There is so much wrong with this game. The facial animations are wonky at best, the story makes no sense, the same boring areas are reused ad nauseam. Despite all this however, the game remains fun.

For whatever reason I just wanted to keep playing, it felt good to climb up a big tower and kill hundreds of enemies like it was nothing. The set pieces are cool, the environments are pretty (the first time you see them), and the voice acting is great.

It's so far from great but its an above average introduction to a staple series in gaming.

It's crazy how this game is better than the first one in every way. The shooting is more fun, the climbing is more fun, the story is more interesting, everything is just better.

The best part about this game is the variety of the environments you get to explore. In the first game you were trapped on one stupid island running through the same stupid jungles and the same stupid caves. In this game you go from Tibetan mountains, to an art museum in Istanbul, to Borneo, back to Tibet in like the first four levels.

The story still kinda sucks but it's the national treasure kind of stupid that you just don't see anymore. In my opinion it does enough but thats about it, I was consistently interested, which in a game like this is pretty much all you can ask for. Plus getting to actually play through the lost city in this game after getting blue-balled in the last game was great. The villain was still lame though and his boss fight sucked.

Also the puzzles were still really bad. They were better than the ones in the last game but they still basically all boil down to turning something to make it match how it looks in Drake's journal, straight 0 IQ shit. The shooting sections also get kinda tedious. All of the big set pieces were awesome though, they really cashed the cinematic check that the story wrote.

Overall this game is really good. It improves on every single aspect of the first game, but it still feels too shallow to give it anything higher than a 7.

This game is hard for me to review, because parts of it are executed flawlessly and other parts feel like they were developed by people who have never played a video game before.

Like ok, obviously the game looks amazing. You really feel like you're going on a journey across America. It's almost odyssey-esque, with every stop along the way feeling unique, with it's own quirks. The attention to detail is just absurd, it's crazy how much effort must have been put into this.

The story is really good too, in parts anyway. The dialogue is great and the acting is phenomenal, especially for a video game. The overall story however, literally hits every single zombie cliche ever. It's almost funny how obvious it is, with that being said though I was still into the story because of how well fleshed out the characters were.

These things are all great (amazing even!) but the gameplay hits some serious hiccups along the way. The main combat is pretty fun, stealthing around and managing your equipment is satisfying. I also respected the game for having the guts to let you just walk around and explore towns, these were some of the best parts of the game for me. There are just so. many. pointless. tasks. Like it's kind of a meme by now, but god the amount of ladders you need carry is infuriating. And by the twentieth time I had to push Ellie across a body of water on a raft, I was ready to punch a hole in my tv. The boring, annoying parts of this game do serious damage to the overall product and really drag it down for me. I don't care too much about replayability in games but the thought of having to play the last of us again is nauseating.

Overall the last of us does way more things right than it does wrong and is probably a must play, maybe, I can't decide.

Oh also the music is really good.