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| By: Adam Zimmerman |
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On May 31, Naughty Dog, finally released the long awaited demo for The Last of Us. If the rest of the game plays as well as the demo, the race for 2013 Game of the Year, with no disrespect to some of the excellent games that have already come out this year like Ni No Kuni and Tomb Raider, will start right here.
The Last of Us is a new franchise from Naughty Dog, the company that has previously brought us the Jak and Daxter and Crash Bandicoot series', as well as the Playstation 3’s preeminent game franchise, Uncharted. It looks like they have struck gold once again. The Last of Us is an action/survival game. It takes place after a plague wiped out much of the world’s population. Mother nature is reclaiming what were once the great cities of the world. Survivors are killing each other for weapons, food, and any other resources needed to survive. The character you play as, Joel, is a grizzled, brutal survivor who is hired to smuggle a young, 14 year old girl named Ellie out of Boston, where the game starts, and take her across the country.
The demo places you in the Outskirts level. Your goal is to make it through the city to the capital building. You don’t actually get to play the whole level so you don’t see how the level ends, but it sets the stage. You start out exploring of foraging for supplies in long abandoned buildings. Through the course of the demo it walks you through the basics of exploration, combat, stealth, and upgrading your equipment. The stealth segment is appropriately tense, the combat is brutal, and upgrading and creating equipment is easy and straight-forward.
The exploration and foraging at the beginning of the demo has you searching desks and cabinets, climbing over and crawling under debris, and picking up everything you find to aid you in crafting and upgrading equipment later on. The stealth segment involved sneaking around a Clicker. Clicker’s are infected who whose heads have been effectively ruined by the infection, so they use a bat like radar to find their prey. They are very strong, but can only find you through their radar, so they can be avoided.
To get around it in the demo you need to hide behind cover, and use thrown bricks or bottles to distract it so you can move between cover and eventually out of the room without being seen. The demo ends with a challenging fight of you versus several infected. If you aren’t careful they will surround and overwhelm you.
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My personal strategy was to upgrade my melee weapon right before the fight, sneak up on the first infected and take him out with the few pistol bullets I had. The sound of the gun attracted the rest of the infected, including a Clicker, and took them out with my melee weapon first and then beat up the last 2 with my bare hands. The combat is not for the faint of heart, with finishing off enemies by breaking off shivs in their necks, or bashing their skulls in with pipes among other things. I would love to write more about the demo, but there wasn’t enough demo to write a ton about, which leads to my only problem with the demo.
I only problem I did have with the demo for The Last of Us was simple, it was too short. Don’t get me wrong, as I stated above it was very good, but it was also very short. After all the hype of being able to access the demo through God Of War: Ascension, it was over way too soon for me. I guess that is a compliment in a way that I wanted to keep playing, but it took longer to download and install the demo than it did to play it.
The actual gameplay of the demo lasted about 10 minutes.
The demo is only available for now to those that own, or at least can borrow, a copy of God of War: Ascension. Right on the main menu of GoW there is an option to download the Last of Us demo. Once downloaded you no longer need the God of War disc, and the demo is accessed on your PS3 system in the same place all of you other downloaded games and demos are.
Our Honest View gives The Last of Us demo a 9.5 out of 10. This game looks like it is going to be a leading contender for 2013 Game of the Year. The only reason I knocked the score down a half point is because the demo was over way too soon.
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Sources:
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All rights reserved by naughty_dog / lastofus
Image 2: Accessed On June 2nd, 2013 ( http://www.flickr.com/photos/naughty_dog/8451038069/sizes/o/in/photostream/)
Video 1: Accessed On June 2nd, 2013 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLGxubfC1Ik )
