Sure, I’ve written a lot of words about the terrific new PS3 game The Last of Us. But I haven’t really gotten to show you the game. That’s largely because, doubtless in a fit of spoiler-phobia, Sony put draconian restrictions on the amount of pre-release video footage they allowed the press to show. Those restrictions lift today, as the game has been officially released.
You may know that The Last of Us has a great story, good characters, and cool cutscenes. But how does it play? It’ll always be easier to just show you, so that’s what I’m gonna do.
The video above spends a little under an hour going through the basics of playing The Last of Us. It covers stealth combat, outright gunplay, crafting, scavenging, and combat against infected enemies, which is an entirely different thing from fighting humans.
A word on spoilers: Everyone has their own sensitivity to spoilers, so if you want to play the game totally fresh, I’d say just go ahead and play it. Don’t watch this video.
If you’re on the fence or just curious, however, this video contains no major story spoilers, and only has footage from the first third or quarter of the game. You won’t learn anything major about the plot except for two early cities/settings – you’ll see Joel and Ellie together, and you’ll see them interacting with one side character. No big-arc stuff, no cutscenes, no surprising set-pieces, no hints about the story’s beginning or resolution. This video is concerned with demonstrating how TLOU is designed and what it’s like to play it. That’s all it shows.
But, you know, it’s an hour of the game. So if you don’t want to see anything at all, don’t watch.
It’s a long video, so I’ve broken it up so that you can skip around to whatever you might want to see. As follows:
6:28 – Scavenging and crafting.
15:23 – Upgrading weapons.
21:45 – Stealth/combat versus a whole bunch of dudes.
38:20 – Stealth versus zombies, introduction to clickers.
52:05 – Open combat against zombies.
And that’s that! A whole bunch of The Last of Us gameplay, for those who are interested. (Though I’ll certainly understand if you want to avoid watching it and just go play for yourself. Your call.)
If you’ve got any questions about the game, let me know in the comments and I’ll do my best to answer. Also, this was more or less my first try at making a lengthy gameplay/commentary video like this, so I welcome your feedback! If there’s something you’d like to see more of in the future, or anything I can do to make this type of video more helpful, I hope you’ll let me know.
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