Developer: Naughty Dog
Publisher: Sony Computer Entertainment
Platform: Playstation 4
The Last of Us: Remastered – Review
The Last of Us, you can read our review here, made its appearance on Playstation 4 as The Last of Us: Remastered. One of PS3’s best games now available on PS4, was it really necessary to port the game to Sony’s next gen console? The answer is YES, if you want to find out why, I suggest to start reading.
Story
The story is still as captivating as when you played it for the first time. When you start playing you feel right back at home, travelling with Joel and Ellie. Although it takes a bit of time before you meet Ellie in the game, but the moment you do you’ll want to play the game more and more.
One of the strong points of this game is the storyline and the way it is told. The way you get to know characters, how you’ll come to love them, and how sad you are if some of them disappear. I had a feeling that I would never have the urge to replay this game again, because I knew the storyline, but boy was I wrong. When I started the game, I was once again captivated by the story and kept playing for hours until finally I had to get some sleep.
Graphics
On Playstation 3, The Last of Us was one of the, if not the, most beautiful game for its generation. It used 30fps at 720p resolution. The game challenged the PS3 to its limits, and it totally payed off. The PS4 version however, uses 60fps at 1080p resolution, making the game even more stunning and so much more smoother than the original one. To highlight this contrast, the developers added in the option to switch between 30fps and 60fps. This way you can really see the difference between the two framerates.
The extra framerate doesn’t only make the game smoother, but it also gives the game a lot more detail. The bad textures you could sometimes see in the PS3 edition is completely vanished from the game (well I didn’t encounter any while playing on PS4). Another thing I noticed was that when you ran, for example, in the shadows under a tree, the sun kept shining on your back. In the PS4 edition shadow also falls over your character making the surroundings feel more real.
Character models have been made to look much more realistic. Sometimes making the ones from the PS3 edition look a bit cartoony. The facial expressions like fear, happiness and feeling lonely all look so realistic. All this sometimes makes you forget you are playing a game, but make it feel like you are watching a movie instead. Though the fantastic voice acting in this game has a huge partake in that too.
Where you got the feeling that the PS3 version of the game made use of the PS3’s powers completely, the PS4 does an excellent job displaying the game as beautiful as possible. But I never got the feeling that the PS4 was at its limit. This is very promising for the future. Anyhow, let’s not get to far ahead of ourselves, cause this game is probably the most stunning game at the moment.
PS3 on the left, PS4 on the right.
Sound
The Last of Us has a great soundtrack, the music composed for this game certainly helps set the mood, but it isn’t the soundtrack you’ll remember. The best parts of this game, besides the graphics, are the voice acting and the sounds effects.
Ashley Johnson probably did her best job here in this game, it’s like Ellie is her second personality. There wasn’t a moment in the game where her manifestation of Ellie felt forced or unnatural. She really outdid herself as Ellie.
The same for Troy Baker’s performance as Joel. His voice fits the character perfectly and he couldn’t have done it any better. I didn’t know both voice actors until now. I’m sure gonna keep an eye on them in the future.
Seeing this is a stealth game, where you have to sneak by infected people, it has to have a somewhat creepy atmosphere at times. This is where the sound effects fit in perfectly. When you’re sneaking past the Infected, that’s how the infected people are called, it will be very quiet most of the time. There will be no music, but just the sound of your surroundings and of course the very creepy noises the Infected make while you’re trying to sneak past them. It’s these creepy noises that sets the atmosphere for this game in such a perfect way you’ll actually get scared sometimes.
Also a nice addition to the remastered edition is that you can set some of the sound to come out of the speaker that’s build in the PS4 controller. When you’re playing at night with this option on, you’ll probably get scared to death when your controller starts making sounds when you don’t expect it at all.
Gameplay
The Last of Us: Remastered does not only contain the game, but also has all the available DLC as well. The DLC being multiplayer mappacks ‘Abandoned Territories’ and ‘Reclaimed Territories’. Even better, the singleplayer expansion ‘Left behind’ has been added as well. This part serves as a prequel to The Last of Us.
In the PS3 edition you had to aim and shoot with the L1 and R1 buttons, but this can be changed now. You can set the L2 and R2 buttons for aiming and shooting, like in most other games. This feels more natural for a shooting game. This feature was most likely added because the L2 and R2 buttons of the PS4 controller are, in so many ways, better than in comparison with his predecessor.
Another nice addition is the photo mode. You can now stop the game at any given time when you have photo mode enabled. This is done by pressing the L3 button. When you’re in photo mode it’s like time stands still and you are able to turn you camera in the right position, apply some filters or effects and even make the image darker or lighter, all to create the perfect photo of your favourite ingame moment. When you’re finished creating your photo, you just have to press the share button and you can upload your picture to share it with your friends.
Conclusion
It was the best game available on PS3, so the question was: Is it worth your time and effort to buy and play this game again? The answer is definitely YES. It’s the best game you can get on PS4 at the moment and it probably will be a while before another gem like this will emerge. The amazing storyline, astonishing graphics and challenging playing experience will be hard to find in another game. Definitely a game worthwile in your collection, even if you’ve played the PS3 version.
No Comments