Call of Juarez: Gunslinger

Rating: 2 out of 3 Stars (why only 3 possible stars?)

Genre: First Person Shooter

ESRB: M (Cartoony blood splatter, profanity)

Estimated hours of gameplay (thorough play/quick play): 8/4

Developer: Techland

Wiki page

Another DLC stand-alone game from an established franchise like Farcry 3: Blood Dragon. I'm not entirely sure what this trend is, but I kind of like it. I'm worried that it means big companies are trying to invade the sales space of Indie games, but they're still quite nice. So far, each has had a $15 price tag on day one. Now these games are much smaller than the "legit" entries of the franchise, but considering the length of them they are a deal and a half (at least in terms of "gameplay hours," which gamers often make more important than we should). I find myself hoping a franchise I like- say, Mass Effect- would try it out as well. Not every game needs to be some $60 giant budgeted affair with a ridiculously long development time. And I don't want to always dedicate so much time to a game. There's nothing wrong with a quickie, yo.

Oh yeah! Wait, this game features like one cutscene total worth of female. What is this ad for?

The story of this game is basically the draw of it. When someone wants a cowboy game, they want to enjoy a good cowboy setting with lots of cowboy cowboy'ing. It functions well, for the most part. Nothing that astounds me or is too immersive. Just a fun romp of a tall tale from a drunken guy with a southern accent. I will complain that the music wanders around in genres, making me wonder if it's just some leftovers from other games. I know this isn't something that is generally worth noting, but in this case it becomes downright distracting to enjoying the setting. The cutscenes and levels follow a simplified format, but it's well suited to this lower-budget attraction. The ending does wrap the game up well, but it does something that offends many: a binary choice is given with no precedent to it. Quite precisely, the game just pauses and asks you to either spare the final bad guy or kill him (in a rather awkward menu, I might add). I chose to spare him, which made no sense. Especially considering the crazy amounts of people Silas (the player character) kills during the story to find him. I'd have preferred there be no choice at the end at all, but Techland probably wanted to give us a reason to play through the game a second time for more of those precious gameplay hours.

Bullet time! Everyone's favorite!

A bit ago I reviewed Max Payne 3 and shot it down for relying too much on bullet time. I will admit that being able to slow time to make perfect head shots is still fun, it definitely works better in a shorter game. It also helps that this game has a mini-leveling system with skills. Once you get to a high level, you can do some ridiculous crap like create infinite bullet time combos (so long as the enemies come at you fast enough). But this is where the game is showing its "not terrible but not great" aspects. Like a realistic shooter, you spend the entire game using the same guns to shoot the same kind of enemies over and over. Which is weird because this is a game about tall tales from the west at their tallest. Why not throw some Frankensteins or Gundams at us? I don't know. You do get to fight ghosts, but they are the same as regular people. There are boss fights and duels, but neither of those are ever interesting. I found myself dreading them and being happy when they were over.

They even manage to squeeze in a turret section here and there. Really?

Conclusion:

A fun, cheap vignette. But not strong enough in any category to feel vital for any kind of gamer.

Defiance

Rating: 1 out of 3 Stars (why only 3 possible stars?)

Genre: MMO; Sub-genre: Third Person Shooter, RPG

ESRB: M (Blood splatter from machine guns, but mostly profanity)

Estimated hours of gameplay (thorough play/quick play): n/a

Developer: Trion Worlds

Wiki page

This is an ambitious undertaking. A video game and TV series launched simultaneously? The video game is an MMO? The MMO is an action shooter? And they're backed by small potatoes? Man. Some of the largest games in the world have difficulty with launching on multiple platforms at once. How did these guys do it all? We all assumed it would just be a broken, unplayable train wreck. To our delighted surprise, this game actually works. And it works far better than I expected it to. That still doesn't make it a good game, though.

The ambition caught my attention. But you have to do a good job to keep my attention.

A fair assumption would be that the shooter controls wouldn't translate out. MMO's are known to involve things like targeting and hit chance, while shooters only go off manual aim. Not only that, but latency is a constant issue in an MMO. Most of them skate away with it because the game design doesn't require the pinpoint precision of a tense action game. Somehow the shooting in this game is almost spot on despite the reliance on servers and the loads they bear. I noticed some discrepancies here and there when it came to landing shots- sometimes generous, sometimes denied- but mostly these issues I could attribute to having the aim assist turned on. Normally I turn those off, but I figured, "It's an MMO!" I regret that. If you're a shooter fan, turn it off. The biggest problem I ran into were choppy framerates in high traffic fights. But I was playing on XBox 360, just to test the game's mettle further! And... also because I'm very comfy with the XBox's controls. Which leads me to another compliment: the game is stupidly easy to get into. Yeah! It just uses your XBox Live sign in. Creating an account for the game is optional! And even that process takes about two less steps than I thought it would. Astounding, since even the most technologically advanced studios make this process as irritating as possible. 

If only the whole game was this intelligent. For all these pluses, the game boils down to being an MMO grind in no time flat. Sure, there's plenty of questing and even a good helping of cutscenes with recorded dialogue. But every quest is so similar: go click on three things, waves of guys attack you at each step. Next quest? Go click on four things, waves of guys attack you at each step. And every other activity is approached the same way. Like Arkfalls. Holy crap, those are constant! A big rock falls out of the sky and you fight waves of guys to claim it. The enemy design almost seemed competent, being that you do have to use different tactics to fight hellbugs than humanoids. But too quickly a pattern is noticed. Either you run in circles for days or you are hiding in cover and abusing long range weapons. 

The classless system feels unique at first. But it is problematic in important ways. You get a "skill point" for each "level" you earn. And each perk can have three points sunk into it. But you have to equip each perk into a perk slot; unequipped perks do nothing. Perk slots unlock very slowly, and many perks have to be acquired to unlock farther perks. The end result is that you go many, MANY levels where you spend points that do absolutely nothing to your character. And even when you are spending points on something you want, you probably can't equip the perk you just got yet. The idea is that you can eventually level so much that you can buy every skill you want for several different builds of character because the game allows you to swap between different builds at the character screen. An interesting idea, but not a good one. This makes alternate characters pointless, renders each individual build less deep, and only benefits people who want multiple builds while the more single-minded player (which I believe is the majority of people) gets less out of his/her character.

One last thing: there are no auction houses, no banks, and no major cities. MMO's are about community, and the lack of these things really hinder the player base from becoming that.

It just isn't an MMO if you can't idle around on an epic mount around hundreds of other players.

Here's a question, Defiance: do I HAVE to watch the TV show? Because I don't know what in the flying frick is going on! With zero introduction, my character got in a plane crash and was then told to go explore. Something called an EGO, which is half Cortana from Halo and half Angel from Borderlands (and all Navi from Ocarina of Time), continually tells you what to do. Whether its basic gameplay (things like telling you to defend yourself and to "keep doing what you're doing") or pointing out what the icons on the User Interface mean, it's just too blatant. And it never stops, no matter what your level is. It seems like a minor thing, since it's basically like having a Quest Helper add-on in World of Warcraft. But this is 100% of the story, man. This dumb AI acting like some oddly emotional "emotionless" girl and telling you what to do and think. Your character can't talk, so this is the only thing you get to listen to after quest NPC's do their little dance.

I tried looking through the knowledge index to no avail. But even then, why should I? Clever writers would make a world I can understand just by experiencing it. And the setting they've made is no help at all. It's supposed to be Earth. The city of Defiance (which the game oddly does NOT take place in, it takes place in San Francisco) is actually Saint Louis only renamed after some battle or something. That's all I know and that's from some extracurricular reading. I have no clue what happened to the Earth, how bad the damage was, why there are all these different kinds of aliens and mutants, where this Ark came from, WHY the Ark is important, and on and on. Unfortunately it makes me understand why things like a zombie apocalypse are a popular setting: people understand that concept already. Whatever the hell is going on here needs an entire 2 hour movie to explain, if not more. And it gives us nothing. Maybe if I watched the show religiously and read the Wikia AND read every little thing I found in the game I would eventually piece it all together. But... MAN. That is a lot of work just to be able to understand the basic setting, nevermind all the other details!

None of this even matters, though, because the characters and dialogue are so bad that I can assume everything is just random cliches and ideas hobbled together. The story of the "main" missions and the "episode" missions both involved a maguffin. Each one could fit in the palm of your hand. Literally, one story featured an item that looked like a Christmas Tree-shaped ornament and the other was an ash tray. And each mission just involved trying to find the damn thing with non-stop steps to get to it. Intermixed with this are the stories of the NPC's you are helping, which are completely lazy and nonsensical. For example, I ran a quest where I met some genius mechanic. After enlisting her help, her assistant gets kidnapped off-camera by a man who also happens to be the same person who killed the mechanic's father. Once this villain is killed, she almost verbatim gives a speech about how revenge doesn't make her feel any better that you can probably quote before seeing it. Everything comes out as some sloppy cut-and-paste from everything else you've ever seen with some awful acting behind it. In particular, the Nolan character (who seems to be some kind of main character in the show) couldn't be bothered with putting inflection in any of his lines.

Keep shooting. That's the plan. No, I'm not a robot.

I did try the multiplayer briefly. 

I did all but one of the co-op maps (I already decided to stop playing by the time I unlocked the last one). Those were functional, at least they were congruent with the single-player experience and met my expectations for what a group would be like. My biggest complaint on those was that I didn't see a point to doing them. In MMO's, generally the group activities are the most rewarding. While I can appreciate doing something just for fun, that doesn't work in an MMO. The reason being is that people will stop doing it if it distracts them from important grinding. 

The PvP was equally as messy as I expected it to be, but also as functional as the rest of the game. While everything seemed to work, there are only four maps total: two deathmatch, one where you hold capture points, and one that was labeled 64 vs. 64 that I couldn't fathom being anything less than a choppy nightmare when played on console. The capture points one had lost me after only two games. I think maybe people who play Battlefield could get into it, but being an item-based game might still ruin it. It's far too large, open and hectic to become any kind of strategic battle of wits. And the team deathmatch is just victim to less-than-great map design; the one that supports more players is too confined and both maps have strange spawning habits. Regardless, the game is "leveless." Players' level of power is displayed as an "EGO rating." Because of this, PvP matches will feature everyone from 1 rating to 5 million rating (or whatever the cap is). 

Even though the game goes to great lengths to normalize items and talents, you are still subject to playing with extremely powerful players at every turn. The amount of knowledge and careful character crafting someone can do by the time they reach a rating of 2000 or so makes them ridiculously more powerful than a newbie. This normalization affects a great deal of the game, since MMO's are all about progressing your character, and it is almost completely ineffective. What a waste!

Blur: useless in PvE, godlike in PvP.

Conclusion:

As an MMO, this game offers none of the things MMO players want other than an infinite grind and mostly functional gameplay. As an action shooter, it only offers a mountain of MMO features that slow you down for days/weeks/months just to get to lazy and 100% repetitive sequences. An interesting game to talk about, but that's it. But hey: no subscription fee!

Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island

Rating: 3 out of 3 Stars (why only 3 possible stars?)

Genre: Side Scrolling Platformer

ESRB: K-A (This is now an E rating)

Estimated hours of gameplay (thorough play/quick play): 10/4

Developer: Nintendo

Wiki page

I talk about this game frequently. While I'm definitely not the type who thinks video games were better "back then" than now, this is one of the ones I find is worthy of the nostalgia. I've played it through a few times, each time maybe 5 or more years apart, and it still holds up. This might even be considered a game that helped push us to where games are now; easier but with more content and shinies to make up the gameplay hours. Although it isn't THAT easy. Either that or I'm somehow getting worse at this game. I made liberal use of my emulator's freeze state capability. By the way, I would have played this on Wii's Virtual Console but apparently Nintendo doesn't want my money because they never put it there.

I could still make this jump. But... wow, man. Platforming!

While this is a platformer, much of the game doesn't simply revolve around managing jump arcs from place to place. There's considerably less death pits than previous games as this one does not rely wholly on that one concept. Furthermore, not everything is to be jumped on. Unlike earlier Mario games where Mario has to find a flower or a leaf or something to be able to do anything interesting, Yoshi has a whole arsenal available to him from level one. He can eat things, throw eggs, butt stomp, and he also has other power-ups that afford him zany godlike qualities. For example, he can MORPH into a freaking helicopter! Arguably, these transformations make no sense but- back then- these things were a technological wonder. And when has Mario ever made sense? One of the best things about Super Mario World was the introduction of Yoshi. This game throws him into the spotlight and never feels forced or repetitive. Almost every single level has something new for the player, and the difficulty curve- while slow- peaks neatly towards the end. The boss fights are generally too easy, but level to level everything just looks and feels so well designed.

This fight reminds me of Super Mario Galaxy. A lot of this game is the foundation for later stuff.

With older games, it's not necessary to comment on the story. But this game actually has a little bit of one! Or... maybe it has as much as others, it just has room on the cartridge for some text screens. One at the beginning and one at the end. A wizard guy yells at you from time to time, and because of this and the clear setting (an island full of Yoshi's, duh) it feels more like a proper work of fiction rather than some insane acid trip. But it is based on a series of games that look like acid trips, so some of that is inescapable.

Pre-rendered CG stork looking like the cover of a Rush album. Oh yeah.

Conclusion:

If you've got an SNES emulator and are looking for a new game to try and you haven't played this, this should DEFINITELY be on your list. If you're a PC gamer and you don't have any emulators: why are you a PC gamer? C'mon, man. Get an emulator!

Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance

Rating: 1 out of 3 Stars (why only 3 possible stars?)

Genre: Beat-'em-up; Sub-genre: Stealth

ESRB: M (dismemberment and gore, profanity)

Estimated hours of gameplay (thorough play/quick play): 8/4

Developer: Platinum Games

Wiki page

Last week I ascended the lofty heights of The Last of Us only to be treated to that much higher a fall when I played this game. Looking back on this and considering other reviews on it, I do wonder if I was too harsh. But then I think about the fact that this game caused me so much pain that I wanted to quit on several occasions and was happy to be RID of it when it ended. Also, I kept a list of all the design choices I disagreed with while playing. Within a few minutes of starting this game up, I knew I was going to need to do so. I don't think I even need to go that far, but I'll provide my list at the bottom anyway just for fun. I should point out that I've never played any of the Metal Gear games. Crazy, I know. But I'm not that big on stealth (and this isn't a stealth game, so I figured I'd try it).

Note this game did not come out for Wii, but it sports a decidedly Wii-like main feature.

I really feel like I don't even need to justify much. One design decision immediately gets in your face and ruins the entire game: blocking. To block, you press towards the enemy and attack. Because Raiden, the main character, fights with a sword, most of the time this means he'll interpret your attempt to block by moving forward and attacking. Furthermore, because Raiden fights with a melee weapon, this means you'll ALWAYS be pressing toward the enemy and attacking. This is because that is the entire point of the game. The fact that they made one command perform completely adverse moves is completely beyond any kind of logic. AND Raiden doesn't clash swords when you do it either. He just holds his sword up like he's waiting for the blow to come to him. It makes no sense. I seriously feel like ending the article right here on just how mind-blowingly stupid this concept is. You might be saying, "Well, every button is already assigned. There's no more room." Oh yeah? How about B? B is used to perform Zandatsu while in Sword Mode and to perform Ninja Kills in stealth. These are two modes that are entirely separate from normal combat. It works perfectly to just press B to do this. Duh! Of course you don't have to do that, Platinum Games, you could have reworked the controls to be less stupid in general. Another solution would be to program the camera to be less stupid (like in the Batman: Arkham games) and then remove the lock-on button. The lock-on button isn't useful most of the time and when it is, it's only marginally better than the alternative of never knowing where your lightning-fast enemies have run off to. This paragraph is getting too big, so I'll just summarize by saying that this game brings nothing good to the beat-'em-up genre (unlike the Batman: Arkham games, which everyone should copy rather than crap something like this out) and the new ideas it does bring (this crappy block and Sword Mode) are not interesting to begin with and only serve to make the game frustrating.

The combat feels more like THIS Batman iteration. That feeling being PURE HATRED.

Having not played any of the previous games, I am at a large loss when talking about the story. I saw some of Metal Gear Solid 4's cutscenes, and that seemed like some kind of incomprehensible acid trip so I didn't bother to look further. No worries, though, this game is designed for newbies to be able to pick up! What they did for us was they injected a ton of exposition and awkward inhuman dialogue where the characters discuss things they already know very well. Like Raiden will sometimes discuss with Kevin how Private Military Companies are bad, and then Kevin will retort that the PMC they are in is more morally responsible. To which Raiden will agree, being that's why he joined in the first place. Then there's discussions of current and past events where each person is forced to say, "Yeah, I know that." It's unfortunate that there's so much information to dole out, but really this game is so simple it's just unnecessary. Luckily the player is saved from hours of dialogue because the NPC's are all tucked away in a menu that never needs to be looked at. I tried talking to them, but I just got bored from these weird discussions that often involved a ton of techno-babble (many of the discussions are PURELY about techno-babble). Also... the writing is very Japanese. I just have to say that, man. Despite all this, the story (eventually) was what kept me chugging through the terrible combat. There's even one scene in particular I found philosophically deep and touching. And then there's this part where Doktor informs Raiden that Mistral's breasts are not fake. That conversation feels more appropriate for a game about chopping up robots while heavy metal music blasts into your ears. So the tone is... genuinely video game-y. It's so something that would only happen in a (Japanese) video game that there's no other way to describe it. Without getting into spoilers, the last boss is some kind of parody of how ridiculous this game is. At least, I think he is. I don't know how else to interpret the tone of this game.

I think Mistral is leftover from Platinum Games' Bayonetta.

The one additional feature this game has are VR missions. They are bonus challenges that earn you extra experience that for some reason can only be played during the campaign mode (an added dumbness to this is that starting a VR mission sends you back to your most recent checkpoint in the campaign). Every mission involves the same combat and stealth as in the campaign only with more fighting and less level design and story. These help further illustrate how weak both of those areas are in the game, so I do not find them a worthwhile addition. I actually did not complete all of them because they are unlocked with hidden collectables. You know, I try to play each game thoroughly but this game apparently didn't want me to. So I didn't. I only played like half of 'em. They pissed me off anyway, screw 'em.

Conclusion:

I don't know who this game is for. It's nothing like the other Metal Gear games and it's not even the same developer. The hack and slash elements are awful and the story is too dense for newbies. I can only say that by itself this game is not worth the frustration.

Itemized Whining!

1. Game is instantly frustrating

2. Sword Mode is disorienting every time. Have to press forward to get near enemies but forward becomes "look up" once entered. This means you look up when entering Sword Mode.

3. Range of sword attacks is unforgiving. And yet an early cut scene shows Raiden slicing things a mile away from him.

4. Block move is same button as attack. This is IDIOTIC.

5. Raiden is WAY more powerful in cut scenes than in-game. Also, Raiden is capable of much more interesting things while in cut scenes that would have made amazing gameplay if he could ever call on them in combat at will.

6. Difficulty of challenges makes no sense. Challenge 4 simply involves running forward.

7. Raiden stops in place when he attacks while running over things with Ninja Run.

8. Raiden cannot cleanly run through things while slashing them (IE a gate). This makes sequences where Raiden has to run through gates oddly clumsy because he gets stuck on the gate.

9. "Zandatsu" is not an english word. Also, the prompt for the player to do so at an opportune moment is in Japanese letters. This is incomprehensible AND is vital to playing the game correctly.

10. The ability to do the better block by waiting longer is never explained.

11. Slicing people apart is absolutely NOT precise at all. It is entirely random at times when you slice people apart in the ways you want, unless you slowly spend all your time lining up a single hit.

12. X and Y can be used during sword mode. This is never offered to the player.

13. Enemies cannot be figured out naturally. The best way to understand an enemy is to find them in a VR mission and fight them over and over by trying EVERYTHING on them.

14. The targeting for Raiden's slash during sword mode is not easy enough to see.

15. D pad becomes locked out while moving. Raiden has to calmly stand perfectly still for a second before it will work. Why?

16. There is a red flash to indicate when a move can be blocked, yet there are blockable moves that do not flash.

17. Raiden can be easily hit stunned to death. EASILY.

18. VR mission 8 says to eliminate all enemies with ninja kill. It does NOT specify that being spotted is an auto-fail.

19. Raiden cannot simply move in the direction pressed when running. He has to make a very slow U-turn

20. Game has NO concept of difficulty curve.

21. Raiden has no method of dodging or recovery once staggered.

22. Camera is absolutely terrible. This is 2013.

23. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-iQpLT92RY even players getting "top" scores look clumsy.

24. Targeting in this game is both unnecessary and causes Raiden to hit the wrong target. Furthermore, when actually selecting a target this makes the game more disorienting at times.

25. The sai attack that pulls Raiden towards his enemy has CONSTANT pathing errors.

26. Every enemy has a combo that hits multiple times. Every hit of such combo leads into the other hits with no way of escaping it. This means they intentionally coded into the game several points where the player is frustrated and unable to play.

27. Every single move in the game locks onto Raiden; curving in 270 degree curves to connect on him. None of Raiden's even come close to having this much leniency in their targeting. This is incredibly frustrating.

28. Enemies can hit Raiden even when he is 12 feet in the air and CLEARLY out of range of the move's arc.

29. Last boss fight is LONG with NO CHECKPOINTS in its longest phase.

30. On the longest phase of last boss fight, there seems to be no thought in terms of how much the screen can be filled with fire. Because his moves are chosen randomly, damage can become unavoidable and cause Raiden to bounce around between wafts of fire.

31. Last boss has a dash move which he can instantly interrupt with a combo AND has inexplicable invincibility frames when he doesn't choose to take a free combo.

32. Ripper mode doesn't work on bosses.

33. Management of super meter irrelevant on boss fights.

34. Very possible to make game "unbeatable" if player is caught on a hard section with low healing items up.

35. Item menu too slow to be relied on in intense situations.

36. Too many combos syndrome; there are a million combos but they are way too long to ever complete or too complicated and numerous to bother to remember. The usefulness of each combo is questionable, too, so I just use the most basic stuff. It would be better to focus the combos into a short list where each one is useful for a specific situation. Or just be like Batman and have no combos.

37. Ninja Run is not as clean at parkour as the guy from Prototype 2. Try again.

The Last of Us

Rating: 3 out of 3 Stars (why only 3 possible stars?)

Genre: Survival Horror; Sub-genre: Stealth

ESRB: M (explicit violence and gore, profanity, intensely depressing situations)

Estimated hours of gameplay (thorough play/quick play): 22/12

Developer: Naughty Dog

Wiki page

I gotta say, it is a huge relief when I definitively know what to rate a game. And imagine how much better it feels when it's not only a three star game, but a game I genuinely enjoy! Since my reviews are based on how much I recommend a game to the general public rather than just my own personal pleasure, sometimes a three star game can still bore me. Not this time. Although I do have some critiques and warnings for those interested, let me get into why Naughty Dog has once again made me proud to possess an over-priced Blu-Ray player.

Sony's Blu-Ray player, the "Playstation 3," can also play video games. Startling!

Now, for those who don't know about Naughty Dog, the thing you need to know is that they invest a lot of their expertise into storytelling. So if you want a game like Gears of War where you just fire endless machine gun bullets at baddies and skip all the cutscenes, this game will not click with you. The best way to enjoy it is going to be from sitting quietly and paying attention; immerse yourself. Obviously, since it's a survival horror game, the effect will be increased if it's dark and you're alone. That being said, it is a gritty survival horror game. If you have a weak stomach (especially if you're also a parent) then this whole ordeal might be way too stressful for you. But if you're like me- desensitized and cynical- or if you're starved for a good story from a video game then The Last of Us will slap you right in the face with some of its twists and turns. My one complaint on this element is that the main character, Joel, has a background that's a little too vague. There's definitely a lot of personality and relatable emotions to him, I just don't get what his stake is in his quarantine zone or what he has to lose from his post-apocalypse life.

Zombies are a little too PG-13 these days. Just warning you: The Last of Us is NOT.

I'm actually some kind of dumbfounded with the gameplay here. I never computed "survival horror" and "stealth" to be two things that would go together so well. Sure, I remember thinking, "Isaac has no sense of sneaking around!" when playing Dead Space. And BioShock offers builds that can make the player somewhat stealthy. But here it's full blown stealth. Joel can't move bodies and lacks the finesse of the awesome technology/shenanigans available to people like Solid Snake, Sam Fisher, and Agent 47, but it is still a vital tool to his successful navigation of the world. And, when fused with the setting, enemy design, and scene-by-scene story, it makes it all the more intense, real, and investing. All that being said, another warning I have would be that it IS a survival horror game. So things are slow and clunky by design. If you want to be able to perform perfect air combos or headshot ten dudes in a row this game might frustrate you. BUT I myself do not like survival horror games. At all. A little anecdote: I bought Dead Space when it was brand new at full price before realizing how stupid I was to buy it. I only got about two levels in before I gave it up, and I think that game is likely worthy of a three star rating! So think about that: this game is good enough to transcend its genre "handicap."

Navigating menus in real time (no pausing) is terrifying!

And, by complete surprise to me, there is a multiplayer feature in this game! Keep in mind the campaign alone is well worth the price of admission for this game. So this is just an extra bonus. I thought it would be some kind of PvE horde mode, but it's actually a head-to-head mode. That sounds idiotic, but it actually is pretty damn good. It scores most of its points with me for being so unique and fairly balanced. But I can't help but wonder, "Where are the zombies?" Seriously. The infected have NO direct interaction with the gameplay. Maybe they'll introduce a PvE horde mode later on for that. But basically the only time you even hear about them is during the day-by-day announcements the game makes. Basically, instead of having experience points (like Call of Duty) you have survivors. Keeping them alive and happy by competing well will earn you more supplies and unlock more stuff. It can hook up to your Facebook account if you let it, but as far as I can tell this only provides the player with pictures of his or her friends when the game makes daily announcements about the survivors; implying that you and your friends comprise their numbers. While this concept of survival replacing experience is unique, it leads to my biggest complaint: this multiplayer is TOO STRESSFUL. If you have some bad games or screw up on an event, you can suffer a large hit to your progression. That wouldn't be so bad if the game didn't count leaving games early (or freaking disconnects!) as a big fat ZERO for the day. I was doing pretty well until I left a game and it said I was ~40 supplies short for the day and it made half my people "hungry" and the other half "sick" when they were all previously "healthy." My other two complaints are that it is impossible to leave a game once a countdown has started and that the second game type ("Survivors", the primary is called "Supply Raid") is incredibly awful. I'm sure there are people out there who enjoy the concept, but it's identical to the first game type only with more limiting spawns. Adding a feature that can prevent me from playing is not a feature!

Showing off gets you bonus supplies... somehow.

Conclusion:

The biggest downside is that this game is a PS3 exclusive. But the upside to that is that makes my judgement easier to render: if you own a PS3, then get this game! How do you not own three copies already!?

One last comment:

Hey! Resident Evil! Dead Space! So you say your games are becoming more "shooter" and less "survival horror" because it's more profitable? The Last of Us LAUGHS at your impotence. LAUGHS!

Check it out.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/insertcoin/2013/06/18/the-last-of-us-is-the-biggest-game-of-the-year-with-1-3m-sold/