Some really, absolutely top notch writing and quest design in places, and the setting is dynamite, but unfortunately those nuggets of fun are embedded in what is kind of a big janky mess of a game to actually engage with moment to moment. The ratio of time spent engaging with the great writing to time spent walking from place to place and engaging with janky, not particularly fun combat in which Cass is always getting her damn fool self killed is just entirely out of whack and it made me feel like I had to do chores in order to get to the part of the game I actually like.

"is it over yet?" Is the phrase that kept going through my head. Things feel dragged out. There are interesting ideas here, but overall this was tedious past the first level. I had missed the crucible not because of the ability to instantly remove a threat but just for the sake of being able to speed up the encounters. Every archvile and spirit didn't didn't make think "oh what an interesting challenge" it made me think "boy this is gonna take some time". Maybe I will enjoy it more on the replay now that I'm familiar with it, but this was kind of a miserable slog, while the base game to me feels masterful.

Utterly dreadful experience, one of the worst titles put out by AAA companies especially taking into account the conditions the game was made under, the amount of effort placed into it and the money Naughty Dog and Sony threw at this project.

One of the few things it is good at is using its photorealistic 3D graphics and animation effectively as a veneer to hide the fact that the world Neil Druckmann and Halley Gross have imagined is laughably (and ironically) one dimensional. Every person you come across is out to murder you, and you are out to murder everyone. Almost everyone in the world TLOU2 imagines has the same motivation: Kill. Is there any interesting interrogation into why they are like that? No.

For a game that they have marketed as one about 'hate' and 'violence', it sure doesn't want to explore why everyone that inhabits its world shares the same bloodlust as its protagonists. It just assumes that everyone is born with that propensity for violence without rhyme or reason, which is both laughable and I find it a lot funnier thinking about how Druckmann and Gross are begging you to extend your suspension of disbelief that far.

Abby's arms are good. The juxtaposition between how they effectively made Ellie gameplay-wise the Predator and how they made Abby basically Dutch from the same movie is one of the few good things about it, even if it's unintentional because it's a game that wants to sit you down and talk to you about violence, no matter how cool the exploding arrow works in the game.

Bad game, one of the worst in recent memory.

The original game is one of my favorite games of all time, but this is pretty ok.

The new combat system is serviceable, but quickly falls apart as it expects more from you since enemies just become damage sponges. The game also suffers from padding issues, as it has to draw out what was originally a 3-4 section in the original into its own game. Unfortunately, this extra time wasn't used as great as I wanted it to be, as instead of being used to developed Midgar, it's mostly used via needlessly longer dungeons and backtracking. However, when time is used to flesh out the world, as less frequent as I would've wanted, it's fantastic.

The writing and seeing FF7 in pretty graphics are the main draws, and in those aspects, this game excels.