Borrowed a copy before a relative sold it back off for a run through.
Starting with the quick brush on the gameplay. Well, its the same gameplay you had in the first one. Still feels kind of sluggish and stilted all in all. The big addition was the jump button, so we could add terrible platforming segments on (which further exacerbates some sections with the level design being fairly unclear on where you're meant to be going).
Our psedo-survival crafting/scavenging elements also remain unchanged. Even though they make even less sense at this point. The bulk of the game is set this time around organized settlement areas that are mostly self-sufficient (in some unexplained way). Everything in a raidus should already be looted, and for this settlements to exist, they'd have to be producing their own volumes of equipment. So besides bogging down the pacing and tension to start with, its also nonsensical. Hell, the start of the game even jams this right out when people are going on patrols and specifically being armed for their mission with only a half-dozen bullets.
Delving into the story, if this were a movie, we'd be wondering who went in and did a complete recut or reshoots. The game is constantly cutting away from its main narrative to flashbacks (most with Joel, which furthers the comparison to reshoots to add more of a popular character into a film). This basically sabotages Abby's meant-to-sympathize arcs as well. She gets introduced as the sociopath who went across multiple states to go torture and kill someone who has more or less rehabiliated (rather then presenting any kind of challenge like simply rolling up to Jackson and telling them he may have prevented a vaccine and murdered a hospital full of people (granted, even the doctor pulled a weapon on him first, and the rest were actively shooting at him).
Then hours later we get a third of a game worth of content trying to humanize this. Which is its own kind of mish-mash. She has no problem dragging her pregnant friend into danger apparently, despite this being one of the few recurring points that only the bad people kill pregnant people, and slips in sleeping with the father of said child in as well. Alongside all the spree of murder and violence that basically sets her as just kind of a hypocrite in her own mission because she runs around killing just as many possible fathers, etc.
Since our main theme is a through line of revenge being a fools errand, and only by putting the violent cycle down does one get the "good" outcomes that Abby (and Dina, arguably) do. Right through to the end we're still murdering people left and right though. Our last batch of villains (much like last time around) are given stock irredeemable qualities specifically to dehumanize them (do not take this as an endorsement of slavers, or in TLoU! where it was cannibals/possibly pedophile) so that last burst of killing after this theme is presented directly doesn't count and all.
OF course, we don't really get much conclusion. Abby not killing Dina and Ellie still is encountering all sorts of problems, and didn't even stop them going after her again. Ellie not killing Abby just dead ends, we don't see any positive outcome for her either. Tommy seems to have the best outcome of anyone, living with his wife in a safe settlement, and he's the one who drags Ellie back into the revenge thing, he never gave it up but couldn't physically do it anymore. Dina gets out of the game, but with the father of her child dead, and having lost her long-term partner in Ellie, in the process, as well as presumably having to leave the safety of Jackson to do so.
