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J_Allard on 05 August 2013
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I can't tell which part of the OP is the most up to date one.

My thoughts on the game:

I found the SP to be more fun to experience than it was to actually play. I felt the same way about the Uncharted series after #1, MGS games after #1, and most CoD campaigns nowadays. Some might take that as a shot on the game, I guess it can be depending on how you look at it.

The premise and atmosphere of the game are pretty spectacular, but when you're actually playing it, they fall apart. There's not much of a sense of survival, of starving, of desperation. You're a one man army wiping out horde after horde of enemies. Your penalty for dying is you restart right before you died. I felt no connection to anyone past the 2 main characters, and even there I didn't feel much. In other ND games you have a couple main characters but you still feel connected to the others. In the end of Last of Us I really didn't care what choice Joel made. Compare this to something like Infinite, I was so floored by the ending of that game that I immediately started playing it again. There was none of that for me personally with LoU.

Other areas that make the gameplay fall apart are the issues with the gameplay itself. One big reason why the premise and atmosphere fall apart imho is the fact that the AI support characters are entirely ignored by enemies. I know some people gripe that this is nitpicking and whatever, to me it really broke the immersion. It also enables incredibly easy combat, which also kills the premise. Trying your hardest to scrounge and save up supplies.. just let your God mode AI teammate kill everyone.

There are also loads of glitches. A majority of them are graphical, but the game is very rough around the edges. Moving around I was constantly sticking through things and falling through areas. Other glitches are more glaring. On more than a few occasions my health bar disappeared. AI teammates spazz out sometimes, as do enemy AI. Anyone can search YT and find plenty of videos of AI turbo running from one cover to another or teleporting back and forth.

Even when non-glitched, the AI is lackluster at best. This is personally my main area of letdown with the SP. There was so much potential here to make a really incredible survival horror game with great stealth and challenging AI. But instead we essentially get Uncharted AI set in what should be a wildly different setting. It was so sad to stumble upon a square area with a few rectangle box cover areas built in and realize a big fight against a wave of enemies was coming up. They could not create anything better than what we see in a typical shooter. I expected more from a developer like Naughty Dog.

Leading up to release they'd shown nothing but the "dynamic" combat encounters where you stalk and kill people using stealth, and the less "traditional" encounters that happen in abandoned buildings and stuff. But a majority of the encounters are your typical corridor cover enemy waves over and over. But back to the AI, even in these more open combat encounters, the AI is laughably bad. I routinely sat 3 inches away from enemies and they would walk right past me. You can strangle a guy 3 feet from an enemy and he doesn't notice. It's terrible.

It's strange that the zombie AI seems to be more challenging and designed better than human AI. Not that the zombies were a challenge, but they were much more challenging than the rest. Each zombie room I viewed almost like a puzzle. Encounters with humans I viewed almost like a chore.

What I DID like about the SP. The design of the environments were outstanding. This is a lot like how I would expect a zombie apocalypse world to look like. The writing and the story of the game itself were pretty good. More than the main story, I thought all the little things in the game were amazing and reminded me a lot of a Fallout game. For example the whole Bill and Frank stuff. The Ish stuff from the sewers and his survivor group was just fascinating. Stuff like that made the game worth experiencing one time imho.

On to the MP. It is a great blend of Gears style tactical gameplay with a mix of the scavenging/supplies stuff from SP. It is pretty well balanced though some styles and weapons are a little overpowered imho. It could also use some more content but apparently DLC is coming.