Ratcan Reviews: June 2020

So, To preface this entire review, I will mention, any opinions in this review are my own, and at the end of the day, they are just my opinions, if you enjoyed it, that’s great, I am Kind of disappointed by this, I know naughty dog can do better, and have seen them do better, so its just kind of sad that they couldn’t live up to the hype of the first game, also there will be spoilers in this review, so with that out of the way, let’s get into it.

The Good

Despite me absolutely despising every minute spent in this game all the way to the end, I will admit, everything in here has the capacity to actually be an amazing game, they used all the right ingredients, yet somehow made the wrong thing altogether, I don’t know how. What I’m mainly talking about is the story, chronologically, it actually isn’t an awful story, but you see the problem is, you start out as Ellie, and you kill all the people who killed Joel, then you play as Abby, and get to know these people, but the problem with that, is its like “oh they like dogs, too bad they killed one of my favourite characters from the original game, still a piece of shit” and then you play as Abby, for the second half, witnessing the carnage that Ellie has wrought upon your loved ones, this was their mistake, there are flashbacks in this as well, some starting as early as during the same time frame as the original game. What would have made these deaths more impactful and therefore got more of a reaction from the player, would have been keeping Joel and Ellie out of promotional material, presented it as a sequel that just takes place in universe, you start out with Abby’s flashbacks, then instead of starting at the point where Abby and her friends kill Joel, It’s Abby’s Seattle Day 1, you play through all of that, with the brief mentions of what happened in Jackson, but nobody goes into specifics, then, when Abby hit’s the hotel, shoots Tommy and kills Jesse, says the line “we let you live and you messed it up” you flashback to Abby and her friends on their way to kill Joel, then after Joel’s death, its Ellie’s story, going through Seattle, Angry at whoever those people were, so you’ve grown to care about these characters, and come across them dead, meanwhile all you can do is think this was done by scars, then you have to be the one to kill them, as Ellie. That would have improved the story, and absolutely nothing is added in terms of story like “my OC John Billybong, the kooky but lovable steel drummer” its literally just rearranging it. So, in hindsight, the story isn’t awful, but nothing is designed for it to be enjoyed after the fact, because if it weren’t for the fact that I wanted to write this review, I would’ve just stopped playing once the search for Abby began on Ellie’s Day 1.

One of the things that did kind of make the experience a little bit enjoyable, was it was clear everyone who worked on it cared about it, it wasn’t enough for me to call this a good game on a whole, but in several areas, the love put into it shone through, its why in my opinion, I believe it just suffered from poor creative direction, the voice actors were amazing, I only really experienced a few bugs and annoyances, and some of the areas did look nice too.

The Final thing that I will absolutely praise this game for is the accessibility, there are so many options one of which I did abuse quite a bit when I couldn’t really be bothered to hunt round a dark room for what might only be 1 rag or something and that was the high contrast mode, but actually going through all of them, it baffles me that hardly any other games have them, and I don’t think there is one that has them to this level, not all games need ultra-super-duper accessibility to the point it ruins the experience, but it would help if your game is story driven and you want that story to reach as many people as possible, and there are so many other factors to accessibility for instance there is a fighting game player who goes by the name SightlessKombat and he has managed to get to an amazing level of playing Killer instinct, solely based on sound design, Accessibility is one of the reasons that you should never ever neglect a single aspect of game design, every single aspect is important.

The Bad

So, I feel I’ve already aired out most of my grievances with the story, and that’s just that its in the wrong order. However there are so many things wrong with it too, such as the Lazy sort of parallels within the story, for instance, Dina reveals to Ellie that she is pregnant, so to try and make you feel bad for killing Mel, Ellie realises she is pregnant only after the fact, Then you also have Joel playing the guitar and teaching her at the beginning, and then at moments to try and make the player feel sad, it has Ellie play the guitar as if to say “hey remember Joel, the guy who used to play guitar, he is dead, remember” and another example is Ellie keeps her diary in a box, and in that diary mentions how she wont talk about her feelings, kind of like she is keeping them locked away in a box and pretending they don’t exist. It just feels like bad writing, and just piles onto how the game tries to force you to feel something, rather than actually putting in the effort to build up the emotion and then really drive it home. It also does this thing where as Ellie you kill a dog, then in Abby’s story find out it was a very happy dog that lived a nice life, I feel like this is one of the only games that guilt trips you despite the fact your only choice as the player was play the game, or don’t play the game. This led to me being very unimpressed, and even a bit angry, If I as the player had a choice to not kill, I’m pretty sure 99% of the time I wouldn’t have, but the game forces you into it, and if I actually cared about the made up lives of these people, I probably would’ve stopped playing the game. Probably the final point of the whole guilt tripping thing is the fact that all NPCs have names, so if you kill someone, another of the enemy’s will call out something like “Jeremy” and I feel like that was supposed to make me feel bad, but when 7-12 people with guns are all trying to kill me, the last person I am feeling bad for is Jeremy the NPC.

Now onto parts of the gameplay. There are many padding mechanics, some of which combine with the very low effort jump scares in the game, such as holding triangle for 15 seconds to open a door, or lift a door, or move rubble, or lift rubble, and unfortunately, I must have spent at least an hour just holding triangle. The jump scares that appear in the game also are incredibly low effort, where you have a sound mechanic, so you hold R1 to focus on sounds and what direction they’re coming from, if there is a jump scare, yet you can hear the clicker making noise, it blatantly doesn’t show you where it is when you use the sound mechanic, and that’s just bad, but to be fair, jump scares are bad in general so I don’t really know what I was expecting. The rest of the horror elements in this game are just sort of over the top gore, its not personally my thing but if you like ripping a mans jaw off with a sickle and then punching what’s left of his jaw clean off, then you will probably like the combat in this. I’ve somewhat touched a couple of the mechanics, some of which that were present in the original are missing in this one, and that was the locked doors you open with shivs, shivs are still in the game, but exclusively in Abby’s story, and only for self-defence, I will admit, that is a bit nitpicky, but now locked doors just mean there is either a vent to climb through or a window to smash, which just feels a lot easier and doesn’t cause the player to gamble on the trade-off of “do I use my last shiv for potentially more ammo, or supplements, or weapon parts, or do I save it for later when I might need it to save me from a clicker”. Some of the newer mechanics also don’t feel nice to use either, such as jumping, which is actually shocking considering its naughty dog, the guys who made crash bandicoot, jak and daxter, and uncharted, yet they kind of botched the slight parkour elements in this game? The jumping doesn’t feel fluid at all, it feels incredibly clunky, and honestly I feel like I would rather toss a coin to see if I make the jump or not, because it feels like the jump distance shifted every time I went to jump, and I’m pretty sure most of my deaths can be attributed to missing jumps, or ropes just deciding they didn’t want to be ropes for a couple seconds, and I just missed them entirely. So, despite being a newer game, in terms of mechanics it feels worse to play than the original. I also wasn’t too impressed with the stealth, while I expected the AI to improve, instead of actually improved AI, it just notices you easier, which meant I just had to stay hidden longer, which at one point I was hidden behind a crate for so long I actually fell asleep, and woke up, and hadn’t actually been spotted at all, admittedly it was only about 30 minutes of sleep, but still, kind of a let-down. My final mechanic gripe is the horse riding, you do quite a lot of it at the beginning of Ellie’s story, then you don’t do it again till near the end of Abby’s so by the time it actually came to a long horse riding segment, I had pretty much forgotten most of the mechanics for the horses, and to then attempt to shoot stuff while riding the horse it just didn’t feel fun at all, there should have been a few more horse riding segments other than a couple hours at the beginning of a 25-30 hour game (bearing in mind the final 2-5 hours will be spent on epilogue crap).

Now, one of the things I really really really hated, was the RE4 Cottage style sequence, in case you are wondering what that is, in Resident Evil 4, you (Leon Kennedy) and Luis Sera are trapped in a very cramped cottage with lots and lots of zombies coming at you, they will come at you endlessly for a set amount of time, the problem is, this was so fun, that every single other zombie game you can think of has a sequence like this. I’m not joking, Evil within 2, State of Decay 2, RE2R kind of has one, but its more avoid Mr X, RE3R however does have one, and its been done to death, much like zombies as a genre, in fact, The last of us 2 has a better sequence in it already at the beginning, when you play as Abby for a brief period, you run from a massive horde of zombies, that was amazing compared to the later part where all different zombie types just sort of flood a small room for a set amount of time, it’s boring.

Just Plain Wrong

The problem with this game being linear, is a lot of the environments are too open, this is nice for people who appreciate the art of the game etc. but when the environments are massive yet filled with no actual content, or items/resources, why are they so big, because if more effort was spent on extra areas, to be explored, and extra content, it may have been received better, but instead we get to go into a large field and say “wow, look at this large field with nothing in it” some areas towards the end of Abby’s story suffer from this to such a level that they just feel unfinished, because you come across a small set of huts, none of them can be entered, there are no enemies, it feels more like a test area than something that would have been left in the final game. It’s nice they’ve expanded the sizes of sections compared to TLOU but the problem is they still have the same number of things within them as they would have had if it were the first one, same number of enemies, items, etc. and it just ends up feeling empty.

What I will leave this section with, is the fact that it is just plain wrong, that this game got review bombed a bit on Metacritic on release (and is still kind of ongoing) because “SJW” and “PC” and “keep politics out of my games” because I feel I can almost guarantee that those same people saying those things will go on and recommend games like the witcher 3 and the original bioshock games to their friends as some of the greatest games of all time, just because they are doesn’t mean they aren’t political, they are some of the most political games of all time, you just don’t like this game because it appears to have politics you don’t agree with inside it, and for that you don’t deserve anybody to take your word seriously as any kind of critic. So many reviews like these just prove the people made a judgement based on the leaks, rather than playing it themselves, I wasn’t too impressed with the leaks which is why I bought the game myself, to find out myself, and although I dreaded playing it, some areas did leave me pleasantly surprised.

Final Score

So Overall, its nothing special, there are a million other much better games on every platform at the moment in my opinion, I believe this game is a 4.5/10 its certainly nothing special, but if you aren’t bothered by much of what was stated in this review then odds are, you will enjoy it, but if this stuff made it seem like its not really your thing, then depending on whether you still want to play it then I would either wait till its on sale, or just not bother picking it up.