Uninspired, bullet-sponge enemies, flat boss fights, an annoying "hold button to use a power to do a simple thing" time-wasting mechanic that AAA games love to do for some reason, and a pretty empty storyline (until the end) which frustratingly does nothing more than the base game to set up a sequel. It's a bland character study with blander gameplay, though because it reuses the base game's locations, a few flashes of that goofy magic remains, and if nothing else, it provides some closure to Village's somewhat abrupt ending of the Winters' storyline. Fails as an action game, middling as a horror game, and maybe slightly above average as a character piece (sadly), but if you have any interest in RE7 or *8* lore, it has some nice touches.

I'm probably wrong because it's been a while, but I don't remember the main games playing this poorly. The guns feel like pea shooters, aiming is floaty and inconsistent, and the level design, as with all Naughty Dog games, is fundamentally horrible. They have a problem with designing the world around aesthetics and throwing in gameplay elements as an afterthought. (I remember so many sections from The Last of Us Part II being obviously planted directly from concept art, which looks very pretty but feels over-composed, which completely breaks the immersion and makes for bad gameplay). This is why people joke that Naughty Dog should just make movies instead of games; they clearly value the cinematic experience over satisfying mechanics. Here, though, those impulses seem somehow worse, because all we get are open rooms randomly cluttered with waist-high cover and streams of enemies coming from all directions. It's actually crazy how many times I was frustrated by the gameplay in just three hours.

But it's not all bad. Stealthing around an abandoned mall is fun, and using the bow, because it's organically lower impact and is built into the stealth gameplay, feels a lot more natural than the guns.

The story is good; Naughty Dog certainly deserve some credit for convincingly bringing prestige Hollywood drama storytelling to the AAA game space (although whether that has ultimately been a net positive for the medium is something I'll never be able to agree with). But it needs to be said that, against genuine prestige movie/TV screenwriting, the dialogue of their games is average at the absolute best. This is clear every time the HBO adaptation, which is generally quite good, takes lines directly from the game; it always feels pretty hokey. Still, it's functional; the performances, the art direction, the story itself—these are the only things that make The Last of Us worthwhile while we trudge through the middling (or in this case, mostly bad) gameplay to see what happens next.

A confluence of 15 years of the worst tendencies of AAA Western game design brought to bear on a linear, formulaic, frustrating slog of a cinematic action game. There's no denying the allure of a game this invested in its production value (though I wouldn't exactly call it polished), but even its hyper-budget storytelling is hampered by its lethargic pace. This is felt especially with its one-shot cutscene gimmick, which adds an inexplicable amount of dead air between lines of dialogue, and constant poorly disguised loading screens where you crouch or sprint your way through empty corridors while characters ramble superficial exposition in your ear. Ideally, the combat would feel impactful and the puzzles engaging to make the time spent interacting with the game's systems interesting, but the former is painfully unsatisfying (the Leviathan Axe feels like its made of rubber and the Blades of Chaos are only good for inflicting papercuts) and the latter is just simplistic, empty padding solved by sidekick characters' (distracting, badly written) dialogue the second you come upon them anyway. It took eight hours to get to the first big, epic boss arena with distinctive mechanics—a much more common feature in the first game. Every moment made me question my enjoyment of the original, yet there were enough cool things to keep me playing for nearly 11 hours, hoping those things would become more consistent. I imagine they might in the latter half of the game, but I'd rather spend my time somewhere else at this point.