There’s some stuff going around which is completely false, namely the story about Druckmann humping Laura Bailey in a mocap suit (which someone photoshopped her tweeting about and she had to come out and shoot it down). There’s also rumours about it being transphobic which I really don’t agree with and I think were at least somewhat overblown. I thought the trans character was handled really well, and the trauma he faced due to his gender identity was alluded to and discussed in dialogue but never directly shown, which was a nice restraint for an otherwise very disturbing game. I’m not trans, so of course I’m not an expert on this and maybe I’m missing something, but I thought it was respectfully done. The review bombing in general is ridiculous, and all the misinformation has led to a lot of toxic and polarizing discourse, which for the most part I think has been unwarranted. It’s also the gayest major video game out there which I’m 100% here for.

Gameplay wise, the best thing Naughty Dog has made in ages, maybe ever. The stealth is vastly improved, and actually a viable option for the majority of encounters now. Hiding in tall grass and bushes isn’t a binary invisibility but a layered system based on proximity and movement. Instead of everyone just instantly knowing your position when you’re spotted, there’s a caution phase where enemies will be on higher alert and search your last known position. The crafting is expanded even further from the first game, allowing you not only to craft explosives and ammo for combat encounters but also further options for stealth, such as makeshift silencers and arrows for the bow. As before, crafting one item often comes at the direct cost of another, and many of these choices are suited to either stealth or action, only now there's even more such choices you have to make. Fights between multiple factions allow you to pit your enemies against each other, tossing throwables to draw them together and stir the pot, occasionally thinning the herd from the shadows.

There’s also more depth to the progression system this time around, with character upgrades attached to various perk trees that are gradually acquired throughout the game instead of just a list that you can tackle in any order, requiring you to actually put some level of planning in to get the stats you want, and with more variety than the typical combat/stealth/resources trio that a lot of modern games have. It’s still a pretty straightforward system, nothing super in depth, but it’s a welcome addition to flesh out the gameplay a little more, and fits nicely into the more methodical, preparation based encounters of the game.

The level design is also a huge step up, often featuring multiple routes through encounters. There’s even some more open areas, with optional locations that have their own sectioned-off combat scenarios. Unlike Uncharted 4, where I felt the open areas where neat but didn’t offer much in the way of incentive to explore, these parts of Last of Us 2 often have additional upgrade materials for perks, weapon upgrades, and even new guns, directly rewarding your exploration on a tangible gameplay level, as well as fleshing out the games’ environmental storytelling chops. Human enemies are smarter than in the first game, and the Seraphites even have their own creepy whistling system that impacts how quickly they’re able to notice you. The weapon upgrade system is basically the same thing as the first game, though additional holsters are now moved over to exploration instead. The infected have a few new enemies types, but for the most part they play quite similarly to the first game. Overall, it’s a lot of fun to play, and even if the story doesn’t grab you I think the game is worth picking up for the combat. It’s not gonna win over people who don’t like Uncharted or Last of Us 1, but for those who do it’s the best iteration of Naughty Dog’s TPS gameplay loops.

As with the first game, the big explosives setpieces are spaced out more so than the Uncharted games, making them more impactful when they do come around even though they’re smaller in scope. ND does a great job blending cutscene and gameplay here, so much so that I was occasionally telling myself “nah this can’t be running in real time it looks too damn good” only to be greeted with a QTE prompt 2 seconds later. God, this game looks great. Probably the most visually impressive game I’ve ever played (though I’m yet to get around to Red Dead 2), not only on a technical level, but also an artistic one, with the lighting reflecting and contrasting the mood of particular scenes, unending natural beauty punctuated by the evil that humans do to each other. The animations are incredibly detailed without being overlong and interfering with the gameplay too much, which is something I find ND is really good at in general. The music, performances, writing, and cutscene direction continue to be some of the best in the medium, pushing interactive storytelling into new and unconventional places.

Narratively, I understand why the game is so much more divisive than the first one: it’s challenging material that makes you feel bad and questions the very core of its characters, featuring a Pulp Fiction-y non-linear structure that puts you in the shoes of characters you thought you hated. I don’t think it’s trying to be directly critical of the player for their use of violence, rather it’s deconstructing why the protagonists choose to inflict such pain at all. There’s no big picture, no cure for the survival of the human race, just people, vengeance, and civil war. As with the ending of the first game, it’s often about the hateful things done for love, selfishly destroying everyone in your path to protect loved ones, even if it costs the world and ends up destroying the relationship with your loved ones that drove you in the first place.

Many have criticized this game for its lack of levity, and that’s somewhat true, but only in the back half of the narrative, and though it is depressing there’s very much a thematic purpose behind it. The flashbacks and happy moments early on in the narrative establish what characters are leaving behind in their quests for revenge, but also what was taken from them to stir that desire for vengeance in the first place, a web of violence and trauma becoming more and more tangled by self destructive tendencies until they have nothing left.

The story is hardly ‘fun’ in any kind of traditional sense, even though the gameplay is. It cuts deep, leaving scars on the cast that will perhaps never heal. It could’ve just been Joel and Ellie adventure 2.0, which it seems is what a lot of people wanted, but this is so much more daring, unique, and interesting that I have a hard time imagining how straightforward replication of the first’s formula could’ve been better (and I don’t mean this in a derogatory way, at least not completely, I love Uncharted 2 and that’s basically just the first game but bigger and more better). The Last of Us is not a brand that got its acclaim by playing it safe and giving us formulaic fun adventures. The reason the original stood out in the first place is because it dared to slow down and let you feel, building a deeply flawed protagonist who obviously does the wrong things, but making you care about him anyway. A game that just did what we expected from it would not be a worthy successor to The Last of Us.

Does this game want to be realistic or escapist? This should be a simple question to answer, yet its inconsistencies in design make it harder to crack than the Enigma machine. In one early setpiece, you grab an MG42 turret to hold off the Nazis.

These emplacements have limited ammo, and you have to reload them, suggesting that the game is aiming for a more immersive, believable style as opposed to the infinite ammo emplacements common in the genre. But then a few missions later you hop on a jeep turret and it has infinite ammo, only it can overheat. This is strange but for most of the game this rule of overheating vehicle turrets and ammo-based emplacements stays consistent, so it’s not that big an issue. However, in the penultimate level, you get on another MG42 to hold off more Nazis, except this one neither overheats nor has ammo. If you’re going to undercut mechanical choices just for a cool setpiece, why have these limitations at all?

There’s other little issues like this, such as every door open having a lengthy scripted animation, but then in the French Resistance level there’s no animation for opening windows. The weird “drag the stick to the circle and then press a button” quicktime event totally fails to simulate… any action, really. As silly as mashing buttons fast and stuff like that may seem, they offer a vague approximation of tension and more minute gestures than a typical control scheme can offer. The Call of Duty series has actually been pretty good with these kinds of things, the final fights in Modern Warfare 2 and 3 for instance have little intuitive motions as well as button prompts that immerse in the action of hand-to-hand combat decently well. Hell, even the trigger-mashing of Call of Duty 3 was more effective than this. I’m not against QTEs per se, but this game uses them really poorly.

For some reason, the cutscenes are locked at 30fps even though the game runs at 60, and the transitions often stutter even moreso, which is really jarring, especially considering how often this game is jumping into scripted sequences and wrestling control away from you. There’s a moment in the introduction to your squad where Zussman (I finished the game, like, an hour ago, and I had to Google his name because I had already forgotten it) does the five finger fillet and you can see the knife clipping through his hands, lmao. There’s so much care in some aspects of the presentation, but so many things just break or don’t work as intended and make the whole thing fall apart. There’s a few interesting ideas here, but most of it is taken from other, better ww2 fiction.

Call of Duty has always been a weird mishmash of various TV, movie, and other game influences, so the lack of originality isn’t a problem in and of itself, but WWII doesn’t do anything new with them, nor does it even do them as well as the things it’s cribbing from, let alone coming close to surpassing them. The narrative is totally divorced from the gameplay. In the cutscenes, your squadmates are your ride or dies, and you’re constantly saving each other’s asses from the brink of death, but in practice they… give you ammo sometimes, and mostly just sit back and watch while you risk your life doing all the difficult stuff.

They’re not teammates, they’re equipment dispensers. They don’t even give you the stuff you need, like Elizabeth from Bioshock Infinite, you have to ask them for it, and they’ll just leave you to rot otherwise. This coldness of war worked in the old games precisely because they weren’t trying to connect you to the characters, aside from a few plot critical NPCs the man next to you could die at any moment in the grand, dehumanising machine of warfare. But here, contrasted with this inspiring tale of the heroism of 6 men played by actors whom Activision gave a bunch of money to pretend to be soldiers, it just makes it impossible to pick out any coherent thematic thread. The game takes great pains to show the destructive chaos of war, with nearby soldiers having limbs blown off constantly, but it’s also full of action setpieces like the collapsing church tower and the (rightfully) mocked train crash scene that would be more at home in an Uncharted game. There’s an entire mission about concentration camps, but you also have bullet time. This campaign doesn’t know if it wants to be a serious interactive experience or a heightened video game romp, and it fails at both.

Some of the best storytelling in the medium. The premise itself is fairly standard genre fare but the character work here is by far the most impressive I've ever seen in a video game. Very light on exposition, and much of the character dynamics are revealed through subtle body language in the animation, the main themes left unsaid and bubbling under the surface. The vocal performances are incredible and bring these characters to life more than anything I’ve seen in the medium. There’s more subtlety and grace in the narrative here than even a lot of movies and television, honestly. It allows players to connect the dots themselves, instead using the lengthy cutscenes to communicate emotional tensions. The characters can rarely find the right words to express themselves, so the player must read them as they must read each other.

Still looks great 7 years later, especially running in HDR at 1800p on the Pro. The framerate dips a little here and there, but it’s still pretty consistently around 50fps at the worst of times, and there’s of course still the option to run it at 1080p 60fps if you’d prefer. The only thing that’s really aged much is the character models, but even those are better than a lot of early PS4 games.

The gameplay is really solid, much better than the Uncharted games I find. The stealth is a little barebones and confusing but otherwise it’s a really solid action-horror tinged cover shooter, playing like a toned-down version of Resident Evil 4, complete with quick turn, limited ammo offset by enemies who drop more the less you have, incremental weapon and character upgrades, and inventory management. I really like the crafting here, it forces you to plan ahead to some extent and doesn’t allow you to hoard resources too much, so you need some foresight into what you’re gonna need. It’s not perfect but I really enjoy it, and it makes for some really tense gameplay in the 4v4 multiplayer matches as well. The Last of Us is not a perfect game, but it is a landmark title for the medium that pushes linear AAA shooter campaigns to new levels of nuance in storytelling, and plays way better than you’d expect.

spoilers

At first glance, this seems like a largely frivolous mashup, the Pride & Prejudice & Zombies of gaming, a modern successor to old b-movie fodder like 1966’s Billy the Kid Versus Dracula. Look a little deeper, though, and it’s clear that Undead Nightmare’s Weird West skin is a vessel for further analysis of the western as a genre. The ending in particular is quite damning of the whole idea of the western expansion and Manifest Destiny, the lingering effects of colonialism plunging the world into chaos. By the end, Marston returns the stolen Aztec mask which caused the zombie outbreak, and all seems well. However, the grave-robber character Seth rushes back into the crypt and steals the tribal artifact once again, reigniting the zombie plague. Even when there’s an easy, obvious solution to the problem, the settler population continues to desecrate native cultures and fuck everything up all over again, in a seemingly inescapable cycle.

One of the most striking moments in this expansion is the Sasquatch hunt sidequest. A farmer tells you that there’s a bunch of Sasquatches going around eating babies. Marston sets off in search of them, killing the mythical creatures without much second thought, as they are other and look more like animals than humans. Once you get to the final Sasquatch, though, he begs you to kill him, speaking quite fluently and maligning that his entire species has been hunted down and killed. It’s terrifying how easy it is here to dehumanise another group and wipe them out, a deeply disturbing allegory for the treatment of Native Americans throughout the western era (which continues today in a myriad of ways). It’s a totally surreal scenario, yet its underlying theme is just as real and relevant as anything the main game provided.

Gameplay wise, the basic mechanics are about the same as the main game: you have an array of bolt-action, lever-action, and semi-automatic weaponry, along with a couple of throwable explosives. The third person, auto-lock targeting system where headshots are top priority plays out basically the same as Grand Theft Auto V, aside from the different arsenal. There’s also a bullet time feature, as with the main game, but here you get it at max level from the start, encouraging you to use it far more. There’s a couple of new weapons, but most of them are in fairly short supply and don’t shake up the formula too drastically.

The other main difference from the base game in this respect is the zombies themselves. They’re slow, lumbering things that walk out in the open. Cover is basically useless here, instead you’ll be running and gunning your way through zombie hordes. The emphasis on headshots is even greater, as body shots don’t do much to keep the zombies down. I actually find this combat a lot more enjoyable than the main game, though it’s a tad too easy most of the time. The game claims that ammo is scarce and you should conserve your bullets, but beyond the first town or two that was never really an issue for me.

The main structure of the game involves you roaming from town to town, clearing out the zombies to help the survivors and then doing a variety of sidequests for them. There are a few “main” missions, and in typical Rockstar fashion some of these are quite heavily scripted, but overall this looser format gives the player far more gameplay freedom than their other recent titles. It does get a little repetitive at times, though, especially once you get to Mexico and there’s not really much further amping up the stakes. The structure of the narrative as a whole feels somewhat slapdash and thrown together, leaning heavily on established relationships from the base game, giving each major player a quick quest or two, and then on to the next town.

Even though there’s plenty of great individual moments here, they don’t really form much of a coherent whole, at least from a character or plot perspective. The one thing that ties it all together is how most of the survivors, instead of banding together, dig themselves even deeper into their own prejudices, blaming the apocalypse on everything from Mexicans to Jews to African Americans and beyond. It’s an eerie echo of increasing tensions in the world right now, decades of prejudice and mistreatment once again bubbling to the surface of popular culture.

It’s also quite entertaining to see how fed up with all this shit Marston is, he even deliberately lets a couple of racist dickheads get eaten by zombies when he easily could have saved them, and threatens people at gunpoint several times. Unlike the main game, where he was framed as a redeemable character trying to be a better person, he’s just totally done and letting his violent instincts takeover, and this characterization fits way better with Rockstar’s misanthropic satire. There were many annoying characters who I just wanted to pull a gun on and get it over with in the main campaign, and it’s very satisfying to see Marston finally line up with that (does this make me a bad person?).

If the main game drove home that by 1911, the west is pretty much dead and the cowboy life became totally unsustainable, this explores the one way in which cowboys could’ve been relevant again: a total stop in societal progress by means of a zombie apocalypse. As grim and fed up as Marston becomes, there’s a perverse pleasure in returning to the gun-slinging and horseback-riding ways of old that’s not lost on him, nor the player (nor on Rockstar, it would seem, who had to rewind time itself to for Red Dead Redemption 2 to be possible). The apocalypse destroys the very world which Marston, Dutch, and co are hopelessly railing against, giving them one last chance to be outlaws again, even if it costs the entire world.

(spoiler warning)

Rockstar’s second western, a (very loose) sequel of sorts to Red Dead Revolver, follows John Marston, a retired outlaw tasked with tracking down and killing/capturing his former gang members, the government holding his family hostage until the deed is done. Through the course of the 20-30 hour adventure, Marston completes bounties, plays lots of poker, gets involved in the Mexican Revolution, kills hundreds of people, herds cattle, picks flowers, meets a bunch of colorful characters, breaks horses, and more (depending on how much of the side content one chooses to do). It’s a formula that should be familiar to anyone who has played an open world game from the past 10 years, with basic shop, sidequest, money, and hunting systems to flesh out the game’s fairly simplistic gunplay.

Visually, the game often looks stunning, especially at sunset, and the cutscenes are very well framed, showing an understanding of the language of film/video beyond a lot of its contemporaries. It runs like ass on ps3, though, and the fairly zoomed out third-person camera combined with the heavy aliasing made it a bit hard to see stuff in the distance. It’s still quite impressive on the whole, though, especially considering it’s nearly 10 years old.

The writing is mostly pretty good, though Rockstar’s tendency towards satire makes it a bit obnoxious at times. Their cynicism works better when it encapsulates all the characters, I find, but this one goes to great pains to show Marston as the straight man, a contrast to all the crazy weirdos he runs into, and the lack of sincerity in the supporting cast does get a bit grating at times. The sound design is absolutely excellent, though. The booming thunder and crackling lightning of storms is some of the best I’ve heard in a game, and little touches like the voice actors yelling their lines for horseback sequences shows a high level of foresight for the aural experience here.

It seems that, though the story presents John Marstron as an outlaw with a heart of gold (which is also how I tried to play the game), the game design is instead aiming for the freedom to do whatever evil outlaw shenanigans you want, from stealing wagons to murdering random strangers. A lot of the game’s prompts and combat systems are highly contextual and assume things for you, which led to Mr. Marston doing some despicable shit I had no intention of. The game wants you to be able to play it any way you want, but because of its imprecise controls I ended up getting the opposite effect.

A man runs to me, yelling that his friend is about to be hanged by a gang, having done nothing wrong. I climb on my majestic white stallion and follow him to the site. The bandits are seemingly ready for us, and a hail of gunfire greets me before I have time to react. I do the natural thing and draw my rifle, pointing the camera towards the outlaws. I hold down the left trigger and the aiming reticule snaps to the man next to me. I pull the right trigger to fire, almost an unconscious reflex, and the man who brought me there searching for help is dead. Hoping to at least save his friend and complete my objective, I open fire on the bandits, my screen running red with my own blood as my health quickly depletes. During this vastly outnumbered gunfight, text appears in the top left of the screen stating that the innocent man has now been hanged, and is dead. I finish the fight and ride away from a pile of blood and bodies, all the worse for my involvement.

Once, I went to take a ride on caravan, this game’s fast travel system, but since I stood on the driver side and not the passengers’, the “drive” prompt led me to immediately sit down in the same space as the driver, after which the game realised that two people weren’t supposed to occupy the same space and triggered an animation of my throwing the guy out. Shocked, I got out of the caravan and ran after the driver in hopes of making amends, but the game gave me no such option. Then, I holstered all my weapons and walked peacefully over to the sheriff to turn myself in (which is a mechanic in this game). His deputies, whom I’d completed several quests with, showed no such mercy and opened fire. Full of bullet holes, I ran for cover. A deputy snuck up behind me, and a “bribe” prompt appeared. I gave that one guy 10$ and the entire thing was forgotten. This had no impact on any future interactions in the town. I did lose 400 “honor” points, though.

At a certain point I just gave up and went with the mayhem, but it runs somewhat counter to what the narrative tries to say. We’re often reminded that Marston killed lots of people, but you never really see that side of him, pretty much everything he does in this game is at the behest of someone else, in effort to get back to his family and give up the outlaw life. At one point quite late in the game, the antagonist, Dutch, takes a hostage and then Marston lets him go to protect the hostage, even though I got a hostage killed a few minutes earlier in that same mission lol.

Beyond these criminal offenses, I’ve run into a couple other minor annoyances in how the game expects me to play it. For instance, to capture people when on bounties or helping someone get back stolen goods you’re supposed to lasso the target, then get off your horse, hogtie them, and then throw them on your horse and bring them to the quest giver. Now, the first time I ran into one of these quests I didn’t know that, so I just lassoed him and slowly dragged him behind me, being careful not to hurt the poor bastard too much. I then brought him directly in front of the quest giver and stopped. Nothing happened, neither of them reacted, no cutscene was triggered, all because I didn’t deliver them in the order of operations the game expected me to. Eventually I figured it out, but it was a process where my train of thought was ”hmm, how did Rockstar’s designers expect me to complete this task”, rather than engaging with the game’s world.

The biggest surprise for me was the extended 5 act structure of the plot. The game could’ve easily ended on Marston returning to his family, but instead it delves into the relationship with his family, fleshing out his wife and son far beyond anything I expected to see here. They could’ve been just plot devices to set off all the cowboy action, but instead they become fleshed out characters in their own right. It’s by far the most sincere portion of the game, and probably my favourite story section as a result. From God of War to The Last of Us and beyond, video game dads have become a pretty popular trend as of late, but this game did it before it was cool, arguably setting off that trend in the first place, and the epilogue brings the narrative full circle. Red Dead Redemption is a very messy game, but despite all its flaws I did still enjoy my time with it.