I finished it earlier today.
I think the greatest bit of praise, but also the biggest criticism, I can assign to it is the fact that I found it very fun. As a matter of fact I found it to be the most enjoyable third person shooter I've gotten to play since Max Payne 3. However, if it really was Neil Druckmann's intention to make the player question video game violence on a moment to moment basis, he completely missed the mark.
That's simply not possible with those specific mechanics. Not when it's so easy and so satisyfying to shoot, stab, choke and punch your way through countless waves of zombies, soldiers and cultists. The fact enemies often yell out the names of their comrades when you kill them is kind of cute, the first few times, but wears off very quickly. That's the issue here. If you want to humanize enemy characters and question violence as core gameplay, you'd have to completely rethink the mechanical framework. Then every single combat encounter would have to be threatening, every single enemy would need to be characterized to some extent and every single fight would need to have an emotional impact.
See, that's the core issue with the game, or rather, with how it's trying to be "artistic". It substitutes actual emotional weight with "grit". And it's definitely gritty. At points almost comically so. People go through terrible things and do terrible things to each other but it's all so closely tied to the mechanical language of exciting action games and the visual language of exciting action movies, so afraid to be actually unpleasant as an experience, that it's never quite able to grow beyond banality. It's honestly a bit frustrating to see. All those absurd production values and all that lush presentation for a story that effectively boils down to two grimly determined meatheads crawling through the dirt and shooting dozens of generic soldiers and zombies to settle a score over the death of their respective daddies. I think it was the point when you were playing Ellie, chasing a single woman through a hospital with an axe in your hand like Nicholson in The Shining where I thought "This is complete shlock, isn't it?"
Abbie's storyline is kind of better, mostly on the virtue of her being an overall more likeable character and, most of all, having a more likeable supporting cast. The whole thing with Lev seemed to me like a bit to overt an attempt to recreate the relationship between Joel and Ellie from the first game but overall I can at least say I cared about the things she went through and I was sad when most of that supporting cast inevitably got killed.
So, here we are, it's a lavishly produced, excellently acted, mechanically smooth epic about what's basically the worlds most drawn out catfight. If I had to rate it on gameplay alone, it'd be a 9 out of 10, if I had to rate the story it'd be a 7/10 (and even that would be much lower if the presentation wasn't top notch), it evens out at an 8/10, which I think is a very good score. It's not my favourite game of the year (That's Final Fantasy 7 Remake) but I had a good time playing it. It had two scenes that particularly stuck with me, one's the one in the hospital I already mentioned, because it was very silly, and the other one was Abby breaking a guys neck with her thighs, because it gave me an erection. But as much as I enjoyed the presentation and the combat and as much as i may fantasize about Abby holding me in her strong arms at night, if anyone tries to convince you it's some great artistic accomplishment for the medium... yeah, no. It doesn't hold a candle to even last years Death Stranding, much less games like Pathologic 2, Silent Hill 2, Silent Hill Shattered Memories or Killer 7 when it comes to genuine artistic merit. When it comes to actually being a fun game though, yeah, I guess I take it over those.
www.polygon.com
