lucas duralia

I've been waiting to leave a detailed review until after I was able to finish playing through the campaign, and I'm glad I did because my rating for the game changed a number of times throughout the course of my initial play through. Overall, I would probably give the game a 90/100, but I decided to stick with 5 stars here due to the undeserved review bombing this game has received. After playing through the game, I do understand why so many people are upset, but it's worth noting that the game is still incredible whether you agree with what they did or not, and the majority of negative reviews are from people who haven't even played one single minute of the game and never will. I'll start with what makes this game so great. First and foremost, the graphics, the environments, and the characters are insanely detailed and stunning on a 4k TV. Second, the game play is highly improved in every possible way, the fighting mechanics are smooth, and the physics are highly realistic. Take for instance something as basic as rope mechanics: The way the ropes actually take the surroundings into account and bunching, looping, and swaying on the rope actually feel exactly like you'd imagine it should make it clear that there was an insane level of attention to detail from the developers. That attention to detail applies to every single aspect of the environment in this game. Everything is much more interactive and if you rush through the game, you're guaranteed to miss a ton of mini challenges. The game deserves patience and having it makes it all that much more rewarding. As for the story, the characters, and the plot devices used to tell the story, there is a mix of good and bad in my opinion. It's impossible to not be emotionally attached to the main characters, making the story itself more effective in every way possible. The game was extremely tense and emotionally draining to the point that I often found myself taking multiple day breaks to regain my composure. [WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD] What really bothered me was the second half of the game where you're forced to play as the main antagonist (Abby) and you're forced to start building a new characters skills/weapons. This particular plot device is where the game really fell incredibly short for me. First, the story makes you hate Abby and then it forces you to play as her for almost the entirety of the rest of the game. They try to humanize her and convince you that you should actually care for her character, but this didn't really work for me. I was already too emotionally tied to Ellie, Joel, Tommy, etc, so there was absolutely zero chance I was going to abandon those characters and everything I've been through with them since the first game to instead care for a basic (personality) WLF soldier who killed Joel out of revenge. Not only was this plot device extremely ineffective, it was actually really frustrating because I had to play as Abby for half of the game and I had to build her skills and weapons from the ground up. I did enjoy the few new skills/weapons introduced as I played her, but I would have MUCH rather played as Ellie (or any other protagonist) for the majority of the game and been able to focus on a single characters skills/weapons with greater depth. To me, this felt like a missed opportunity to offer a more complicated skill tree with improved weapon attachments and upgrades. It also just felt less powerful in general than had they let me play through as Ellie and instead just used cut scenes to tell Abby's story. This is THE ONLY reason this game doesn't deserve a perfect score.