The Last of Us Part II Remastered review — Beautiful brutality

When The Last of Us first released on PS3, I loved it. Struck by its personal narrative of loss and the horrible things it can bring people to do. As time has passed, however, I’ve kind of soured on it. I feel like the whole media landscape became a lot more cynical after that game, making me retroactively feel like the game’s story wasn’t about loss and grief, and more just another example of “people are and have always been garbage.” Everything surrounding The Last of Us Part II seemed to confirm this was the intent, so I skipped out on it. Eventually, though, I wanted to fully form an opinion on it for myself. It can be easy, almost too easy, to just ride with whatever opinion the internet decides, and I’m trying to stop doing that. So, why not wait for the PC version to do just that?

First impressions of the game are incredibly strong, because it looks gorgeous at max settings on PC. Despite still being a little miffed Naughty Dog has become a Last of Us machine, they haven’t lost a beat in crafting worlds and characters with shocking amounts of detail. You can see every strand on Joel’s beard as he fixes up a guitar and tells his brother about the horrible things he’s done. After Tommy agrees to keep the secret, which I would probably do the same for my siblings, their horse ride back to Jackson feels like showing off. The grass sways in the wind, and the sunset streams through the trees and plays on rivers as they pass. 

Oh, and when I said max settings on PC? It certainly looks phenomenal there, but the rest of the previous paragraph is describing the game on Steam Deck. I’ve gotten used to being more surprised when a new release runs on the machine, the PC market moves fast and the Deck is quickly being left in the dust. The game has been verified for Deck, and it deserves that badge, because it runs at a mostly stable 30 to 40 fps out of the box while looking great on the 800p screen. Now, blow that up to a 1440p display and you’ll be able to notice all the imperfections, but I’m still impressed it runs at all on this thing, let alone while looking this nice.

That 30 to 40 fps does see some dips, especially in open areas, so I think it’s best to cap it at 30 here, both for battery life and visual stability. I also turned off motion blur and film grain on both PC and Deck, as I just don’t like either of those things. Back to PC though, on my refreshed rig with an RTX 4070, Intel i9-12900K, and 32 GB of ram, I’m getting anywhere from 80 to 170 fps depending on how complex the scene is. That’s a fairly big range of 90 frames per second, but it mostly sticks closer to 170 than 80. I never really felt those dips either, to me anything above 60 looks smooth as butter, so while your mileage may vary it feels good on my end. There were moments of about a second where the game would go down to around 20 fps, but that’s exclusively when alt tabbing out of the game and back in after a moment. 

Of course, all those frames are achieved with DLSS, in quality mode specifically (with the other typical modes and DLAA). The game also supports FSR 3.1.0 and XeSS, the former of which is what the Steam Deck version utilizes. Upscaling does come with a few caveats, which are the biggest problems with this port. With DLSS on, transparencies like the in-game menus or shards of glass will look super blurry and leave artifacts behind when in motion. It can be very distracting, so I would understand turning off upscaling in moments like this. Luckily, even with DLSS turned off entirely I still get up to 100 fps in quieter moments.This game just does not want to drop anywhere near 60 on my rig, even if it’s under heavy load without DLSS. It’s very clear Nixxes wanted to make up for the rough state the PC port of Part I was in at launch, and their work here is nothing short of black magic, forbidden arts and pacts with devils to get the game to run as well as possible. Can you even tell which of these screenshots are using DLSS and which aren’t?

In short, the port is phenomenal. As for the game itself, I have mixed thoughts. I certainly won’t understand the full scope of the story until I beat it, since a lot of my time with the game so far has been testing performance and such, but I am interested in where it’s going. I still think it’s a little too macabre and cynical at times, like enemies calling out the name of the guy you just killed is unintentionally hilarious rather than dark but the death animations remind me of the Tomb Raider reboot in a bad way.  There have been some great moments, but it remains to be seen if those will stick with me over the less than stellar bits. 

If you’re somehow not familiar with The Last of Us, it’s a survival horror duology where the horror mainly comes from the selfishness and cruelty of man. While there are zombie-like creatures, you already know their motivations - standing around in a daze, making clicking noises, and generally ruining the vibe of wherever they are - while people are much more complicated. Part I ended with Joel making an ultimately selfish decision, and Part II is the consequences of that choice, for better and worse. The main focus of the games is the story, but you’ll be scavenging ruins for supplies and bullets between cutscenes.

The game always makes you feel like you’re running low on ammo in particular, which consequently makes every shot fired feel like it counts. It feels good to play while also advancing the themes and brutality. While it may have better served both if the combat felt bad, to make you feel even worse for killing human beings with their own lives and relationships, that probably wouldn’t fly in the AAA space.  Regardless, they’re… enjoyable (?) experiences and I can respect the artistry.

Since this is the remaster for PS5, this PC port also includes all of the neat DualSense features. As usual, unfortunately, they still feel significantly weaker than they do on PS5. The triggers do feel a bit stronger than is typical on PC, but there’s still something missing here for the full effect. You also still can’t get those features over bluetooth, which can be frustrating. I played mostly with my Turtle Beach Stealth Pivot, which worked fine enough but occasionally the game wouldn’t recognize my back button inputs. I have them mapped to stick clicks, so it’s odd that the game would take a few tries to, for example, turn on Ellie’s flashlight. This would happen occasionally when pressing the sticks themselves, so I’m willing to chalk that up to just a quirk of every version of the game.

My most concrete complaint about the game itself is actually the level design. It’s very often too difficult to tell where you’re supposed to go or what to do to progress. NPC companions sometimes do give hints or just outright tell you, but with the naturalistic environments it can be hard to spot one tiny thing you need to interact with.