DOWNTOWN SEATTLE

T H I N G S W I L L B E G R E AT W H E N Y O U ' R E DOWNTOWN

those Runners? Or is it a better idea to take the Clicker out early so you have more room to breathe with the Runners? Thanks to her handy knife, Ellie doesn’t even need to expend a shiv to stealth kill a Clicker (though you can still craft them later on, and they’re useful for getting out of grabs and speeding up stealth kills). However, at some points you’ll play with a more combatoriented loadout that doesn’t involve a knife.

This is handier for taking on groups, but means you need to be careful with the sneaking dead.

Bloaters, the mini-boss-like big boys of the Infected world, are back, alongside newcomer, similarly acid-sporing, grunt-like Shamblers (who cannot be stealthily killed). Encounters with the former are rare, but the latter more frequent. You can decide whether to avoid them altogether, or finish them off last with some shotgun blasts.

While Stalkers aren’t quite new to the series (they featured in the first game’s standalone Left Behind DLC), terrific use is made of them here. They track you through the areas they inhabit, trying to sneak up on you when you’re not looking. If you keep an eye out, you’ll be able to spot them peeking around corners at a distance (and ideally silently shoot them in the head). Some even become enmeshed with the walls as fungal growths, and will burst out at you, catching you unawares if you neglect to carefully look over fungus-sprouting walls. Usually Stalkers mob you in groups, and while the close-quarters combat is much more dynamic in Part II, dodging with o and laying into enemies with r feels delightfully frantic.

Bigger baddies lurk in the darkness too, including one horror that will be keeping us awake for plenty of nights to come… but we’ll leave that one to ruin your pants when you play.

THE STALKING DEAD

The best way to deal with the ravenous Infected is to be as quiet as you possibly can, eliminating all the ones you possibly can before alerting their fellows. Collect magazines to unlock skill trees (and pop pills to learn them) and you’ll have an easier time: you can upgrade your listening power to more clearly make out moving enemies through walls, or learn a skill that allows you to crawl along the ground while prone in long grass faster. (Other skills allow for faster crafting, more health, bigger explosives, that sort of thing.)

Like in the first game, you get a bow, but it feels like you get it a little later this time around. You can craft a limiteduse silencer for your pistol, which can help you with the silent treatment. Or, if you need to, you can craft much bangier tools, like Molotov cocktails, to take out clusters of Infected, though relying too much on those will quickly drain your scavenged resources. Everything from arrows to silencers to health kits will make a dent in your resources, in fact, so you can’t waste anything. You can only carry so much of each

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We met Abby in the Paris Games Week trailer. She’s just one WLF member you get to learn more about.

“MACGUYVER YOUR WAY THROUGH SITUATIONS WHERE YOU’RE OUTMATCHED.”

resource at a time, so even when you’re fully stocked with equipment it only takes a couple of dicey encounters to leave you running low on materials once again.

Often areas where you use up combat resources are filled with replacements, but even playing on Normal difficulty that’s not always the case, and the harder options (of which there are plenty, with more to come in post-launch updates) force you to operate far more conservatively. All in all, the resource elements of TLOU Part II are pretty lightweight, but the way they mesh with the mechanics makes you feel like you’re constantly on the move, having to MacGuyver your way through situations where you’re outmatched in terms of numbers and guns.

WLF PACK

Ellie might only have a small number of names on her hitlist, but that doesn’t mean Seattle is sparsely populated. Far from it. As your group pushes further in you soon learn that you’ve ended up in the middle of a turf war between the remaining members of the WLF and the Seraphites, a puritanical community of survivors who have moved away from sinful modern technology.

The groups’ different backgrounds makes them feel distinct in combat. The WLF is a more typical military force, the sort of thing you’ll be used to from the first game, and it’s that group you’ll mostly be dealing with at the beginning. Its members are smarter than those in the first game, though, and even early on they’re smart about flanking you, pinning you down, and flushing you out from cover. And yes, these enemy groups are made up of people with individual names that they’ll bark out as they communicate with each other.

The names are a nice touch (even if character models are still recycled), but their tactics are even more impressive. They also use dogs, which can sniff you out from a distance and then follow your trail. Listen mode doesn’t just highlight enemies, it allows you to see your own scent trail, which is useful when dogs are after you. Continuing to put distance and obstacles between you and a dog can cause it to lose the scent, but they nonetheless make it really tricky to stealth through areas, especially as they’re paired up with people and not that easy to separate.

In more enemy-dense areas you’ll probably end up in some lengthy firefights rather than stick completely to stealth. This is where the improved movement and area design shine. Once you’ve been spotted you can regain your stealthy status, or simply outflank enemies with guns pointed at where they thought you were hiding. It’s real guerilla warfare. There are plenty of platforms for Ellie to leap over to break line of sight or reach higher areas, and she can crawl under trucks or through holes in buildings. She can also quickly slide through narrow gaps. She might not be fully Nathan Draking it, grappling around combat arenas, but her mobility is key to the flow of Part II.

ONE-WINGED ANGELS

Your varied weapons make it easy to adapt to combat situations, from using shotguns in narrower areas to employing a hunting rifle that you can upgrade with a scope to pick off enemies from far away (keep an eye out for high areas you can turn into sniper nests). Guns feel punchy, and they might even make you jump the first few times you fire them. The same goes for the reverse; getting caught by a stray bullet can easily knock Ellie off her feet, and she’ll have to scramble up or use her guns from on the ground until it’s safe to move.

Encounters feel dynamic, and the impact of the armoury, combined with the much more natural ease of movement, sets Part II apart from the first game. It feels like an evolution of what Naughty

Dog previously accomplished with Uncharted 4.

So far, so soldiers then. But the Seraphites offer something different. Their culture favours low-tech equipment (though some do carry guns), so they often come at you with bows and hefty melee weapons. When you’re hit with an

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There are some fantastic chases where the Infected come in overwhelming numbers.

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Sections where you can play the guitar utilise the touchpad for a little strumming minigame, arrow, instead of being downed immediately, the missile instead deals constant damage until you can pull it out with u, something that takes time to do. The melee-carrying brutes on the other hand, caught up in their zeal for combat, charge at you even as you spray bullets at them, making them hard to stop unless you can hit your target under pressure.

The Seraphites have a system of eerie whistles, calls and responses between individuals. If you eliminate one of them so they can no longer give the response whistle, their comrades immediately know they should investigate an area. It means they’re able to co-ordinate without Ellie being able to tell exactly what it is they’re communicating – a deadly skill. It turns the way you’re used to approaching combat situations on their head, and those early encounters are thrilling. It’s really great to have a distinction not just between the Infected and the humans, but between different groups of people.

While Ellie’s main quest is one of merciless revenge, with such a rich setting you eventually learn more about the plight of both sides through numerous important main characters from both the WLF and the Seraphites. While it’s largely a bloody conflict with some pretty clear-cut atrocities committed by both sides,

The Last Of Us Part II is also interested in the individuals who get caught up in that fight whether they like it or not. You might have spotted some of the more important characters in the Paris Games Week trailer, and the game’s secondary plot largely revolves around them. The game is at its bleakest and most gory when these characters are featured.

That said, the aforementioned trailer shows the game at its grim peak. While it’s a cruel world, it’s thankfully not one that’s portrayed in a needlessly grimdark way. If you were worried about things getting too excessive or stomachchurning, then you can rest easy. The story feels like it’s in mature hands even as it deals with darker subjects. Nothing feels unnecessary, and the more progressive elements of the story, like Ellie being gay and the later introduction of a trans character, are only ever handled organically and tastefully. After the bloodfest early trailers we did worry we’d be entering the teenager gorezone when we played this, but worry not, this is a grown-up story.

B-WARE

There you go, thousands of words of praise, but The Last Of Us Part II isn’t without flaws. Mainly, the game’s structure ends up feeling a bit muddled. As the road trip style of the first game has given way to something more static, Naughty Dog has attempted to liven things up by baking in flashback sequences filling in the four-year gap (which work well), but also by having the main revenge plot

“WHILE IT’S A CRUEL WORLD, IT’S NOT PORTRAYED IN A NEEDLESSLY GRIMDARK WAY.”

25% Holding our breath as we creep though Infected areas. 5% Jumping out of our skin as a rogue Stalker peels off a wall. 10% Wanting to just hang out with these characters in a non-violent situation.