A horse of course
Guest
Just finished it on PS4. I give it 6-8 out of 10 depending on how much you liked the story. I don't think it's fair to slam the game for the whole "cinematic" angle, necessarily. It has a substantial amount of mechanical gameplay content, but I'm sure you could cut at least a couple of hours of playtime if you were able to skip parts where you'rebasically just walking around an area or performing some rudimentary puzzle whilst the protagonists natter away. It handles the problem a lot better than, say Half Life 2, where there's absolutely nothing to do aside from throwing crates at people during many "interactive cutscenes". There's a legitimate reason to explore every area and grab critical resources (particularly material for shivs or molotovs, which are almost mandatory for certain sections), although it could be rather frustrating to spend several minutes scouring a very large area and finding...a trophy collectible and a few scraps of hardware (credits for upgrades).
Even if the whole game was nothing but continuously action, however, it would still be far too long. The defense to this is, I imagine, that it was necessary to make use of this time to really draw out Joel and Ellie's character arcs. This is unmitigated bullshit. Their story could've been told just as well over the course of a 2hr feature film. I can think of several lengthy sections - namely Bill's infected town, the outlaw/hunter city, the sewers and the winter areas - that could've been aggressively condensed in both narrative and gameplay. Henry and Sam really did nothing to help keep the story in motion, even if I can see why they were inserted (parallels with J/E etc.). The Hunters and Outlaws were practically identical, and I was surprised to learn that David was inserted as a replacement for an earlier character who was originally meant to be the main antagonist and would hunt the character throughout the game (apparently this was cut for not being "realistic"). Speaking of which, I found it amusing that something like 50% of the main characters in the game are openly or implied to be either gay, lesbian, bisexual or a deviant. :inclusive:
There is precious little variation in enemy design - there are basically three different zombie types repeated over and over throughout the game's 15-20 hrs, and human enemies are divided into melee and ranged. Once you reach the school miniboss, congratulations - you've defeated every single enemy type in the game, now fight them again for the next 60-70% of the game. The game does a poor job with the stealth/combat balance, as it strongly encourages stealth, yet frequently triggers events that will activate every single enemy in the area once you reach a certain point. Reading up on this after I'd finished the game, it turns out that some of these can still be avoided if you're quick enough. But how the hell would the player know this when, by an hour or two into the game, he's conditioned to assume that sneaking is a waste of time except as a means of killing as many enemies as possible before you screw up and have to dispatch the remainder? There were quite a few amusing scenes where I'd kill everything in the area, open the exit door and trigger a cutscene where Joel desperately barricades the door behind him and gasps "that should hold them" Of course, if you tried to sneak past them and open this door, it would likely make a loud screeching sound and trigger the insta-death melee enemies nearby. The other reason to abstain from a stealth run is that, as a survival/resource hunting game, you really would prefer to have the opportunity to search the entire area for materials, which isn't feasible if you're also trying to avoid enemies at the same time. The central problem is that, as with certain other stealth/combat hybrid games, you're better off stealth-killing the least risky targets, then using a distraction to corral the rest of them in a tight corridor or a small herd ripe for a molotov. Maybe the point was to make a "realistic" stealth system where sneaking is simply to mitigate the odds you'll inevitably face in combat, but the higher difficulties don't seem to bear this out. The DLC is definitely post-game content in that it throws you into a couple of very difficult fights only a veteran of the combat system would want to grapple with, but it also added much-needed three-way battles that should've been in the base game in the first place.
Putting aside the length, the story was pretty good. A lot of it is communicated through very subtle things - a slight change in tone, an unusual expression, and so on. I'm sure there's a good mastercut of the whole game that turns it into a passable drama. I took a very long time to warm up to Ellie herself. She didn't seem like an especially believable teenage girl, even taking the setting into account - Joel's daughter felt similarly stilted. And when I did start to follow her more closely, her motivations really weren't all that unique to her age or situation. She gets a lot of screentime in the Left Behind DLC, but I didn't find her interesting enough to care, quite frankly. Marlene is revealed as a reasonably engaging character once you reach the final level, but by that point it's been something like fifteen hours since she had anything to do with the story. Joel ticks all the right dots, though I can see some people finding him a little too one-issue. As noted, Henry and Sam were completely pointless, David would've been better as the original character, and Frank is practically comic relief apart from being gay, which is a Very Important Thing according to reviewers. I can't even remember the names of any other characters, just the hundreds of gruff soldiers/outlaws/bandits/rebels you murder. I would say the greatest weakness of the plot was that nothing in the game surprised me. None of the characters did anything unexpected or acted outside their boundaries. The military were portrayed exactly as you'd expect, as were the Fireflies and their Tough Ethnic Lady leader, and the backdrop could've been swapped with a million other post-apoc settings. The issue is not that the game was in need of a shocking plot twist (tm), or that predestination through character motivation is an illegitimate theme, merely that I could guess exactly how a character would react before their lines were triggered. They never broke through to me as real people, just vending machines that would spit out the appropriate flavour when you hit them.
Even if the whole game was nothing but continuously action, however, it would still be far too long. The defense to this is, I imagine, that it was necessary to make use of this time to really draw out Joel and Ellie's character arcs. This is unmitigated bullshit. Their story could've been told just as well over the course of a 2hr feature film. I can think of several lengthy sections - namely Bill's infected town, the outlaw/hunter city, the sewers and the winter areas - that could've been aggressively condensed in both narrative and gameplay. Henry and Sam really did nothing to help keep the story in motion, even if I can see why they were inserted (parallels with J/E etc.). The Hunters and Outlaws were practically identical, and I was surprised to learn that David was inserted as a replacement for an earlier character who was originally meant to be the main antagonist and would hunt the character throughout the game (apparently this was cut for not being "realistic"). Speaking of which, I found it amusing that something like 50% of the main characters in the game are openly or implied to be either gay, lesbian, bisexual or a deviant. :inclusive:
There is precious little variation in enemy design - there are basically three different zombie types repeated over and over throughout the game's 15-20 hrs, and human enemies are divided into melee and ranged. Once you reach the school miniboss, congratulations - you've defeated every single enemy type in the game, now fight them again for the next 60-70% of the game. The game does a poor job with the stealth/combat balance, as it strongly encourages stealth, yet frequently triggers events that will activate every single enemy in the area once you reach a certain point. Reading up on this after I'd finished the game, it turns out that some of these can still be avoided if you're quick enough. But how the hell would the player know this when, by an hour or two into the game, he's conditioned to assume that sneaking is a waste of time except as a means of killing as many enemies as possible before you screw up and have to dispatch the remainder? There were quite a few amusing scenes where I'd kill everything in the area, open the exit door and trigger a cutscene where Joel desperately barricades the door behind him and gasps "that should hold them" Of course, if you tried to sneak past them and open this door, it would likely make a loud screeching sound and trigger the insta-death melee enemies nearby. The other reason to abstain from a stealth run is that, as a survival/resource hunting game, you really would prefer to have the opportunity to search the entire area for materials, which isn't feasible if you're also trying to avoid enemies at the same time. The central problem is that, as with certain other stealth/combat hybrid games, you're better off stealth-killing the least risky targets, then using a distraction to corral the rest of them in a tight corridor or a small herd ripe for a molotov. Maybe the point was to make a "realistic" stealth system where sneaking is simply to mitigate the odds you'll inevitably face in combat, but the higher difficulties don't seem to bear this out. The DLC is definitely post-game content in that it throws you into a couple of very difficult fights only a veteran of the combat system would want to grapple with, but it also added much-needed three-way battles that should've been in the base game in the first place.
Putting aside the length, the story was pretty good. A lot of it is communicated through very subtle things - a slight change in tone, an unusual expression, and so on. I'm sure there's a good mastercut of the whole game that turns it into a passable drama. I took a very long time to warm up to Ellie herself. She didn't seem like an especially believable teenage girl, even taking the setting into account - Joel's daughter felt similarly stilted. And when I did start to follow her more closely, her motivations really weren't all that unique to her age or situation. She gets a lot of screentime in the Left Behind DLC, but I didn't find her interesting enough to care, quite frankly. Marlene is revealed as a reasonably engaging character once you reach the final level, but by that point it's been something like fifteen hours since she had anything to do with the story. Joel ticks all the right dots, though I can see some people finding him a little too one-issue. As noted, Henry and Sam were completely pointless, David would've been better as the original character, and Frank is practically comic relief apart from being gay, which is a Very Important Thing according to reviewers. I can't even remember the names of any other characters, just the hundreds of gruff soldiers/outlaws/bandits/rebels you murder. I would say the greatest weakness of the plot was that nothing in the game surprised me. None of the characters did anything unexpected or acted outside their boundaries. The military were portrayed exactly as you'd expect, as were the Fireflies and their Tough Ethnic Lady leader, and the backdrop could've been swapped with a million other post-apoc settings. The issue is not that the game was in need of a shocking plot twist (tm), or that predestination through character motivation is an illegitimate theme, merely that I could guess exactly how a character would react before their lines were triggered. They never broke through to me as real people, just vending machines that would spit out the appropriate flavour when you hit them.