TLOU is painfully mediocre. Except for Ellie, everything else in it is too aimless, too simple, too cynical, has no replay value whatsoever and writing is too weak to care about it. The most of the game feels like a filler and it does not even have fun set-pieces with its cinema-wannabe presentation. Strange to see how people craving towards full freedom in video games make such an exception for this game.

I had the highest amount of technical issues while playing this game than any other one - plot-important doors not opening, FPS being very unstable, walking animation being nullified and characters starting to move in T poses, textures not loading to the point of me just standing in the void and so on and so forth - but I would not say it was anything significant, as I got used to FPS and the bugs disappear from the game moment you reload from the last checkpoint

The Last of Us is immersive but merely on a micro level, with very small details that people usually do not really care about while playing games, aside of companionship with Ellie that feels very natural and there is a lot of effort put to flesh out their dynamic... and generally facial expressions and body language is good to capitalize on it further. Although conversations themselves in general are good in how they flow, as the game does not over-explain itself and establishes the kind of relationship several characters may have with one another, as well as making some neat wordplay (such as Ellie asking Joel about the gunfire and him answer 'cicadas', meaning both the group of people and how short-lived the actual cicadas by nature are).

Meanwhile, literally everything else is very lacking - such as, only having three type of monsters or fighting against fodders (who also have attempts to be humanized, but they all feel like one character anyway... hell the moment you arrive to your brother, you start seeing girls and generally more individuality in the camp, but every enemy (bar one girl in the ending) is the same face maniac guy) in cover shooters and that makes it super repetitive. In the whole game, you really only get caught by fodders in some small ares and trying to deal with them by killing or running away/stealth (You basically either repeat some simple stealth stuff or just run around to not get hit...). At least, these things have weight behind them, with heavy gunfire, close-range weapons that can be used only once most of the time, scarce ammo, how deadly the enemies are despite their small numbers and how destructive the playable characters are instead of being un-diagnosed schizophreniacs.

I did not particularly care about the opposing A.I. and they were coming off goofy whenever they tried to come at me bare handed in the middle of two-sided gunfire, even when I had more than Ellie as an ally. A.I. for the companions are good (or, at least, convincing enough for me), though and they do not really do anything that breaks the immersion despite them performing things that usually warrant flow-breaking cutscenes even in many other PS3 games and is generally convincing and entertaining, even if most of the things they do are predetermined and they even are invisible amidst the stealth, I still like it because of how puzzles would not work for a lonely brooding character, communication in the fights, delivery of some items and them being visible in stealth scenes would make the game way too insufferable.

That said, the game not having co-op option only switching POV with Ellie in a very convenient moments really does feel like a cop-out, because Ellie can disappear anytime from Joel's vision and then spawned wherever the story wants her to be. I would say RE: Revelations 2 (even if its nowhere near as immersive as TLOU - but that is not the point I am making right here, so let us ignore it) did a better job at it and it also gave each of the supporting characters different roles.

Puzzles as a breathing room? Haha, you literally just drag ladder/'boat' from one place to another obvious place like 15 times and that's it, every pathway is almost identical. It is mostly used for mundane interactions to bond the characters further, so here is that.

Of course, it has zero replay value because it is trying too much to come off as a movie, but is not good enough even at that. You can even kill zombies just by punching them. Not only that, but it virtually has no story - seasons are basically episodic story-lines with abrupt and forced plot advancements, to the point of feeling like fillers because they barely (if at all) have any importance and get immediately forgotten, making the story drag a lot despite all of these story-lines being rushed as hell (you waste whole game to get to one place and you only have one scene there... there is a story-line where Ellie gets kidnapped by a faction, Ellie kills some guy in their camp and the plot-line immediately ends in the middle of nowhere... There is also a guy and his brother you befriend, but the moment they finish their job in the plot, brother gets turned into a zombie out-of-nowhere and his older brother immediately kills himself - all this getting zero foreshadowing, internally or externally).

And there is also a weird habit of cutting the scene and immediately skipping the time, dropping as in tonally different scene the moment after something supposedly emotional happens in the story. Prominent example of this being the very prologue - first, story wants us to get attached to father and his daughter with a speed of light and even cheaply plays on the expectation by giving as 3 minute gameplay section for the daughter. 10 minutes later she dies at the hand of the soldier, who is spawned out-of-nowhere and who gets completely unjustified order and he gets confused as if he was a teenager (because that's within the characteristics for such an important job, right?). Then instead of seeing Joel's grief to at least emphasize to his grief by his own very emotions to connect with the scene, story simply does not let us and skips 20 years of his life. Needless to say, both pacing and structure of this story is quite unappealing to me personally.

Aside of Ellie, not only none of the characters give you much reason to either care about them or find interesting and be intrigued about their placement in the overarching plot, but even main characters themselves do not care about them or get affected - Joel's inseparable best friend? Dies a meaningless death at the start and Joel does not even raise an eyebrow (well he does a bit more than that, but its just not enough to be convincing)... Ellie gets assaulted? Kills someone for the first time? Someone she befriended turned into a zombie in front of her AGAIN? Well too bad, no reaction (aside of Joel being proud of her...), in the next scene she will start whistling or something I guess... Like yeah, it is mature and all with how selfish and survival oriented everyone is as the result of civilization's fall and how even the main characters can commit bad deeds without feeling bad about it, but it is just too cynical when there are not exceptions made for people they have established attachment and thus very dry for me to experience. Joel only really gets mad and tortures the random fodders, so the full potential to communicate is not reached. Oh and characters also change their minds pretty fast as well - you have Joel who does not want to take Ellie with him because he trusts his brother more than himself (that was a nice bit of confession, I must admit) and fights with her, but in the next minute he takes Ellie back... Joel's brother does not want to help Joel because he does not want to risk his family, but then sees Joel killing people and talking to Ellie and immediately changes his mind...

Also, you can't really try to come off hyper realistic and, at the same time, let some 50 years old guy (do not know his actual age, but you get the point), who can't even make proper jumps and whines about his age, to massacre an army equivalent of soldiers in their own base AND then allow him to somehow slip through the rest of the army in their own building with predictable exit routes while he is carrying a child with him. You also can't make the girl 'easy to track' in the middle of the camp full of people hunting her down and, at the same time, let her get away completely scot-free (funnily, the story-line ends before they even get out from that place). So, basically, Ellie (virtually alone) not only ruined the whole camp, but did that without any consequences whatsoever. Hell, they never get injured at someone else's hand throughout the whole game, Joel only gets injured once and that's just because he drops on something. That is not a characteristic of a plausible cinematic experience (well, not counting blockbusters), but good old FPS shooter.

And the story is full of such convenient developments in favor of main characters - like in Winter, we have a smart guy who deduced just by girls' impressive skills and need for medicine, that she was with Joel and trailed the girl, BUT somehow, his whole camp ONLY came after Ellie and completely forgot Joel's existence... - while everyone else are just always suffer heavy consequences - so even if they are not really winning anything, I still was not really invested in their conflicts, because at least they were not losing things, in comparison to everyone else - the ending was probably the only exception (and it standing out highlights how the rest of the story does not have much effort put into it), because you get like 1-2 tapes (which is quite very little) where you can see the people you are killing are struggling too and doing something for the better, while we have selfish Joel lying to even Ellie. That being said, game being so cynical and dead AND still trying to make you believe that a sacrifice of one girl WITH NO GUARANTEE OF SUCCESS can have any worthwhile effect on the world is iffy to me, given the damage seems irreversible and I fail to grasp what exactly would Ellie's sacrifice fix. Although, that probably makes the ordeal better, rather than dampening its quality.

TLOU is fine in terms of showing the consequences over the world, what the zombie attack ha done to society and an individual, but the presence of something that would deny the zombie virus and how denying people of that miraculous chance is not provided.

Already much prefer TLOU2 to it and I have not even played it