izigame.me

Woke and gay

That's right! I woke up gay once again, as always. Pretty epic.
Anyways, onto the game

The Loss of Ours
The Last of Us 2 might be the most enthralling and unique AAA game I've played in a significant while, both in terms of its storytelling and elements of its gameplay routine. I was completely engrossed in its experience all throughout.
That's not to say the game is perfect -- it definitely has some issues, but it's just so consistently good. And when it's good, it's real good.

The Grusome Twosome
The combat is largely similar to as how it was in the first game, but what it alters is very significant.
But generally speaking, the combat is a super fluid and flexible experience, which allows for so many fun, dynamic play-styles throughout its abundance of well-thought-out combat arenas.
Some of these encounters are so sprawling and complex that you could seriously tackle them in just about a dozen different ways. There is just so much room for personal preference in terms of how you want to engage in any given combat segment -- all without the hampering leniency of letting you play stupidly.
As I played on one of its harder difficulty options, so many layering gameplay factors would constantly enforce me to switch my primary method of overcoming enemy hordes. It could even alter mid-battle. This meant that one combat section from another were easily distinguishable and helped differentiate them for the sake of every encounter feeling fun and unique.
Most arenas just felt so much larger and grander than the original games' -- it's amazing.
And again, the really tight resource management enforced me to switch between different weapons and other utility items constantly.
Only further enhanced by the fact that both playable characters have different weapons and utility items. It really keeps the whole experience staying fresh.
Yet what I believe the most important gameplay detail of this game is its enemy human callouts.
Enemy humans will vocally signal and plan commands against you mid-battle, and those interactions will actually translate into their behaviour. It's a small detail, but it sure as hell is an impactful one.
On harder difficulties, it'll become an absolute necessity to pay attention to these to survive. It's so engaging.
And just as you begin to comfortably notice and act on those clear, vocal commands, the game suddenly throws you a curveball, where another faction of human enemies communicate through whistles. It's beautiful. It's stressful, and I love it. These whistles are actually distinguishable commands, meaning that if you pay real close attention to learning them, you can still improvise and adapt to them.
Also, alike the first game, on harder difficulties it merely takes a few enemies to totally fuck you up. Meaning that each individual enemy act as a real threat if not dealt with properly.

Traumatizer, Womanizer
The story is very much the definitive highlight of this game for me.
While I really liked the story in the first game, I absolutely adored the story of its sequel.
Alike the first game, it uses a simple plot to frame its complicated character dynamics around.
But unlike the first game, The Last of Us 2 goes the extra mile by using stark dual narratives between its characters and factions, as to draw parallels and comparisons for you to personally reflect upon and witness.
Halfway through the game, it just halts and suddenly forces you to play as what it had been building up to be the villain so far.
That is an extremely bold form of storytelling. I've barely seen anything alike such on the market before -- closest I can think of is the movie "Gone Girl" from 2014. But even that is hardly done in the same way.
Initially, Ellie's side of the story is very honed in, focused and straightforward. It truly embraces its limited cast.
Whereas Abby's is messy, complicated, and all over the place. All while staying cohesive throughout.
As you're juggling between both perspectives, who is friend and who is foe commonly switches. It's beautiful.
Each perspective really enhances, reflects and intersects with each other.
It's epic, and it's ambitious. You end up truly comprehending and sympathizing with both characters, as if they were two sides to the same coin.
Ultimately, the more you win, the worse things get -- for both parties, that is.
Both, for different reasons, spiral down into worse and worse situations.
You witness this grief-stricken duo decay into miserable, desperate husks who unnecessarily indulge in increasingly horrendous acts. It really tests your stance on both characters, all while not seeming out-of-character on both ends.
And all spawned solely due to the never-ending, relentless feedback loop of how this game portrays revenge. Even if I don't entirely agree with the sentiment, I still find it very profoundly presented.
Additionally, it was also rather gripping to experience the game building characters up for several dozen hours, only to swiftly kill them off. Such was executed really well... No pun intended.
Really, the large build-up really just emphasizes their deaths, both for the in-game characters' reactions and my own.

Crashes scarier than Clickers
Similarly to the first game, the remastered PC version of The Last of Us 2 ran surprisingly good for me performance-wise, especially for a Playstation port.
With all* graphical settings at max, the game ran at a butter smooth ~120FPS, only dipping down into the 100s during really intense moments.
Although, as my sole critique, I did encounter a few notable bugs, yet hardly of the game-breaking kind.
*One being that on Linux, setting the shadow quality as anything above 'Low' makes shadows very pixelated and blocky. This seems to only be the case for exclusively most Linux players. Regardless, the game still looked beautiful throughout.
I did also notice sometimes during specific cut-scenes that certain background object textures would sometimes load a frame or two late to the party. A little distracting, is all.
But my main technical issue with the game is that during the start of two specific, different mid-late combat sections the game would randomly keep crashing, over and over. Collectively, they together probably crashed my game around 20 times total. Odd, since my game outside of those two sections were practically free of crashes.
Although, since beating the game several updates have released which supposedly have fixed several, potential crashes. So these sections have likely since been entirely patched.

Conclusion
Again, The Last of Us 2 is probably one of my greatest AAA gaming experiences in the last few years. I honestly feel it's a superior product compared to the first in most aspects.
I don't intend to oversell the quality of this game -- it definitely wasn't perfect in all regards. Yet I just had such a good time throughout my playthrough, that it easily ranks very highly between the games I've played this year.
Anyways, if you're capable of setting aside the aforementioned possible technical issues, then this is a firm recommendation in terms of both story and gameplay.