As a member of the evil PC master race I’ve never played this before.
I did watch the HBO series and enjoyed it thoroughly. Now, after playing the game on the PC, I noticed, how very close to the game they had stuck with the series, which is nice.
Back to the game though.
It’s fun and it’s good. It’s really good. It takes a shitload of time to build the shaders intially, which makes the initial load a real pain in the behind, but other than that, I personally did not run into half as many issues as apparently many other folks did.
I am running this on an Intel Core i9-10850 with 64GB RAM and an NVIDIA GeForce RTX2080 SUPER 8GB on 2560×1440 at 144Hz. I’ve encountered very few stutters. Most of the settings are pretty high and it performs just ok with decent FPS and quality. I encountered excactly one crash and that was kind of my own fault. I insisted on activating settings I couldn’t possibly make work with my setup.
—Graphics—
[5/5]
To quote Ellie: “Jury’s still out, but man, you can’t deny that view.”.
The game looks stunning, especially the views and cinematics are a sight to behold.
—Gameplay—
[4/5]
There is one glitch in the riddles, very well known to console players actually (as Google had me know…), which they ported over to the PC version very nicely. Apart from that glitch, which you can simply pass by activating the skip riddle option in the settings, I encountered no biggies. Very few stutters, only one crash and none of the weird texture issues one can see on TikTok, Youtube, etc. I guess I was lucky.
—Story—
[5/5]
You’d think, the whole “mankind got wiped out by some bug” theme would get boring with time but man, it somehow really doesn’t. TLOU kinda makes it work and while there are certain parts of it, where I myself was like “Ok, now that’s illogical and odd.”, in the grand scheme of things, I was properly entertained and caught in the story. The hallmark of a good story is, that it entertains you and gets you to immerse yourself in its world, even despite its weak moments. The story of TLOU managed to do that for me.
—Content—
[3/5]
It’s a bit on the short side. It doesn’t take very long to complete the main story on low difficulty settings. I always play through games on the lowest possible difficulty setting first, to fully focus on the story. A nice addition with Left behind, which adds a bit of story content. But in the end, I felt like I wanted a lot more. Not necessarily a bad thing, of course. But when there is such a gap between part 1 and part 2, that’s also not necessarily a good thing. Hence only 3 of 5 points.
—Game Mechanic, Riddles, Difficulty—
[3/5]
The riddles are obviously fairly easy. The game isn’t actually focused much on riddles, it’s not that kind of game, so that’s ok.
While the battle mechanics aren’t uberly sophisticated, you wouldn’t expect that from that kind of game, so that’s fine.
The aim assist is annoying as hell and I’d advise you to turn that off, as it will lock on the torso of pretty much any enemy. With most enemies, that doesn’t do the trick. As ammo doesn’t exactly grow on trees, you want every shot to count. So trying for headshots is the way to go. That’s a hell of a lot easier to do without aim assist, actually. All in all, only 3 of 5 points here. It’s just not that kind of game:. This isn’t about riddles, this is about story and shooting the shit out of cordyceps-riddled infected! 😉
—Verdict—
[20/25]
It’s a solid port, at least in my personal experience. I was, apparently, one of the lucky ones.
It entertained me thoroughly. Now, that I’m done with the first run on lowest difficulty, I started a second run to really experience the whole thing with a bit of a challenge to it. I enjoy playing this.