Upon beating the Grounded Mode DLC back in May 2022, I said I would refrain from talking about the overall experience of The Last of Us, specifically to save it for this moment. So here we are - 4 playthroughs and almost 2 years later - We can finally discuss The Last of Us in earnest.
The Last of Us is set in post-Apocalyptic United States - Ravaged by an infectious disease converting the population into hordes of infected.
Taking place 20 years on from foretold events at the beginning of the game, which see Joel, who you play as the main protagonist, lose his daughter to a police command to open fire on them under the premise of leaving no doubt when dealing with the original outbreak.
Upon tracking down an arms dealer to discover the whereabouts of a missing weapons cache, they discover the cache has been sold to a local faction called the Fireflies, who will only give it back under the condition that Joel delivers Ellie to a group of Fireflies across the city awaiting her arrival at a local hospital.
Unbeknownst to Joel at the time, he later discovers that Ellie is infected, but resistant to the disease, and the reason she is being trafficked by Joel is to undergo an operation to extract her brain in order to harvest a cure for the infection.
As a consequence of this, you're pulled through a tale of pure survival horror, battling through hordes of infected, local factions and humans who want to take Ellie away from Joel once it becomes common knowledge how important she is to the future of the human race.
The fluctuating tempo of the game makes the pacing completely unpredictable, keeping you on edge at all times, and contributes to a genuine roller coaster experience. You can go from traipsing through a peaceful, sunset-kissed neighbourhood to being ambushed by hordes of clickers within the space of a few minutes.
Set-pieces which involve having to sneak around a dark basement to activate a generator quietly enough to not rouse the infected and escaping a garage from a bunch of savage locals who just want you dead really encapsulate the survival horror element perfectly.
The story is excellent, and the characters are the best part about it, especially the dynamic between Joel and Ellie. You can see the mood noticeably shift between them, going from treating each other with contempt at the belief they have purely just been burdened with one another, to genuine care and emotional attachment as the realisation sets in that they have to rely on each other to survive.
The game also excels in it's graphical output, capturing a variety of different environments beautifully. Anything outside with natural lighting and landscapes is nailed to perfection, but even when you're stuck in a murky basement, the shimmer of infectious spore particles and natural light creeping in through the odd gap is still enough to leave you in awe of the attention to detail the graphics provide.
Combat is also solid, with excellent melee and gun elements blended perfectly. Death animations are brutal and full of violence, really hammering home the desperately dark undertones the game displays throughout, which are a constant reminder than you're in the thick of a survival horror game. It boasts over 200 Game of the Year awards on the box art, and you can absolutely see why.
As far as the trophies go, this is actually a fairly small list, with just 24 trophies in the base game, including the Platinum trophy. However, don't be fooled by the low volume - There's still a reasonable amount of work to put in here in order to unlock that Platinum trophy.
The list is divided between the Single Player story, which is where the vast majority of the trophies are obtained, and the Multiplayer side of the game - A team-based adventure with an interesting twist.
The "The Last of Us - Survivor +" trophy, awarded for Completing the game on Survivor+, is the hardest standard to which the main list will require you to beat the story on. However, it's not technically the hardest difficulty in the game after the addition of Grounded Mode as part of the final piece of DLC released for the game.
The Story is split into 12 chapters, and will take anywhere within the region of 20-25 hours to beat.
You will need to beat the game once on any difficulty to unlock both New Game+ and Survivor difficulty level, so there is a minimum requirement to play through the game twice in order to achieve the Platinum trophy. There could be a possibility of a third playthrough, depending on your progress with upgrading weapons and obtaining collectibles, but we'll get into that later.
Survivor difficulty isn't too bad on the whole. The biggest notable difference is the fact that ammunition and resources are much more scarce than they are on lower difficulty levels, so there are portions of the game that will force you to treat it like a true survival horror, such as negotiating past certain areas through stealth alone and being ready to escape enemies that may spot and pursue you.
This doesn't necessarily make it more difficult, it just makes you change the way you play the game. You'll be able to almost run and gun on lower difficulty levels, because you'll never have to be worried about being constrained to the limitations of low resources.
Saving the limited ammunition and crafting items is crucial in Survivor difficulty, because you'll need to be conscious of the parts of the game where you'll have to fend off enemy ambushes or defeat enemies that come at you in larger quantities, so it'll certainly make you play in a smarter way that will catch you out if you don't preserve your ammo properly. It's a subtle, but critical difference.
In theory, if you beat Grounded Mode, you should be able to beat the game on Survivor, though it is important to note that I tackled Grounded Mode in a specific way that meant I avoided the limited resource challenges of the higher difficulties, and appreciate the fact that this makes a direct comparison between Survivor and Grounded somewhat difficult to make.
Upon beating the game on Survivor+, and due to the fact that all difficulty related trophies are stackable, this will mean you'll have unlocked 8 trophies, which is a third of the whole list. There are no progression-based trophies awarded at critical plot points in the story, nor for beating certain chapters, which is unusual for a Story driven game.
As a direct consequence of this, the only other elements of this trophy list cover off 2 things. Collectibles and Weapon Upgrades.
The "Scavenger" trophy, awarded for finding all collectibles, requires you to collect all 141 collectibles throughout the game. This includes all Artefacts, Comics, Firefly Pendants and Training Manuals, but not Optional Conversations, which are kept separate from this requirement.
There are a couple of things to keep in mind with the collectibles within this game;
Firstly, there is a separate trophy awarded for unlocking all Shiv doors. Shiv's are obtained in 2 ways. You can either just find them naturally lying around, or you can find the materials to craft them. Once you come across a door that requires a Shiv to be opened, if you do not possess a Shiv in your inventory to open a door, you'll be forced to leave it behind, and some of these doors possess the collectibles you need for this trophy, which makes them extremely missable. This was something I found out the hard way, so always ensure you've got at least 1 Shiv in your inventory, or at least the materials to craft one if you need to, at all times.
Secondly, whilst you're not required to collect all the collectibles in one playthrough, they do all still spawn in again during subsequent playthroughs, which makes tracking any missing collectibles a bit of a headache. If they've already been collected within a prior playthrough, they should disappear in New Game+, but they don't, which means you'll have to collect everything again, until you get the trophy, just to be sure that you don't miss anything.
You can view detail on the collectibles within the Chapter Select menu, in order to see where you've missed them. However, it's really important to bear in mind that, once you reload into a specific chapter, you'll lose all your supplement and weapon upgrades that you acquired after the point you loaded up, which are critical to both New Game+ progress, and unlocking other trophies, so this isn't a recommended approach. I just ensured I collected them all again, which obviously requires extra time, but felt like the safest way to tackle this trophy.
Collectible-based trophies of high volume are always worth noting because you have to make sure you're extra diligent when progressing through the game, but a better tracking system, or more effective Chapter Select feature, would have alleviated this task significantly.
The "For emergencies only" trophy, awarded for Fully upgrading all weapons, will require multiple playthroughs, due to the limited amount of parts you'll collect in a single playthrough.
There are 8 weapons in total to fully upgrade, and there are a couple of little nuances that could easily derail you that you should be aware of when working towards this trophy.
Firstly, aside from collecting parts scattered around the open world, you'll also need to find the 5 toolboxes. These equate to 5 levels, which will allow you full access to upgrade every part of a weapon you'll need to upgrade, so it's vital to the trophy that you also make sure you're aware of finding their locations and collecting them ideally in your first playthrough of the game. It's easy to overlook this little collectible side-quest because it doesn't have it's own trophy like the other collectibles do.
Secondly, each time you start over in New Game+, your weapon upgrades will carry over, which is exactly how you achieve this trophy. However, you won't have access to the actual weapons. You'll need to find them to access them, which in turn, will allow you to upgrade them at a workbench. I found it a little bit odd that you don't have them already in your inventory if you're playing in New Game+, but I would guess they wanted to maintain the integrity of the challenge on higher difficulties, and therefore exclude access to upgraded weapons from the start of the game.
Finally, you can only upgrade weapons at a workbench, of which there are limited opportunities to use throughout the game, so make sure you're always checking for upgrades each time you use one. Once you pass a workbench, it's gone, and you cannot freely just upgrade your weapons on the go. In theory, if you pass the final workbench in the game, and you're still missing upgrades on some weapons, you'll have to start a brand new game, so it's important to make sure you're always checking in, especially since a couple of these weapons are found very late on where you're probably only going to be able to upgrade them once at the final bench of the game.
The key thing to remember is that Shiv doors and Safes hold the most amount of parts you can obtain in one go, so as long as you always remember to open these up - and it's important because you'll find collectibles in some of them anyway - then you'll ensure that you have enough parts. It's just a matter of making sure you're conscious to the other points above, especially the understanding of workbenches.
Even after all this, and these could easily take you 3/4 full playthroughs to achieve, there's still the Multiplayer element of the game to tackle.
The Multiplayer within The Last of Us is interesting. It does something a little bit different, but with the same core formula you'd perhaps expect from a game with an emphasis on gunplay and combat.
You - sort of - play through a story plot, where your first task is to pick a side. This choice is between the 2 main factions you encounter within the main Single Player story - The Hunters or Fireflies.
Once you've made this choice, a 12 week survival period ensues, where 1 day is equal to completing 1 Multiplayer online game, for a cumulative total of 84 matches across these 12 weeks. You are the leader of your chosen faction, and your goal is get through the 12 week period without losing your group of survivors to death and disease.
At the start of each Multiplayer game, you'll be advised of the survival requirements, and the health of your group of survivors is purely determined by your performance within the subsequent match. If you perform well, your clan will remain healthy. If you perform badly, your clan will suffer. The concept is to get through this 12 week period with enough survivors still alive to save your clan from extinction.
There are 3 different game modes you can choose to play, which include Interrogation, Supply Raid and Survivors. I mostly played Survivors, which is an elimination style 4 v 4 game mode, split into multiple rounds, as I felt it was just the most fun, though I did dabble in Interrogation from time to time, just for a bit of variety. These following trophies are a long slog.
The "Hunter/Firefly" trophies, awarded for Completing the Hunter/Firefly journey, are the trophies that you'll work towards within the Multiplayer portion of the game.
Completing the journey for each one simply equates to surviving for the full 12 week period outlined above, and because you need to fulfil this for both factions, in order to unlock 2 different trophies, this means you'll have to go through these requirements twice. That's a total of at least 168 Multiplayer matches - If everything goes to plan.
This is where the big twist comes in. At 5 different intervals of the 12 week period, the pre-game survival requirements will potentially bring about an outcome that wipes out your entire clan population in one go if you do not meet the performance requirements within the next game. If this happens, you'll have to start over from the very beginning. Out of these 5 instances, 1 of them comes on week 11, day 6 (which would be match 77), and 1 also comes on week 12, day 4 (which would be match 82) - Both agonisingly close to the end of the 12 week period.
In the interest of balance, it's not hard to perform well enough to overcome these hurdles. You do need to seriously drop the ball to fail, but it does require preparation. At these stages when your clan is at 100% threat level, you'll be forced to achieve a certain objective to pass. Some of these objectives are more difficult than others, and there are other special events that will cause a threat to your clans population - Just not to the degree of 100%. The key is to hold out for the easier objectives when your clan threat is at 100%, and use up the harder objectives when it's a lower percentage and you can still survive the hit. Obtaining a specific number of enemy downs, or spotting a specific number of enemies were solid, easy choices for me, but you need to make sure you still have them in your pocket ready for these moments.
Outside of this, and the other thing that's important to mention here; It's long. Really long.
Even if you don't fail and are never forced to restart the campaign, it's still a total of 168 matches to go through each of the Firefly and Hunter journeys. At around 10-15 minutes per match, that equates to 50-60 hours for both combined. That's a fairly substantial grind.
I did personally find the Multiplayer element of the game a solid addition to the package. It doesn't exactly break new ground, but it's a passable experience, and this is important if it demands you to be in it for the long haul. I'm not so sure my thoughts would remain this consistent had I seen my clan wiped out at any point, but luckily, that didn't happen to me.
The multiple playthroughs of the game's story, along with a solid Multiplayer grind probably takes this to around a 80-90 hour Platinum trophy.
You might see this figure low-balled a little bit generally, but it's important to note that there are shortcuts to make this quicker. One of these is to skip days in Multiplayer and still be able to get through the story unscathed, but I did not choose to use this method. I also had to play through the Single Player on 3 occasions - Once to enjoy the story and unlock Survivor/New Game+, a second time to beat it on Survivor and a final time to polish off any collectibles I'd missed, along with finally upgrading all weapons. I imagine most people will be will also within the 3, possibly 4 playthrough range.
The Multiplayer journey is where the challenge of the list peaks, and even that is just purely for the grind. Survivor+ isn't exactly difficult - You just have to adjust the way you approach the game, and this is a fairly straight-forward concept to understand and execute.
This makes The Last of Us a fairly average difficulty overall. Time-consuming, but ultimately providing a limited challenges that prevents it from reaching the upper ends of the difficulty scale.
Notable Trophies -
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| The Last of Us - Survivor+ - Complete the game on Survivor. Scavenger - Found all collectibles. For emergencies only - Fully upgrade all weapons. Firefly - Complete the Firefly Journey. Hunter - Complete the Hunter Journey. |
Hardest Trophy -
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