This review should be subtitled "Why do you keep writing about this game if you hate it so much?" and in the words of Khan from the second big-screen Star Trek outing I would reply "It tasks me....it tasks me!"
After finally figuring out how to avoid paying full price for a game I already own (thanks Sony for making it REALLY EASY to upgrade for PS4 owners who already own a physical copy of the game), I downloaded the whopping 96GB of "The Last of Us Part II Remastered". You know, the game I previously moaned about in this very blog. The lure of pretty graphics and smoothed out framerates will do that to a man.
And we were off and running (after 3 hours of downloading on my crappy home broadband). Back in the familiar territory of a ruined world where mushrooms reign supreme and every single character is a worthless piece of shit / amazing redemptive human being depending on how you look at it.
At this point I must state that there may be spoilers ahead, so if you've never played or completed the game, look away now or go googling for elf porn as usual.
Still with us? Cool. Then off we go.
Let's talk about the technical side of what we're seeing. These remasters are OK up to a point, and straight away you start to see a lot of subtle tweaks to lighting and framerates that feel like a real light touch in terms of providing anything different to the PS4 Pro experience. I don't honestly remember the game looking that bad on either a standard PS4 or the Pro, but switching back to the original version the main thing you notice is the shininess in the PS5 remaster. A lot more light bouncing off stuff, a lot more oozy mud effects and some delightfully crispy looking snow.
Characters look about the same. I've not read any other reviews of what's been enhanced or tweaked, but think of this as a tiny engine upgrade for a game that wasn't really that ugly in the first place and you're on the right track. PS5 trigger haptics and other effects are used well, but again unless you were a complete dummy and got rid of your original copy of the game, there's nothing here that says "I'm worth full price" so nabbing this for a tenner was about the only reason I bothered.
The game itself - you know the story by now. Grumpy teen, shambling father figure, lot of revenge stuff, and a woman who - for all intents and purposes - could just be a Sherman Tank wearing a woman's skin. I have played and completed this game several times and for this play through I thought I'd put myself through the torture of every cut scene rather than skipping them (you can't skip the guitar bits unfortunately, and god did I hate those!) and it just made me hate all the characters even more.
Joel - Selfish old coot who thought he was doing the right thing by denying humanity of a possible cure for the cordyceps by whisking Ellie away before they could operate on her, kill her, and possibly make an antidote.
Ellie herself - the epitome of an entitled brat who spends the entire game being thoroughly fucking miserable at every opportunity, even when she finds love.
Abby - Mrs Tank. Virtually indestructible aside from the fact that she likes to be done like a bloke by her utterly annoying ex-boyfriend she's still hung up on. To Abby's credit, she is the only character who displays a scrap of humanity by sparing Ellie's life - three times at least, and saving a bunch of randos she meets along the way.
Owen - Oh man, this dog. Can't keep his dick out of any of the female characters for more than two seconds. Impregnates one, attempts to impregnate another, gets shot and everyone cheers and claps since he's the most annoying doucheclown on the planet.
Mel - Owen's pregnant girlfriend. Christ almighty, you could boil piss with one of her boggle-eyed glances.
Dina - Ellie's girlfriend. Cocky, annoying, but again probably one of the few characters who has a shred of humanity but sadly fell in love with the world's whiniest chick.
Tommy - Joel's brother who basically seems to only exist to change his mind about what's important. One minute being totally oblivious to the fact that his brother had his head stoved in with a golf club then later existing only to fuck everyone's shit up in search for revenge.
God I hate them all, and I hate Naughty Dog for what they did with this game, basically taking characters that you developed some kind of bond with in the first game, only to completely screw all that up in the second game. The idea that you split your playtime between Abby and Ellie was a really dumb move (at one point you take control of Abby - with the express intent of killing Ellie - as the game shifts around leaping between the past, the present and the future until you get to the last part of the game just wishing your PS5 would irreperably mangle the disk so you can never play it again. The last hour is a slog, and I do mean a SLOG!
What I was there for though was the chance to once again roam around a post-apocalyptic world sliding ever further into ruin. All the bits that the remastered version does well are all the bits where you can spend a bit of time not thinking about the characters and their ridiculous narratives, but spend time looking at the sheer beauty of a world slowly being reclaimed by nature. I wasn't rooting for any of the characters or their various compadres by the end, I was rooting for the cordyceps and Mother Earth putting the balance of nature back to what it would be if we weren't there.
"The Last of Us Part II Remastered" is available for PS5 for a riduclously over-inflated price, or a tenner if you own the original.
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