THE GAME:
In 2023 the first "The Last Of Us" game finally made it's way to PC. It was a rough experience with a lot of technical issues. With a lot of patches they managed to stabilize the game and it runs fine today. Fast forward to 2025. In a few days time the first episode of "The Last Of Us 2" TV-show will be released on Max. The game was released on April 3 so I was in a hurry to finish the game before the TV-show started.
I had cheated a bit by reading parts of the story online, but I wanted to play the game myself. It makes it easier to hate or love a TV-show if you can spot where it all came from. It makes it easier to judge if changes make sense or if they suck. I managed to play through the game in about 25 hours, and yes I did not necessarily explore every single building or room on my way. I am already on my second playthrough though and I'll make sure to explore much more this time. Several levels are really huge and if you decide to explore it all then it takes a while to get through them.
I am not going to spoil the story of the game, but I can say that I liked playing as both main characters, Ellie and Abby. I don't think I understand all the hate that Abby got. I can't really see that she is any worse than Ellie/Joel. There are 2 sides to every story. In many ways Abby seems more reasonable than Ellie. The gameplay is a nice mix of stealth, Rambo-warfare, horror-elements, super intense high-speed escapes, horse riding and boat driving, and obviously a lot of exploring and looting. It also has some more relaxed moments. The timeline jumps back and forth in time from the "main incident" that involves a golf club.
There are a lot of cutscenes but luckily they can be skipped if you do a replay. There are also several boss encounters. They can be a bit difficult because it is a bit awkward to dodge effectively using a keyboard. With a bit of patience and persistence it can be done though. There is a lot of explicit violence and blood and some parts are a bit of a horror roller-coaster.
I was worried that the game would be ultra-Woke, but it really isn't that bad or maybe I just expected it to be worse. Yes, Ellie is a lesbian (we already knew that). She is also rather annoying sometimes and harder to love than she was in the first game. White men are obviously fucking useless, there is a stupid trans-kid, an Islamic-ish sect, some Jewish blah-blah, characters of every color except green, and yeah, Abby is built like Arnold Schwarzenegger. I find it easy enough to live with it all, just marching on and killing fungus-beings left and right and killing everything else that walks or crawls.
The game runs smoothly on my PC and I think it is a successful port. I am happy to finally having played through both of the "The Last Of Us" games. Now I am fully prepared to watch and judge the TV-show. Bring it on!
THE TECHNICAL ISSUES:
None really. They have fixed the "rebuilding shaders" issue from the first game. Most of this processing now takes place in-game as opposed to a very long 15-20 minutes wait before the game could run the first time.
The CPU usage is very high. My i9 CPU runs at a temperature of 90C for most of the game. It is not a problem as such, but if your cooling doesn't work well then it might be. Ideally most of the processing should be done by the GPU and not by the CPU, but that isn't always how it works with these console ports. If you have decent cooling and a pair of noise cancelling headphones to kill the fan sound then you can certainly live with it.
I have completed the game once and I only experienced one crash. Auto-save made sure that I could begin again right where it had crashed. One crash is not bad at all for a brand new game release. Since then 2 patches have been released and I haven't had a crash since.
I am playing the game using the optimal settings from the Nvidia App. The graphics look pretty great for a 5 year old game.
MY PC SPECS:
- GPU RTX 4080 16GB VRAM
- CPU Intel i9-11900K @ 3.50GHz
- RAM 32GB
- DISK: PCIe 4.0 NVMe M.2 - 1TB
- GAMING MONITOR: 2560x1440(QHD) @ 165Hz
Rating: 
Content Type: Game Review
Language: 
Updated: 2025-04-12 09:50
Created: 2025-04-12 09:35
