its clunky and akward, the controls are terrible,  vast sections of the map are never really used. and it has so many glitches it ruins the fun sometimes.  It really ruins it when you spend a vast amount of time finding the car you want,  upgrading it to the max,  and then when you get out to interact with a blue dot then turn around and its gone..  this has happend to me 10+ times..  or missions that make you loose the car you are driving to it.   Like the Dom skydiving missions.   The one at the airport..  i didnt want to do it at the time and just wanted to get a plane from my hanger,  trying to drive in caused me to enter the mission,  which when it ended i was at the opposite side of the map..  with no car.

im really hoping they patch it and Online fixes alot.  Im really trying to love this game, but so much of it drives me crazy.  lots of little things that you wonder what they were thinking

edit:  oh ya and the teleporting helicopters...   I was running from the cops,  lost a helicopter and found a spot where i couldnt be see except directly above.  No helicopters on my map anymore and starts are flashing and going away..  no one near my position then.. BOOM   a chopper forms out of thin air directly above me, renews my rating and starts shooting..

Well, since you haven't given me a story marker I assume that you already got to the part where Ellie and Joel get separated and Ellie stumbles upon an infected Joel and is forced to decapitate him. Yes. It picks up after.

why though?

I see your theory, and i kinda get the logic, but to me a 14 year old who with a lot of angst is not charater deveopment in my opinion.

- I love the controlsand have heard very few people who have acutally played the game complain about it

- I've had more glitches in TLOU than I've had in GTA V

- It's pretty damn easy to get a nice car provided you've completed quite a few mission

- I've never really had any car problems in the game...check your disk or it might be something wrong with your console

- Yeah and there are a few glitches and bugs (but relativley low for a console game) which they will patch up...like they said earlier. Almost all games at launch have more bugs and glitches then they do a couple months after. 

I'm on the suburbs part of the story

ive played through TLOU 6 times,  ive hit 2 glitches and each were solved with restarting from a checkpoint 1 minute prior.   Loosing a car is alot more annoying,   ya the adder is sitting there but to drive by 5 times takes time, and but then your looking at well over100k or the long drive to the LSC in the desert. 

the stock market is also totally messed up,  its percent gains arent calculated properly.  The LCN charts dont mean anything and the high/lows dont mean much when its an all-time and you can only see 7 day chart.   We were also told we could effect the stock market with ingame actions, which in SP you cant.  we dont now about MP yet tho.

You also cant rob a bank unless in the story,   robbing the same 17 corner stores and liquor stores gets repetivive

The games is good but after playing it I realized it wasn't the game of this generations. It was great but it isn't a masterpiece. Maybe you just don't like the game or find it boring, and that's okay. For example I find GTA for more than an hour as something boring but some people can play it non stop! It's a matter of tastes!

I found that part to be a bit over-the-top, but I agree that it gets better from there.  It's a shame that Ellie remains the angst-filled teenager throughout the game though; it would have been so much better if she was friendly with other teenagers, or telling jokes to Joel.

The game doesn't tell you where you are in it. Naughty Dog made sure not to let you know. They actually didn't give you any story based trophies because of that. I'll say the game picks up when you meet up with Bill. From that point the game gets pretty intense and draining. I personally couldn't play the game more than a few hours at a time.