Look, I get that for older arcade games, having bad difficulty scaling and unfair later levels is part of the design, but playing through these later levels is absolutely dreadful

But even when the game is rolling as expected, it's not especially fun. The music is pretty dreadful as well. It's not the worst arcade game I've played, and 72 unique levels is neat quantity-wise, but when half of them are just getting rushed by a bunch of enemies in a mostly empty stage, it comes down less to puzzle-solving and more comes down to button-mashing

It should be said that if you are going to a Call of Duty game seeking an intriguing or nuanced political discussion, you should probably see a physician, but it's still disappointing to see how this game fails to really admonish the United States of any real consequence in its story despite their clear misdoings. What is also disappointing is how rushed this campaign feels. Characters feel added just for the sake of being a reference to another game, some missions feel like afterthoughts, not really connecting with the bulk of the plot, and this campaign is pretty buggy. The campaign has its action-packed moments that are fun, as you would expect from a COD game, but it doesn't really do anything to take a big step forward. At its worst, this campaign is portraying Ronald Reagan as not a piece of shit, and at best, it's basically a game you've already played.

As for the multiplayer, it's fine. The maps are better than Modern Warfare's, but the gunplay is worse. If you like COD, you'll like this. If you don't, you won't.

The narrative, while ambitious, absolutely has moments where the game's pacing suffers or plot points don't feel fully thought out. However, the core narrative is, at the very worst engaging and controversial, with its best moments exhibiting some of the best cutscene direction and character moments in any game over the past few years. I don't think anyone is really going to be convinced to change their mind over the narrative given how polarizing it is by design, but I ended up really liking what they were going for.

Beyond all of this however, The Last of Us Part II is great as a video game. The level design is superb. SO many combat encounters feel distinct from one another because of how well-placed enemies are, as well as how fun the environments can be to loot and explore. We can sit here and argue over narrative hot takes all day long (Which I personally think is probably a good thing considering the narrative that they try and tell with this one), but none of that can take a way from how impressive the actual gameplay is.

It's fun for about 15 minutes. The game's structure is absurdly repetitive and the narration gets incredibly monotonous after a while, especially as music is barely present in the game outside of some sparce moments where it picks up a bit (Even in these moments though it's nothing noteworthy)

It should be incredibly fun to just wreak terror as a shark, but it doesn't really ever feel like the game challenges you, or you have to try new things to win, or really anything to keep you engaged. It's just a very typical open world checklist game after a while.

I can almost respect the idea of making your sequel basically a hard mode expansion, but it's not that these levels are hard, it's that the level design just sucks. The physics in the original game are already wonky here and there so relying on stuff like the springs and wind for so many levels when your jumps aren't as fluid as they need to be is annoying.

It feels like every strength of the game is something that already existed and in almost every area, I think this game just does a worse job. I think it's a bad sequel for 90%+ of the players who will play it and to me it misses a lot of the point of what made the original game so good. Still, I don't think it's totally horrible compared to NES platformers, but I'd hardly call the game good.