Much has been written about the violence in The Last of Us Part 2, about how it looks and how it sounds, but only now do we know how it feels. And the uncomfortable answer is it feels grisly, grounded and, actually, kind of great. Of all the philosophical questions around the subject Naughty Dog are hoping their game will provoke, perhaps why something so plainly wrong can feel so paradoxically right is the most pertinent one of all.
Ostensibly combat in The Last of Us 2 is more of the same from the first game but it’s at once entirely familiar and completely different. Stepping into Ellie’s sneakers as she searches a suburb of Seattle for her friend Tommy, who has been captured by local militia group the Washington Liberation Front, offers more than a mere costume change. She’s lithe and lively, able to squeeze through small gaps in the brickwork, drop down to a prone position in the long grass, dodge melee attacks and, crucially, able to jump. The introduction of verticality in particular proves transformative, taking encounters to new levels in all senses of the word.
The game’s creative director, Neil Druckmann, explains that changing the player character to Ellie forced Naughty Dog to rethink their combat mechanics from the ground up.
"Ellie doesn’t have Joel’s stature so she can’t stand toe-to-toe or she’ll get wrecked,” he says, “so she has to be agile and athletic. And that’s why we brought verticality into it, she can clamber quickly and evade people and squeeze through tight areas.
"What else can she do? Well, dodge. She can’t take a lot of direct hits so she needs to evade people.
"Likewise, the idea of going prone was interesting because stealth was such a big part of our game but we wanted to make sure it always feels fluid and never clunky. I was after the best-controlling third person shooter ever. So it’s that agility that makes Ellie unique.”
The level offers a succession of encounters strung out across shopping parades and residential cul-de-sacs to prove the point.
An improved ‘listening mode’, which detects enemy movements but offers less detail as their distance from you increases, allows a degree of tactical planning but going loud is a viable strategy too, Ellie’s arsenal of pistols, rifles and shotguns now supplemented by craftable shock traps and explosive mines.
You’ll likely need them too as the enemy AI has been massively overhauled, the human soldiers now audibly working together, calling for support and pinpointing your position. Oh, and they also have dogs.
“In the past [human enemies] had sight and sound, so what’s another way they can detect you?” asks Druckmann. "Well smell is another sense, which is why we introduced the dogs.”
The dogs in The Last of Us Part 2 are, frankly, a pain in the backside. Gnarly, snarling and rabidly aggressively, they track your aroma (the trail of which is visible in ‘listening mode’) and inevitably bring their owners with them.
A timely lobbed bottle or brick can quite literally throw them off the scent but the respite is never long and it becomes imperative to keep Ellie on her toes. As a result the combat is challenging but not off-puttingly so; instead it’s by turns tense and chaotic, with the ample potential for invention and improvisation ensuring it stays interesting throughout.
Combat is only half the story, of course, and the other level we played showcased the storytelling.
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