The most wanky, self-important and contrived shite I've ever played in my long career as a gamer.
I don't actively go out of my way to play bad games the same way I do with watching bad films or tv, mainly because acquiring games isn’t as easy as film or tv. Pirating games isn’t always the best.
Copped this in a PS sale for 9 quid and was tasked to play it, otherwise I couldn’t have an opinion on the game. Sure, I said. I’ve done worse for less, I said.
But when the dust clears and the experience is over, I gotta say, this ranks very high in the worst things I’ve done as favours for other people.
I didn’t expect it to be this terribly dull and painful to play through. It’s painful and miserable on purpose, but it's doubly moreso because the game is just crap to its very core.

Killing Joel off....you wanna do that? Sure, if you can validate it. Personally, I'd rather we just leave well enough alone with how the first game ends.
The execution of Joel's execution is contrived to all hell. That's what people are most mad about.
The game goes out of its way to villainize Joel for his actions at the end of the first, completely demolishing the ambiguity of it all. What Joel did at the hospital was neither entirely good nor wholly bad, and it leaves a lot for you to mull over.
Part II scraps the ambiguity and sticks Joel in the shit for saving Ellie, and writes him off as a jerk. Even if he killed all the fireflies in self-defence so Ellie could live a life and grow up.
And he gets ambushed like a chump by Abby and her friends, despite the first game emphasising the fact that Joel is not easily fooled or trusting of strangers.
In short, Joel is shafted and disrespected in favour of a story to be told where he gets offed for being a horrible person with no room for grey areas. Cheers Neil.

And of course there's Abby.
Sorry, but I will not feel bad for this cartoonish, obnoxious twunt who was just invented to fuck up a perfect ending. The lengths they go in the second half of the game to manipulate you into liking her and her miserable friends is insulting. Don't show me this after Joel is dead, it's cheap as fuck.
I don't like Abby. I don’t understand her. I don't buy the fact that she so easily defects from the WLFs to help the runaway SCAR kids when she seems wholly devoted to her own cause.
Also, leaving Tommy and Ellie alive was a stupid decision. You were basically asking for them to come and kick your shit in.
It's why Joel killed Marlene at the end of the first game.
Pity he didn’t get you because you weren’t invented when the first game came out.
I hated playing as her, but we’ll cover that later.

The game beats you over the head that revenge is bad, you shouldn't do revenge. But Ellie only realises that after we have:
Mercilessly killed scores of people, both WLFs and SCARs, all with families, friends, hopes and dreams (the amount of times I rolled my eyes everytime an NPC yelled the name of the enemy I just killed is innumerable)
Dozens of dogs.
And killed a pregnant woman. Even if we didn’t know she was until after the fact.
But Ellie has moments of doubt and conflict whenever she confronts and kills Abby's friends. What about the hundred other people you killed without even interacting with them beforehand?
The game keeps telling you you're a horrible person for killing everyone, but there's no other viable way to progress. Especially if you play on harder difficulties where killing is mandatory to acquire resources and stand a chance in the later areas of the game. You as a player don't have a choice in choosing not to kill anyone because you can't progress if you don't.
As such, you don't feel like there's much reward or incentive out of this experience because you're strictly being told what you're doing is morally wrong and pointless in the end.
Ellie's murder quest stops dead in its tracks when her father's killer (the instigator of this quest) is at her mercy and she decides not to end her right then and there. Even after all the ballache of killing her friends, numerous faceless chumps and losing our family, we don't do it, because Joel said to her shortly before he died that she should learn to forgive.
It’s the biggest load of bullshit ever.
Not even bringing attention to the fact that if Ellie kills Abby in this moment, she would be depriving a child of a parental figure, the same way Abby did to her.
But that’s not even touched on because basic logic is thrown aside for the THEMES.
If I were to fix this ending, I’d make it a two way decision for the player to decide. They choose themselves whether Ellie should kill Abby or not. Like in both Force Unleashed games where you can choose whether to kill Vader or not at the end and get a different outcome.
But the game doesn’t want you to have a choice in killing Abby or anyone else, you HAVE to do it to progress. And killing everyone is wrong and you’re a horrible person for doing so. Prepare to be lectured to about the consequences of your actions PLAYER.
….
Can you see why this game stirs such annoyance and bile in people?

It’s like an amateur schmuck screenwriter who wants to flex how smart his content is but can’t back it up with any credible plotting, characters or story.
Oh but Neil Druckmann is an artist. He’s revolutionising storytelling in gaming, he’s a white Hideo Kojima!
No. He isn’t. He’s just a wanker. Probably one of, if not the biggest in the gaming industry, if we’re not factoring in the corporate schlubs like Todd Howard.
It pretends to be high art and smart by having flashbacks, flashbacks within flashbacks, but the structure of the final piece is completely ass backwards. As mentioned before, don’t show Abby teeing off Joel’s head then afterwards show me her petting dogs and hanging with her friends or her father dying in the first game. This should’ve come earlier.
But I guess he wanted that shock value so early on, so cheaply and shittily. That is actual amateur shit. This is stuff I’ve come across from classmates in my script writing classes at Uni and seen being slandered by the teachers. This full grown man has the backing of 200 million doubloons and is the creative director of one of the biggest game studios right now, and he was allowed to just piss it all up the wall. Faaaaantastic.
I’m sick of talking about the story.

Gameplay is pretty much the same as the first, though it gets incredibly tedious this time around because you're less invested. And not to mention, the number of drawn-out cutscenes or walking sim sections where you do nothing but move the character forward are constantly breaking up the flow of gameplay. It’s lame. I haven't played the first game in years, but I do not remember the ratio of gameplay to cutscenes being so heavily one-sided to the latter. There's big long sections where my controller was just sitting on my desk because the cutscene just kept going on and on. For the most part, the game just wants to be a movie instead.
Which btw, I can completely understand why they did a TV show now, given where this game's priorities seemingly lie.

I want to highlight one specific part of the game to make my point clear.
When you first get to Seattle, you have the option to go into a music store and play a song to Dina. A sweet moment in concept, but you don't actually play the song. You just sit and watch Ellie play the song instead.
Now since we're making a game (in theory) a good developer would tune his storytelling to the correct format. In an ideal scenario, YOU the player would be able to play this song. Make it a li'l guitar hero minigame. YOU the player are an active participant in this moment, you are serenading Dina with A-ha's banging tunes and strengthening this relationship between the two women.
For something as important as these two’s relationship, you’d want the player to be heavily engrossed or make some impact on it to get invested, because as it stands, the relationship in the actual game is dull and half-baked. They’re already together at the start of the game, so we don’t see it grow or progress.
So yea, that’s lame, and there’s dozens of bits like this where player input would strengthen their connection with the events going on. But as said before, the game is mostly here to lecture, with no actual decisions or impact coming from the player besides being forced to kill everything and everyone they come into contact with.

And it's so fucking long too. The pacing is horrendous. First hour of the game is nothing but cutscenes and walking sims. Wonderful first impression. The plotting as stated earlier is piss, but when you play as Abby, it becomes even more unbearable because it keeps going and going, diving more and more into lunacy that amounts to nothing and you forget that you were playing as Ellie once.
Sidenote, they keep talking and bigging up this prophet character from the SCARs in the Abby sections, but you never actually get to confront them at all. TF was that all for?! That’s like if Bioshock bigged up Andrew Ryan by showcasing his impact on Rapture, but you never get to confront him and instead forgets about him to go straight into the Frank Fontaine stuff.

Oh and one last note: the notes. Around 12 hours in, I was fucking done with picking up these things. They’re all pretty much the exact same, they’re all miserable and there is barely anything interesting being said in them or cool li’l stories you can follow through each one. It’s just people being torn apart, or subtle points to the THEMES of the game. And there’s just too many of them. It becomes laughable at a point at the sheer amount of them and that some of them have been left in one spot for decades without any interference.

Anyway…
Quite possibly the worst game I’ve ever played in my life. I could probably cite others that are weaker in core gameplay, but based on both enjoyment and overall story quality, it’s the most pointless and needlessly gruelling 25 hours of gaming I’ve ever experienced. I beg to god that they heavily change things for the tv show, because if they follow the sequel beat for beat, the goodwill from the first season will dissipate just like it did for the first game when Part II released.
Can we send Neil Druckmann to the void that Squidward goes to so he can relax to the sound of his own thoughts and ideas? He needs to stay away from any future Naughty Dog releases and the industry in general.
Not playing this ever again. Not even for the platinum, despite getting over half of the trophies on one playthrough.
It’s just not worth the misery.