Five years later The Last of Us 2 finally comes to PC, marking for me my first playthrough of the game, as by the time the original PS4 version came out, I had made the decision to stop playing on console. Unfortunately this meant story bits were spoiled to me, including most importantly the main plot twist. Fortunately, it didn't deter me from seeking to eventually play the game, as I trusted I'd have fun just like with most Naughty Dog titles.

About that, in a moment of mild masochistic high, I decided my first playthrough would be on Grounded difficulty. "This is very manageable, to be honest" I exclaimed during the first couple hours. Fast forward to the first human encounters I'm met by enemies with feline reflexes and eagle eyes. Gunslingers suddenly turning my direction because I was nearby the corner of their eye, or because their Spider Senses were tingling, or who knows why; either way instantly shooting me with pinpoint precision. Immense frustration ensues. One of the last encounters in particular, where enemies kept appearing from somewhere and a pile of corpses started being erected next to my hiding spot, caused enemies to spout sentences like "she must be nearby". No ♥♥♥♥, Sherlock.
Not to mention fighting hordes of infected with your toothpick or bare hands because you have no bullets, attempting to dodge every attack or die on the spot, feeling like I'm suddenly playing Punch Out or God Hand. Grueling and tense, and yet "I would do it all over again" (ha), because the combat in TLoU2 just feels good. From the shooting, to the new dodge move, to the stealth, and every animation and facial expression that accompanies it. It is just good.
Human enemies still suck a considerable amount of ass, though, indeed.

Now the story of TLoU2 follows the beats of the first game, where Ellie starts suspecting events didn't quite unfold as she was made to believe initially. Things happen, and she starts a journey in the name of "justice." But truly vengeance and violence hide under the guise of it, as she spirals more and more into self-destruction. No one is truly a saint in TLoU2, and letting go and forgiveness must be learnt to escape the cycle.

The Last of Us 2's story pulls many emotional strings -- anger, frustration, momentary respite, love, understanding, and yes, forgiveness. Understanding and attempting forgiveness. The latter is something some "gamers" seemed not to grasp, as instead they jumped into social medias to harass the writers and actors of the game due to a certain plot point, with one actress in particular, receiving death threats to herself and her family, including her newborn baby at the time. Now the game deals with its themes in a I would say mature way, but on the other hand "gamers" proved they were not mature enough for such things, and were unable to react to it reasonably, perhaps proving that users are not entirely ready to deal with certain matters in a rational, understanding manner. The reaction to Naughty Dog's new game shows things haven't changed too much, but hopefully it won't deter the developers and the actors from doing their own thing.

All that said, The Last of Us 2 is one of the company's best titles, a peak in story telling, acting and animations, and five years worth waiting for in my case.

The Last of Us series is one of the most emotional, well written, captivating, intriguing games ever produced. What made this games so great is how it managed handle the strong expectations as a sequel of one of the most successful games of the past decade.

Part 2 features some extraordinarily vicious combat animations I’ve seen in any game I can think of. It also fits to the respective situations and tones. The most frequently witnessed crime i.e. Ellie sneaking up on an enemy before slicing its throat or stabbing it to death while holding the mouth shut is not even the most brutal animation this game has to offer. Kills with Shotguns can lead people’s extremities getting (partially or completely) blown away leading to the targeted person slowly, excruciatingly bleeding out. Trip wires and trap mines e.g. almost certainly cause the victim to get cut in two halfs making for a terrible and hard-to-digest sight.

Furthermore the fact that the POV doesn’t just includs Ellie’s contributes to the already high empathy and understanding developed for the respective characters in this series and allows you to fully find out about what lead to certains events. When Ellie was finding shelter in the theatre along with Dina and Jessie, in her mission to track Abby, I personally thought the game was close to coming to an end, but after Abby pulled up and shot Jesse it turned out it was no longer Ellie and her friends who were the hunters and, instead it was Abby herself. Afterwards Abby was to be played for lots of hours covering many, many chapters showing her story and journey, which lead to the eventual events in the theatre. It shows Abby wasn’t just a soulless, heartless, unempathetic person, who simply enjoys killing people. No, instead it showed that Abby’s father was one of the three doctors shot dead by Joel, right before their planned surgery on Ellie, which would’ve sacrified her for a vaccine, Hence, her succefful ambush on Joel, during which she brutally tormented and killed him.

Another interesting element here is quite a difference between all the existing factions and groups as well. On one hand, you got the Seraphites (or Scars), which are traditional, nature-based fighters with bows and arrows using whistling as their form of communication whenever they suspect an enemy nearby, while on the other hand you have the WLF (Washington Liberation Front), which turn out to be a very vocal, transperient and loud group fighting and dressing in a way more comparable to wars and conflicts seen nowadays.
And of course, who would‘ve guessed, there are Infected as well. They can be divided into few categories and species, but they all have one thing in common, aside from being dead and attempting to infect others by biting them. They obviously don’t communicate with the other living dead and instead just attack the humans in mobs and head-on in a very simple, yet effective and intimidating way.
Onto the special and more advanced forms of Infected: There is the Shambler, who throws noxious, toxic spore bombs at his enemies cutting off potential escape routes or obscuring enemies in the process, the Stalkers, who are able to remain invisible in Ellie’s amazing Listen mode, which massively eases their attempts to outflank and surprise Ellie in their obvious attempt to infect her. Sneaking up on the player is no issue at all for them. Especially when they got more colleagues around, who can simutaneously charge at the played character, whilst the one sneaking up can already grab it until reinforcements arrive.

The enemies are just so aware, intelligent and varied in this second part. Once suspicious of any breach they start checking and clearing the surrounding area, which includes bushes, gras and the small spaces under vehicles, right away. This automatically forces you to get familiar with the respective areas and use the environment to your advantage after studying it.

Being forced to resort to using the environment properly in order to advance has to be done in a way more creative way than during Part 1, in which you mostly just had to use a floating palette serving as a raft for Ellie to reach and climb up a point, which couldn’t be accessed by Joel from the water.
Part 2 is way more different when it comes to that. It offers so many contextual challenges such as angling a rope to swing from one room to another locked one or navigating around a series of well-placed trip wires to name a few. This sequel just makes much, much better use of its surroundings and beautiful environment than its predecessor, preventing it to solely be reduced to some sort of attraction useful for taking gorgeous screenshots and instead fully incorporates that into the players‘ experience and gameplay. That’s a massive plus.

Although that game is not open-world, it still allows you to conduct thorough explorations learning about the lost history, short stories and last moments about corpses you’ll come across in the process. Lots of which can be found out about in the rough, beat up and run down remains of a Seattle district destroyed during the pandemic. That very district causes you to be fully immersed its exploration, unlike in anything you could ever come up with. There are so many former shops, ruins and abandoned, yet well preserved buildings awaiting discovery and exploration, which isn’t done solely by the players, but company as well, who keeps exploring while the player is busy reading a left note. That’s a huge Pro to me. The colleagues don‘t just stupidly wait for the player to finish reading, but instead go on to explore the respectives sites all by themselves.

Conclusion: The Last of Us Part 2 is a stunning and brilliant masterpiece more than worthy of its predecessor. Now after I’ve just finished the story I can understand why this game has received so much universal acclaim and countless rave reviews. It improved every aspect from its predecessor and raised the bar to a level almost impossible to reach. It just delivered in every aspect. I can’t believe I never touched this game before, let alone watched a Let’s play of it.

First one's better imo but this is still very good and worth a try.