I'd like to get this out of the way first because it is a very tiny thing that isn't important but TOTALLY IS. The very first time Ellie tells Joel "I can't swim" I said to my TV screen well then teach her. Just fucking teach her. It takes like 10 minutes to teach her how to swim. Maybe a half hour. This is a very big survival skill and we're out here in the fucking apocalypse. Teach her how to swim. It will be very useful down the road. Please teach her how to swim. But no. And sure enough, for puzzle reasons, the fact that Ellie can't swim is brought up like 4 more times. And on the last time Ellie goes "Hey maybe after this you can teach me how toOH GEE MAYBE YOURE ON TO SOMETHING MAYBE WE SHOULD TEACH YOU HOW TO SWIM WHY DIDNT I THINK OF THAT.
The AI was very weird/buggy for me in a lot of moments in the game. I would reload a scene and half the bandits are FREAKING OUT like 50 yards away. Jumping from cover to cover, running at the wall in the same place, basically bandits acting like infected. And I haven't been seen or anything. So this puts them in an "alerted" stage or however you want to call it and made stealth near impossible when that would happen.
I love Uncharted but the pacing in Uncharted games start to bore me after a while. I really want the next 2-3 Uncharted games to be great but if they follow the cutscene/shootout/cutscene/explore/cutscene/sometimes you run away from something formula then I'm going to have a hard time getting through them and enjoying them. I was really surprised when I was playing The Last of Us and finding that it follows the same thing. With all of the hype over "dynamic AI" and how there was a bigger focus on "survival" I guess I was expecting something a lot more open-worldy than what I got. There were too many moments where you're walking down a hill and you go "Wow, look at all that conveniently placed cover, I wonder what's about to ha-- yup we're getting ambushed." Maybe that's from "shooter fatigue" or what you want to call it. Basically, I'm getting bored of this shit.
Scavenging for parts is fine I guess but it starts to become distracting because midway through the game I"m purposely not going the way I'm supposed to go just to see what's out there and 90% of the time it's nothing. The fact that you don't automatically retrieve arrows and is a random occurrence is very disappointing. Same thing with every single bad guy's guns. If a bad guy was shooting at me and I killed him, I should be able to loot him for bullets. No exceptions.
The story is fine. Joel's a dick.
I was really hoping there was a button prompt for "Make Joel calm down" or a "See this from another angle" button but there wasn't. I actually walked out of the hospital room when given the choice because I knew that was the right thing to do. As you might have guessed, the game didn't advance and I eventually had to walk back and make Joel do his thing.
The voice acting was solid. The "original score" wasn't anything fantastic.
Good game, hardly game of the year.