Ok yes it's not worth the price, but I borrowed it anyway so I can't comment on that. There are two types of remakes, first are ones that try to take what the original did and say 'what if it was made now', keeping what people loved about the original but completely refreshing it for the modern day, for instance Resident Evil 2. The other type is what this game is going for, to give you the experience you remember having when you played the original, and half the time it actually works really well, there are times I forget I'm playing a ground up remake and I'm just playing The Last of Us, what was one of my favorite games for many years. Those times are whenever it's night time in the game, or whenever the characters are in dark and dingy places like sewers and tunnels. During the day, it's a different story, but why?

The team managed to capture the fantastic art design of the original game perfectly, keeping everything precisely as it was most of the time, but adding extra flare and details occasionally both big and small, so why do I not think it works? It's a really simple, little thing that encompasses a huge amount of what is presented, lighting. PS3-PS4 era naughty dog, yes I'm just talking Uncharted and Last of us, were masters of artistic and utility lighting usage. They revolutionised how lighting was used to lead the player around the levels in their games, and the use of lighting to create color, contrast and vibrance in natural, diegetic ways is unmatched in things like the PS4 uncharted games and the original last of us. This game ignores and sometimes completely disregards all of that. As we move into a time of advanced lighting techniques and ray-tracing, this artistic baked-in and pre-calculated lighting usage looks to be a thing of the past, but is it possible we're losing some of the artists touch from the past? These are great questions, but ones for a different day, because as far as I can tell this game does use baked in and pre-calculated lighting, almost identically rendered and generated to the PS4 'remastered' version of the game. It's an active and upsetting decision then that the team decided to suck the life and personality from huge portions of this game, turning the oranges and yellows and reds of the first section of the game to creams and greys and browns. It's a real shame for a game as subtly (and unsubtly) breathtakingly beautiful and horrifying as this, but I'll be the first to admit, for most people it's probably not even a consideration when buying.

On the gameplay front it's… the last of us, this is where the 'feel like the game you remember playing' mindset comes in, the animations transition beautifully smoothly, something naughty dog perfected in TLOU2, and enemy AI is greatly improved, in fact maybe TOO improved, in grounded mode it feels almost unfair, and the famous fist-lazers feel like they are utilised more often and more smoothly than in any previous version of the game. I do, however, finding myself wondering if maybe just a couple of things from the sequel could have squeezed their way in here, I'm not asking for Joel to be as agile as the characters in that game, hoisting himself over 7 foot tall walls and crawling around in prone, but it's not like you would have had to redesign the whole game just to add the dodge button, please ND, just give Joel a little tiny dodge button, if Abby and Ellie can do it then Joel-y boy can! Again, I'll admit, this isn't a real issue, just something that kept coming up in my mind.

And other than those two things… this is definitely the last of us. It's still just as great as it was, and whilst the smothering of the original art design that's present in this game does make the pretentious gamer part of me want to go 'no this isn't the REAL last of us experience', I'm not going to act like an actual baby and say that. This is an absolutely worthy last of us experience that's an impressive technical feat, bringing one of the best games of the PS3 to the 4k HDR world. And yes, it's not worth the amount they're charging.

Reviewed on Sep 24, 2022


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