The Last of Us: Part 2 preview PS4 - Ellie's world is more frightening than ours, just
Our The Last of Us: Part 2 preview begins with an exhausted Ellie, alone in a very rainy Seattle. It's her second day there and this time she's on the trail of Nora, a member of the Washington Liberation Front (WLF), who are holed up at the city's hospital.
But as with everything in the world of The Last of Us 2, that's very much easier said than done. There's a mess of Runners, Clickers and Stalkers – a new, faster enemy type – plus armed guards, dogs and of course, the ruined city to traverse.
Fans of the original game will feel at home very quickly. The core experience of scoping out areas, keenly listening for enemies while collecting ammunition, along with key crafting items for weapons and health remains unchanged. However, it's definitely been honed.
Ellie can now craft an expendable makeshift silencer for her pistol, throw ropes to climb to new areas and even upgrades to devastating Rambo-style explosive arrows during our play-through. She can also use pills to upgrade various skill trees again, but you won't have enough to upgrade them all, so you have to be more selective based on your play-style.
The game definitely rewards exploration, both in terms of loot and plot. Firstly, there's various training manuals to unlock the aforementioned skill trees. Then safes, which occasionally require a bit of lateral thinking to crack.
Although, in this play-through, the code is mercifully flagged as matching a couple's wedding anniversary in a discarded note, which is marked on the prominent calendar in the same room. Fair play to them for still celebrating it days before the apocalypse, mind.
Then there's all the glass in the game. You see, you have to smash a lot of it. In fact, if you can see a room behind some windows, or something glinting inside a vending machine or fridge, you should probably smash it. Just beware of alerting nearby enemies.
It's during some of our glass-smashing exploration that we discover some of the game's ambient plot unfold. Another gang called The Seraphites, or Scars, have left a decapitated corpse, an ominous bloody sigil and a noose behind.
After using the noose as a rope to swing to a locked room, we soon discover a note that explains there was a lone woman hiding upstairs, awaiting the return of her boyfriend, who went hunting for medicine, but sadly she was discovered by the Scars.
A bit further through the area we discover her boyfriend. Dead and left holding a bunch of medicine. He leaves a desperate note begging someone to take it to his girlfriend if he's discovered – you see, she's pregnant and can't survive alone.
Small, bleak moments like this could be easily missed while you're pushing through the game, but it's a testament to the developer, Naughty Dog, who has taken the care to weave a narrative between these two, mostly hidden locations.
The game replicates this smaller storytelling soon after, when you dispatch a Clicker who's carrying a hitlist from some deserting WLF members, desperate to flee the brutal regime.
Soon after, you enter a nearby apartment building, which has a mysterious locked door. Having safely swept the area, we innocently approached the gun workbench only to be suddenly set upon by four attackers.
We hastily downed one with a pistol, clumsily hacked away at another with our make-shift axe, before just killing the last two using our shotgun at very short range. The effects are devastating, as explosives and heavy weapons in The Last of Us 2 leave enemies without limbs, heads or completely removed from the other half of their bodies.
It's only after the gruelling bloodbath that we realise the enemies are the very same who fled the WLF. They thought Ellie was one of their former gang coming after them, when in fact, they were technically on the same side, they just wanted to survive. Morals have melted in this brutal world and all that remains are bad choices.
The only downside to all this solo exploration is the silence. This section particularly misses the witty back-and-forth of having another character around, and Ellie is also a lot more grizzled now with the remarks she does make, which can mean some of the continuous item collecting can feel a bit hollow.
Pushing further into our play-through we're faced with a new enemy, the Stalkers. Somewhere between the transformation from Runner to Clicker, these half-mouldy monsters scuttle around in the dark rapidly and barely register in Ellie's listening mode.
Our tense battle with a swarm of Stalkers ends with us falling into a collapsed road with a now-raging river underneath. As we're pushed deep into the sewers we see that Ellie has changed in another significant way since the first game: she can swim.
Sadly, this also allows us to swim to a hidden area to collect some items, only to be left leaping out of our seat as a camouflaged Clicker suddenly peels out of the seemingly rotten wall and kills us. We reload both the game and our shotgun and try again.
The shocks don't stop there, as a bit further on, while exploring a wooded area, we hear a strange whistling sound before an arrow abruptly thumps into Ellie's shoulder. It's vicious and we desperately pull it out before facing down with the Scars for the first time.
This group uses bows, blades and guns to devastating effect. Luckily Ellie can jump, climb and then crawl on her belly while aiming to slowly pick them off, which felt very similar to some of the best moments from Metal Gear Solid 5, just in a post-apocalyptic American woodland.
Finally, past this area Ellie reaches her destination – the Seattle hospital where Nora and her ilk are stationed – but we have to tackle a huge battalion of guards before we can find her.
We do this using a combination of makeshift proximity bombs, the silenced pistol and silent takedowns with our knife, before finally letting rip on the final few with our explosive arrows. It's tough and takes several attempts to best them all, especially the dogs, who are very hard to evade stealthily.
Just before we find Nora, we have to kill a lone soldier (who we notice is playing a PlayStation Vita) before climbing through some air ducts and hearing our target listening to 'Still D.R.E.' by Doctor Dre and Snoop Dogg.
It's a weird moment to hear echoes of the past using relatively modern music in The Last of Us 2, a world with pop culture frozen in time, similar to Fallout. It's odd because our real world has also been somewhat frozen, as movies, TV and even The Last of Us 2 itself have been paused and cancelled in the wake of a global pandemic.
It's certainly surreal playing a game charting a crumbled world following a deadly virus, while living in an arguably crumbling world handling a deadly virus. Ellie's journey will likely be a lot harder than ours, but I still desperately hope they both have a happy ending.
The Last of Us 2 is released on June 19, 2020.
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