The Last Of Us (Most Awarded Video Game in History) - Coming to PS4

[Breezy_Kilroy]

Man fuck the MP. Didn't know they had it and now that I do I still ain't gon play it.

this ain't CoD where niggas looking for the MP its about the story.

 

[stoneface]

Man fuck the MP. Didn't know they had it and now that I do I still ain't gon play it.

this ain't CoD where niggas looking for the MP its about the story.

They'll deliver on the story, MP or not.

 

[earth two superman]

Perfect 10 from IGN. GOTY as of right now.

 

[The Prodigalson]

Its not being very well received, but I don't think the multiplayer looks that bad.

Definately won't be playing the MP. Niggaz eating bullets like fucking grapes. To much effort to kill. I could be wrong though.

 

[funkdocdamc]

On Gamespot, they have the Metacritic rating of the game at the top right corner, which is a 96 as of now. They gave it an 8.0, lol. Can't wait to play the full game.

EDIT: People in the comments section are mad as hell. Apparently, this is the same guy that gave Skyward Sword on the Wii a 7.5 when everyone else was giving it 9+ (93 on Metacritic).

 

[joshuaboy]

The Last of Us Review

Survival of the fittest.

The Last of Us is a near-perfect analog for The Road, a literary masterpiece written by Cormac McCarthy. Both present a hopeless, post-apocalyptic situation navigated by two characters – an adult and a child – with nothing but absolute despair surrounding them. Like The Road, The Last of Us is perpetually dangerous and unpredictable, and like The Road, what happened to get society to a point of rapid decay isn’t the focus. It’s the story of the characters at hand, and those characters alone, at the center of both plots. The beauty of The Last of Us when compared to The Road, however, is that it’s fully interactive, complete with all of the vulnerability, uncertainty and perpetual insecurity such a situation inherently provides.

The Last of Us seamlessly intertwines satisfying, choice-based gameplay with a stellar narrative. It never slows down, it never lets up, and frankly, it never disappoints. It’s PlayStation 3’s best exclusive, and the entire experience, from start to finish, is remarkable. I lost myself in Naughty Dog’s vision of a pandemic-ridden United States, in the characters that populate this unfortunate wasteland, and in their individual stories. The 17 hours I spent playing through the campaign are among the most memorable I’ve ever spent with a game.

Joel remembers the world before the pandemic.

Players are cast in the role of Joel, a grizzled and tired survivor stuck in a cycle any person could imagine finding oneself in two decades after the collapse of society. He takes odd jobs, acquires food, clothing, and shelter, and repeats the process endlessly, a process that only gets more arduous and desperate as time goes on. Joel does what’s necessary to stay alive, and in the ruined United States he travels around, his survival often means someone else’s untimely death.

 

[joshuaboy]

Occasionally haunted by his past but living in his dystopian present, Joel is surprisingly easy to root for. In many ways, he’s strangely relatable. He retains shreds of his humanity as best he can, considering the extraordinary circumstances he finds himself in. He has a sharpness to him, but a tenderness, too, which he occasionally displays to his partner, a woman named Tess. In the time it took me to beat The Last of Us, I came to care about Joel, and I became invested in his story, and the stories of those he meets along the way.

The Last of Us takes place in 2033, so the regular world Joel harkens back to on occasion is one you and I understand. It’s fascinating to think about how he’s evolved since the world crumbled around him, and even if he does what’s necessary to stay alive – including stealing and murdering – it’s hard to fault him for it. In fact, one of the great ironies of The Last of Us is that you’ll be pulling for him no matter how dark things get, or how violent his actions are. He does what’s required. Joel knows it’s either him or them. There’s no gray area. Joel can be cold and ruthless, but those around him have the propensity to be far worse.

As riveting as Joel is, he isn’t the only character of consequence in The Last of Us. Indeed, calling him the main character is true only to an extent, because it’s his companion, a young girl named Ellie, who truly steals the show. Joel makes a business arrangement early in the adventure to help transport Ellie across what remains of the United States, a wasteland marked with boundless wildlife alongside cities and towns ruthlessly reclaimed by nature. From there on out, the two are virtually inseparable, even if they are at first skeptical of one another, forced together by circumstances in a world where trust and faith are in extremely short supply.

Joel and Ellie develop a sort of dysfunctional father-daughter relationship as their collective experiences bind them, and rooting for Ellie in particular is commonplace in The Last of Us. Her success means the player is successful, and her hardened exterior is the perfect complement to her complete ignorance of the world before it was destroyed. Ellie was born after the collapse, and as such, she’s full of questions and wonder, often communicated through the many contextual conversations she and Joel share. She’ll pick through records at a music store, become fascinated with wildlife she’s never seen before, and ask a million questions about the past. You watch her learn, grow, and gain meaning. It’s impossible not to become attached to her.

The interplay between Joel and Ellie, as well as the other characters you meet on your adventure, is one of the great highlights in The Last of Us. Voice acting is not only consistently superb, but the game’s graphical beauty makes the events of The Last of Us overflow with realism. Everything that happens is immediately more memorable, more powerful, and more poignant because your surroundings are so believable. Forests, fields and wooded trails are overgrown, dense, and lush. Abandoned villages and metropolises alike are eerie, silent, and crumbling. Each environment is unique, thoughtfully created, and bursting with little details, including notes, letters, voice recorders and more that tell ancillary stories of survivors you rarely ever meet in person. The game took me so long to beat because I was obsessed with seeing every inch of it. The Last of Us demands exploration, not only to scour for needed supplies, but to satisfy your curiosity.

 

[joshuaboy]

Joel and Ellie's endless chatter is one of The Last of Us' highlights.

The Last of Us is undoubtedly pretty to look at, but that beauty is often overshadowed by imminent peril. Joel and Ellie will confront enemies in all of the various locations they visit, and these battles represent the other side of what makes The Last of Us shine. Combat is tense and nerve-racking. Fighting is as emotionally taxing as it is physically dangerous, because the people Joel fights are, like him, just normal folks trying to survive. In a world where everyone has a singular motivation to keep breathing for one more day, it’s hard to judge even the harshest remnants of humanity you encounter.

Stealthily killing entire rooms of enemies is incredibly satisfying, so much so that when you blow your cover, it’s hard not to feel a sense of disappointment (especially when one of your companions occasionally fires a gun or walks in front of an enemy, which you can’t control). Holding down R2 while crouching lets Joel listen carefully to his surroundings, giving him a glimpse of enemy locations in his direct vicinity and an edge in staying away from danger. Some players may consider this a bit cheap, but I’d merely call it gamey. Just like the L3 prompts that tell you where to look and hints that appear if the game determines you’ve been stuck in an area too long (all of which can be turned off), Joel’s listening skill can simply be ignored if you feel like it doesn’t fit. But rest assured, it’s very helpful, especially later in your quest.

The beauty of stealth in The Last of Us is the incredible, uncomfortable realism you’re forced to witness each and every time you execute a silent kill. Watching a survivor fruitlessly swat at Joel’s arms as he strangles him to death is disturbing, as is quickly shiving a man in his neck and listening to him gurgle some parting breaths as he collapses to the ground. The Last of Us does a phenomenal job of making each and every enemy feel human. Every life taken has weight and each target feels unique and alive. It’s hard not to think about some of the older folks in particular, ones that remember the real world, lived in it, and were once normal. There’s an emotional pang when you’re taking out thugs that look a whole lot like you and your allies.

Of course, there are enemies that are decidedly inhuman in The Last of Us, too. The collapse of society was instigated by the sudden prevalence of a fungus that wreaks havoc on the human mind, and those humans – known not-so-lovingly as The Infected – are alive, but not well. No matter which faction of humanity a person falls on, whether he’s with the remnants of the federal government, or rogue groups known as Hunters, or even the mysterious resistance organization known as The Fireflies, everyone is united against The Infected. This is simply because The Infected can in turn infect others, further eroding humanity’s already dwindling numbers. They are a perpetual threat to even the slightest hope that humanity can one day step back from the precipice of extinction, and running into them is always frightening.

Unlike your human adversaries, who often work together, audibly communicate, plan their actions, and practice self-preservation, The Infected attack with reckless abandon, with absolutely no regard for their safety and with every intention of killing you. Fighting them is terrifying, especially during your first few encounters, and feels completely different than your engagements with pockets of humanity. The lesser versions of The Infected, colloquially known as Runners, can be taken out with firearms and melee strikes alike, but it’s the Clickers – characters so infected by the Cordyceps fungus that they can’t even see – that will haunt your dreams. They can only be killed with silent shiv strikes or via firearm – silence is more often than not your best weapon against them -- but if they so much as get their hands on you, it’s game over. In this world, they are the true threat. It’s unlikely you’ll ever get comfortable dealing with them, of being mere feet away from them, crouching, hoping they don’t somehow sense you.Another brilliant aspect of The Last of Us is its crafting options, all of which happen in real-time. With the exception of actually going to a pause menu, there’s no way to stop the action, so you need to find lulls in order to scavenge for items, put them together and create new goods that can be used both curatively and offensively. The system is extra tense considering you can use, say, alcohol and rags to create either a healing pack or a Molotov Cocktail, but not both with the same goods. Thoroughly exploring environments nets you the components necessary for item creation, giving you yet another reason to inspect surroundings already begging to be rummaged. And item scarcity, a perpetual issue in the world of The Last of Us, means that everything you find is precious in its own way. There aren’t any factories making more of anything you find, and that includes the greatest prize of all: bullets.

Ellie is undeniably the star of the show.

 

[joshuaboy]

This perpetuates real consequences based on your decisions. Will you use those scissors and some tape to create a shiv? Or will you attach them to the end of a pole to create a makeshift weapon of war? Will you create a smoke bomb only because you found sugar in the environment and can only carry more if you use what you already have? Or do you bypass the sugar and hope you don’t need it – or what you can make from it – later on? Will you opt for melee strikes to save ammo for another day? Or will you walk in guns-blazing and hope you find shells on the bodies you leave in your wake? How you choose to navigate these forks in the road have considerable effects on how you approach future enemy encounters, adding a special dynamic to The Last of Us not found in very many games.

Joel can also upgrade himself with pills and other supplements hidden throughout the adventure, though here you’ll also have to make careful choices, as there isn’t enough medicine in one playthrough to fully upgrade him. Likewise, all of your weapons, from pistols to shotguns and rifles, can also be upgraded using parts and tools found on your journey. Similarly, you won’t be able to max-out everything, so you’ll need to make thoughtful decisions. This adds an analytical, tactical slant to The Last of Us not found in the likes of Uncharted, though if you really want to upgrade Joel and his goods fully, you could always take advantage of The Last of Us’ very welcome New Game+ feature.

While the campaign is absolutely worth playing through multiple times, The Last of Us also comes packing a robust, rich multiplayer mode that isn’t simply a retread of Uncharted’s. In fact, The Last of Us’ multiplayer seems decidedly scaled back in order to fit it into the context of the post-civilization United States, with small player counts and only two modes that pay exceptional detail to the greater context of the single-player campaign.

The Last of Us’ online functionality exists within a mode called Factions. Once you begin, you choose one of two sides and then jump into one of two sub-modes: Supply Raid and Survivors. Both are atypical in their approach, especially Survivors, which presents players with a best-of-seven series in a four-on-four match where death is brutally permanent. Survivors forces meticulous play virtually ripped right out of the campaign, except instead of fighting AI-controlled partners, you’ll be dealing with even smarter humans. It’s a truly fun mode, one where every player on the map is overflowing with nerves and afraid to make a mistake.

Supply Raid, on the other hand, is about whittling down your team by eroding their overall life count. It’s more generic than its counterpart, but the idea of having a shared number of lives forces you to strive for better play. It makes you not want to be the reason your team loses, it makes you not want to make silly blunders. Like Survivors, Supply Raid also allows you to craft items on the fly using components found on the map and feels a whole lot like the single-player game. By scaling back the modes and the player counts from the likes of Uncharted, Naughty Dog has removed the tall barrier between single player and multiplayer and has made the two feel interconnected, even ancillarily.

Playing The Last of Us online is exceptionally fun.

What’s especially neat about The Last of Us’ online functionality is the metagame that transcends everything you do. When playing online, your character – who is fully customizable in both appearance and loadout – is the leader of a band of survivors. Successfully navigating online matches, collecting items and engaging in one-off challenges called Missions helps grow your band. Of course, if you fail, your band decreases in size. It’s a simple system in premise, but it’s undeniably addicting when you start getting into it. It creates another, higher level, a different way to gauge your overall success by something other than wins or losses and your kill-to-death ratio. Like the single-player campaign, which judges your actions based on future consequences, so too does multiplayer in The Last of Us reward or detract based upon performances that, at the time, may not seem entirely consequential.

Then again, The Last of Us is still all about its single player campaign. Many players will never jump online, and frankly, they won’t be missing out on what truly makes the overall package so incredibly special, so exceptionally noteworthy, such a must-play experience.

The Verdict

PlayStation 3 isn’t only well-known for its number of exclusive games, but for the sheer number of quality exclusives. That’s what makes The Last of Us even more impressive, because not only does it join the ranks of Uncharted, Killzone, God of War, Infamous and more, but it bests them all. In short, Naughty Dog has crafted a game that impresses in virtually every way. The Last of Us is a true feat.

Its unrivaled presentation in particular sets the bar even higher than the Uncharted trilogy already did, and its writing, voice acting and layered gameplay combine to create what is very easily the game to beat for Game of the Year 2013.

10

Masterpiece

The Last of Us is a masterpiece, PlayStation 3's best exclusive and an absolute must-play.

 

[dontdiedontkillanyon]

A perfect score from Edge: it is only the 15th game in Edge's history to ever receive a ten by them. Also a perfect score from Jim Sterling at Destructoid who is notoriously difficult to please. Would consider buying a PS3 just to play this.

 

[dontdiedontkillanyon]

The Last Of Us review

Had Naughty Dog closed its doors after Uncharted 3 and decided there was no way it could top what it had accomplished, its legacy would be secure. But news of The Last Of Us held such incredible promise because it represented a blank slate for one of gaming’s all-star teams. Naughty Dog takes full advantage of that fresh start, removing the few lingering constraints that held the Uncharted series back from masterpiece status.

As daring as Uncharted was in terms of figuring out how to deliver the spectacle of Hollywood cinema without completely hijacking interactivity, the setup built on established foundations; it’s Indiana Jones with a prettier star and a different set of ancient treasures on his to-loot list. The Last Of Us operates within an equally well-established genre – the post-apocalyptic milieu of films such as Children Of Men and I Am Legend – but its creative decisions are far riskier and, as a result, deliver much higher emotional payouts.

For one thing, you won’t find a terrorist psychopath boasting about pushing the red button on this game’s apocalypse. A species of Ophiocordyceps unilateralis fungus – perhaps the closest thing the real world has to a zombifying agent – has mutated, and is now capable of infecting humans as well as insects. Mere hours after the fungus takes up residence in the body, people turn into something monstrous. Their heads deform, assuming a variety of clefts and reef-like protrusions. Fungal stalks push grotesquely through fissures in skin.

You’re cast as Joel, a stoic but likable Texan who in the two decades since the outbreak has migrated to Boston. Joel who? Just Joel. The Last Of Us pulls off the game equivalent of throwing summer blockbuster volumes of cash at a film production and casting not Brad Pitt but some no-name actor who doesn’t even come up in an IMDB search. Naughty Dog’s vision for this apocalypse demands a believable everyman, not a plainclothes superhero like Nathan Drake.

If you are in any doubt you’re playing a Naughty Dog game, it’s made abundantly clear a few minutes into the campaign when you’re told to boost an AI partner up to reach a high ledge.

The Last Of Us doesn’t just tell you that you’re playing as an Average Joe, but reinforces it on a mechanical level. There’s none of Drake’s cliff-scaling athleticism; if you need to get to an out-of-reach perch, you’d better start scouring around for a ladder. In early combat encounters, you’ll find yourself skulking about behind cover trying to pick off stragglers. You’ll scavenge for stray bricks and bottles that you can toss against walls to lure combatants to concealed areas of the map. The strangling execution that follows takes a few arduous seconds for Joel to carry out, reinforcing the sense that he’s no UFC prize fighter. And the boozy sway of your aiming reticle – stabilised through upgrades later on in the game – means the chances of squandering a precious bullet is high. Joel’s a survivor, but that doesn’t make him a firearms expert. In short, the game tastefully avoids the ludonarrative dissonance that arises from Drake being presented as a friendly treasure hunter while asking players to pile up hundreds of bodies wherever he sets foot. Joel kills because he has to, and there’s no winning smile when the shooting stops, just overwhelming relief.

The tension of confrontation is only heightened by The Last Of Us’s realtime crafting system, which requires you to hunker down in corners making health kits while your terrifying enemies shuffle past mere feet away. Just as nail-bitingly, when you want to heal yourself, you’ll have to watch helplessly as Joel bandages his wounds. Resources dotted around the map are achingly, wonderfully scarce, and many serve dual purposes: the alcohol and rags that combine to make a health kit can also craft you a Molotov cocktail.

While this is not an open-world game in the textbook sense, it feels remarkably dense for employing such spacious environments. A typical slice of unbroken space might incorporate a street, several alleys and a variety of multistorey shops or dwellings. This approach to level design gracefully serves the game’s narrative context: when an apocalyptic event knocks out the structured routine of law-abiding society, you’d expect there to be more latitude in your decision-making.

 

[dontdiedontkillanyon]

The world of The Last Of Us is big enough to get lost in, and without the aid of a minimap, we did on several occasions. Whereas Uncharted often felt like walking down a scenic but clearly delineated hiking trail, The Last Of Us prizes deep, meaningful exploration. You’re constantly looting for supplies, not just for ammo and upgrades. You’ll also find handwritten letters, voice recorders and journal entries. The Last Of Us has a linear tale to convey – Joel’s smuggling of a 14-year-old girl named Ellie to a revolutionary group called The Fireflies for reasons we shan’t spoil – but makes its tale feel less prescribed than Uncharted’s by letting you play the role of amateur detective. The result is a story-driven game that begs to be played, not observed from the couch.

Cutting-edge blood physics make the game’s violence seem much less cartoonish than it might otherwise. Watching blood spray from a corpse, trickle down a face or soak into the fabric of a shirt can be genuinely unsettling to watch.

Joel and Ellie soon depart from Boston and their trek across the country is equal parts The Road and On The Road. There are bleak moments in abundance, but there is also scattered levity of the sort that would make Cormac McCarthy spit in disgust. The complications that propel Joel and Ellie to far-flung regions of the continental United States enable Naughty Dog’s art team to serve up the sort of wide-ranging visual buffet it all but perfected while bringing Drake’s globe-trotting to life. Ellie grew up sequestered in the Boston quarantine zone, and seeing the wider world through her unjaded eyes makes you appreciate the subtle details. There’s a steady parade of sights to marvel at, such as a purple-pink sunset illuminating a ruined skyline, the glisten and ripple of waist-deep water as you wade down a flooded street, and the way the visual depth of field noticeably shifts when you hoist your weapon to aim. This is the work of a studio that has got the best out of PS3 by pushing it to its absolute limits.

Just as the game rewards you with a steady, unmistakable sense of character progression, it offers

a dazzling sense of geographical progression as well. Without picking out the exact map markers on the pair’s travelogue, your surroundings morph from the drab brick and mortar of quarantine zones to foothills, mist-covered peaks, rivers and woodland.

The journey feels like a reconciliation of sorts. Nature introduced the fungus that brought about all this mess, and as you move toward your goal, you’re forced to step deeper into the natural world and learn to depend once again on its capacity to sustain life. The Last Of Us feels like an open-hearted love letter to America in its most primal form. The traditional folk instrumentation of Oscar-winning Argentine composer Gustavo Santaolalla (Babel, Brokeback Mountain) adds to the earthiness of the game without stepping on the toes of every moment of calm Joel and Ellie get to savour between outbreaks of violence.

It’s a game of remarkable character, too. Troy Baker and Ashley Johnson’s performances as Joel and Ellie breathe poignancy into the grace notes of the script, but there is emotion even when the game is completely silent. When you crouch behind cover as Joel, he’ll instinctively steady himself by resting one hand against the wall; position yourself close to Ellie and Joel’s arm stretches over her shoulder like the wing of a bird shielding its young.

Joel’s focused hearing, activated with R2, turns the world black and white and enables him to pinpoint enemies around corners or through walls. Its range can be extended with pills dotted around the game world.

If given too much screen time, the infected assailants could easily distract from this sensitively cultivated human drama, but the game’s biggest threat is used sparingly. The sonar chirps of the so-called Clickers, who stumble slowly about in blindness listening for your footfalls, will make your heart race, not least because they will kill you instantly if they get their hands on you. If you want to grab them, only a shiv will take them down; they can’t be choked like humans. Runners, meanwhile, will sprint straight toward you, bobbing and weaving to make sure you burn as much ammo as possible. Ammo and resource shortages deftly force you to employ the whole range of your arsenal instead of merely picking a favourite gun and running with it all the way to the finish line. And even on the lower difficulty settings, this is no easy journey. Just because The Last Of Us is a game about survival doesn’t mean it necessarily wants you to get accustomed to surviving. We watched Joel and Ellie die screaming with alarming frequency – little wonder we saw so few human beings on our travels.

The Last Of Us strips away the geek-centric fan service so commonplace in contemporary games. For every highbrow idea explored, developers seem compelled to throw in a lowbrow one to counterbalance it. The Last Of Us resists such compromises, and does so without disappearing up its own backside. Naughty Dog has delivered the most riveting, emotionally resonant story-driven epic of this console generation. At times it’s easy to feel like big-budget development has too much on the line to allow stubbornly artful ideas to flourish, but then a game like The Last Of Us emerges through the crumbled blacktop like a climbing vine, green as a burnished emerald.

10
http://www.edge-online.com/review/the-last-of-us-review/

 

[joshuaboy]

Eurogamer gave it 10/10 as well

 

[earth two superman]

#focusisacoon

 

[VulcanRaven]

Eurogamer them niggas are always real critical.Coons are mad.

 

[Vader_F_Kennedy]

already told myboss dont expect me in the day after this game come out

 

[funkdocdamc]

already told myboss dont expect me in the day after this game come out

It actually comes out Friday instead of the normal Tuesday release.

 

[KillaCham]

 

[dontdiedontkillanyon]

The Last Of Us

Review

A fungal plague has devastated humanity, reducing the infected to brutal, mis-shapen wrecks. Two decades on from the outbreak, you play Joel, an emotionally haunted survivor as he guides the young Ellie to a safehouse on the other side of wasteland America. On the surface, the set-up could be pitched as ‘Ico meets The Walking Dead’ but the execution makes it so much more than that.

The world you’ll be travelling is fraught with danger – more often from other humans than from the Infected – but is unerringly beautiful. Nature has reclaimed urban spaces, and the results are stunning. Colour and lighting change with the seasons as the story progresses, and characters’ appearances become worn and tired with time. This is easily the best-looking game on PS3.

The gameplay itself could easily have been a disappointment – broadly a mix of stealth and action, with innumerable sections of waist-high cover shooting, it doesn’t immediately offer anything new. Played with a shooter mindset, it doesn’t, in fact. However, it’s in avoiding combat when possible, incapacitating foes and only killing when absolutely, unavoidably necessary that the game stands apart. You’ll pause, consider options, listen, always aware that a mis-timed charge into action will prove fatal. You’re not playing a superhero, or even anyone as tough as Nathan Drake from Naughty Dog’s earlier Uncharted games – you’re playing a human, as fragile and vulnerable as any of us. When you are forced to fight, it’s short, sharp, shocking, and the game treats violence with almost disgust – necessary evils.

At the heart of the game is the almost parental relationship between Joel and his charge, one brought to life through the best vocal performances yet heard in a video game. The production quality of the game is spectacular but the actors are working at another level. The score, the first Brokeback Mountain’s Gustavo Santolalla has composed for games, is also superb, ratcheting up the tension and underscoring the solitude of the world through use of silence as much as bold orchestral moments. There are many cinematic influences at work throughout the game, but it avoids feeling like an interactive movie.

The Last Of Us is not just the finest game that Naughty Dog has yet crafted and an easy contender for the best game of this console generation, it may also prove to be gaming’s Citizen Kane moment – a masterpiece that will be looked back upon favourably for decades.

http://www.empireonline.com/reviews/reviewcomplete.asp?GID=973

 

[KillaCham]

When will the demo be out for everyone?

Never, bitch.