the game and not its production budget, like Bissell did. http://www.grantland.com/story...
This was always in the back of my mind as people dole out the 10s. Whenever someone manages to evoke emotions in a video game successfully (which we know is few and far between), that supersedes whether the game itself is as successful.
My copy turned up this morning and I'll be playing it all weekend, hoping that I love the game. What I think is that, like Tom, I'll love the dressing.
Yeah, I think I've moved on from this kind of game as well.
We'll all be very sorry!
Tom, can you please just give every game an 85.7 out of 100 stars officially, so the comments sections are bearable? Hide your real score somewhere in the text, which should preclude those who spoil this site from finding it.
I enjoyed all of the Uncharted series so much more on easy mode that any other difficulty. It's a ride that I want to go on for the sake of the characters and some of the set pieces, not the game play. Which is strange for me, because usually, if my minute to minute input isn't giving me pleasure, I don't have much patience for a game.
Strange, so its the gameplay that breaks the immersion? Usually I find the cutscenes boring and frantically tap buttons to get back to the action but it sounds like it was the other way around for you Tom.
that Grantland article was a boring read... like shitting marble.
God only knows why these cretins feel the need to constantly post comments going on about "bias" and "personal opinion". It is almost as if they don't understand that a review is about expressing opinions.
Kinda sounds like my experience with the first Uncharted, really. The story and characters and animation and such were good, but the game was a series of tedious, way overlong fights with individual men who could take something like three shotgun blasts to the face for no apparent reason and who came in groups of sixty to eighty. (I may be exaggerating slightly but that was what it felt like.) And ultimately, if I don't enjoy the gameplay in a game it doesn't matter how good the story is, I'm not going to be able to finish it. Maybe I'll watch someone else play it instead.
I agree with you. Too many people offend reviewers about being mindless. I guess Tom has to realise a review should be a little more objective (you know focusing more on stuff that are actually good even though he doesn't like them) but for God's sake people, reviews will always have a decent part of personal opinion in them.
Don't have a dog in this fight but it is kind of amusing that this score was predicted by the Review Score Trolls in some E3 thread or other. Or was it the State of Decay review?
Great review, Tom. I expected as much from Naughty Dog based on my experience with Uncharted. Great emotion, great set-up, middling gameplay.
Quick, seal the doors. SEAL THE GOD DAMN DOORS.
I haven't played Last of Us, but Bioshock Infinite was way overrated. Gameplay was much more tedious than previous Bioshocks, and the story was an unfocused mess that was rushed at the end. How fun was searching all of those desks? It was an ambitious game & beautiful, but the implementation faltered.
I'm thankful some reviewers base the review on the content in front of them instead of the pre-release hype. I'm thankful some reviewers have "personal opinions" and don't just mimic those of others. I often disagree with Tom's reviews, but goddamn I'm glad they exist.
Shocking. He gave the game a lower score than 99.9% of other reviewers. He'll get on the front page of metacritic. Congrats on that. More traffic to your site.
It seems you didn't like that the game was difficult. I personally love hard games (Dark Souls and Demon's are some of my favorites this gen), so if the game is really hard, I'll probably love it. I usually don't get frustrated with challenges, I just become motivated to overcome the challenge.
I stopped reading the review when you started writing about heavily armed soldiers in the finale. I hope you didn't spoil the story in the review. I don't want to risk it.
Well, he did have a 20% chance of guessing correctly. And I'm pretty sure he guessed a few scores to hedge his bets. I don't recall where the comment was, but I suspect he'll be along shortly to crow.
I'm already here. I said you'll probably give the game a 3/5 at best, but I was leaning more toward the 1-2 range. I didn't think you would give it over a 3.
I never really thought of it as breaking the immersion so much as failing to live up to the story. The Last of Us is no more immersive than, say, watching a good movie, which is a completely different kind of experience than most people have in mind when they use that term to talk about a game.
But you're absolutely right that this is the polar opposite of those games where you quickly skip past the cutscenes!