The Last of Us Part II has great visuals and gameplay, but has a very poor story. I will not spoil anything but if I had to sum up the issue here, the game tries to get rid of what made Part I so great and tries something new which I did not enjoy.
The game is all about perspective, as you try to understand who is "good" or "bad", the problem is that there is no proper time taken to develop the new characters to the point where I would have to wonder who I prefer over the other. This also leads to many plot holes due to characters making rash decisions that make no sense.
There is also poor pacing, I won't say much but imagine that in Detroit Become Human you played as Connor for the first 1/3 of the game, Kara as the 2/3 of the game and then Markus as the final third of the game. That is how it works in Part II and it ruins the structure of the story.
However, there are good parts of the story. I will not say anything but there was still a solid 5-6 hours of the game that I genuinely enjoyed, some characters are actually good likeable characters that I enjoyed playing with. I can also confirm that no matter what you hear, there is no agenda in this game. You are never spoon-fed political views and one of my favorite characters is actually transgendered.
I also enjoyed the gameplay. The gameplay was very smooth and polished, and it reminded me that Naughty Dog will always produce high quality games. It's also good that there are AAA studios that actually make finished games, and I can respect Naughty Dog for that. The Graphics are also amazing and the interaction you can have with the environment is some of the best I have ever seen. While there is very little innovation, it is a very similar package to the first game and y'know what? I don't mind, Uncharted 2 had very little innovation in gameplay and I still love that game. They clearly worked on making the gameplay fluid rather than innovative and I can respect that.
The Level design is also some of the best linear level design in the industry. My favorite part of the game is at the beginning when you explore an open world area of downtown Seattle and it I really got involved in finding ever little thing in that area. My only complain is that I wish there were more open world areas in that game like we saw at the beginning, maybe at the beginning of every day in Seattle so we can stock up on resources before heading on with the day.
That's why I'm giving this a 3-star review, because it is not a bad game. However, it also did not live up to the expectation the first game set. The game is disappointing, and I would have rather not experienced this game. I can definitely respect all the risks that they took, and I can clearly see the effort. However, these risks just simply did not work out in the end. Now... where's factions?