Finally finished this game after taking month hiatus from playing this game. Which I guess already sums lot of about I felt or more like didn't feel like about the game. My minor grievances already start with the naming of the title, it feels like ordinary naming of just tlou 2, just wouldn't be enough in the minds of the creators, for such an extraordinary title, so they just had to name it tlou part II.
For the story, which took me 15 hours to finish according to save file, I can't say I really enjoyed it. Neither was gameplay which i get to later, so one might wonder why I even bothered to play the game after awhile. Mostly it was just sunk cost fallacy, and hoping it might get better by giving the game a chance. For some elements like weed, superficial on-off relationships, bigots, many lbqt's and so on, while they don't bother me in principle whatsoever, it felt like these elements didn't improve the story one bit, but where there solely to signal the virtues of the creators. Characters didn't seem to make a whole lot of sense in terms of motivations and, while some were superficially nice behaving, like Owen, Abby and Ellie, their actions were really despicable most of the time. And yes having sensible, relatable chars is important to me in a story.
Gameplay however bothered me even more since that's what I usually play games for since stories are rarely any good in video games like in this case too. My biggest problem was the poor aiming controls, you really had to be surgical with right stick to make it even hit the body. That to me just isn't fun. I mean I get why developers made it that way. If aiming was as fast and smooth as let say call of duty, then it would make encounters pretty trivial and make the game shorter. However on my case this design backfired and made the game even shorter, since on pretty much every possible encounter my tactic was just to run to next hold Y to proceed door. Controls were also convoluted in terms of mapping. I never crafted anything other health packs, cause that would have slowed down the gameplay for me, both from crafting and having to juggle with that dpad menu. There was also so many nooks and crannies that I didnt bother to loot any of them since none of the upgrades, pills or screws didn't seem interesting at all.
Visually game was good, and there was some cool setpieces like that horse ride on island.
For the story, which took me 15 hours to finish according to save file, I can't say I really enjoyed it. Neither was gameplay which i get to later, so one might wonder why I even bothered to play the game after awhile. Mostly it was just sunk cost fallacy, and hoping it might get better by giving the game a chance. For some elements like weed, superficial on-off relationships, bigots, many lbqt's and so on, while they don't bother me in principle whatsoever, it felt like these elements didn't improve the story one bit, but where there solely to signal the virtues of the creators. Characters didn't seem to make a whole lot of sense in terms of motivations and, while some were superficially nice behaving, like Owen, Abby and Ellie, their actions were really despicable most of the time. And yes having sensible, relatable chars is important to me in a story.
Gameplay however bothered me even more since that's what I usually play games for since stories are rarely any good in video games like in this case too. My biggest problem was the poor aiming controls, you really had to be surgical with right stick to make it even hit the body. That to me just isn't fun. I mean I get why developers made it that way. If aiming was as fast and smooth as let say call of duty, then it would make encounters pretty trivial and make the game shorter. However on my case this design backfired and made the game even shorter, since on pretty much every possible encounter my tactic was just to run to next hold Y to proceed door. Controls were also convoluted in terms of mapping. I never crafted anything other health packs, cause that would have slowed down the gameplay for me, both from crafting and having to juggle with that dpad menu. There was also so many nooks and crannies that I didnt bother to loot any of them since none of the upgrades, pills or screws didn't seem interesting at all.
Visually game was good, and there was some cool setpieces like that horse ride on island.