Back in May of 2013, I was privileged enough to receive an invite to the Media Beta Demo of Naughty Dog’s latest title, The Last of Us. My impressions of that demo carried over to the full review just a month later, where I applauded the game for its excellence. Fast forward to this February, and the first, and sadly only, single player DLC was released, which I also enjoyed. So along with many hundreds of other outlets, I found The Last of Us to be an instant classic, and another in the long line of outstanding games to come out of the Naughty Dog/SCEA team.
With “next-gen” very much upon us, bringing The Last of Us (TLOU) to PS4 was a sensible and intriguing endeavor. With an MSRP of $50, the freshly released Remastered version includes the original game, with some enhancements I’ll detail shortly, as well as the Left Behind DLC, and two multiplayer map packs (Abandoned Territories and Reclaimed Territories). All of this material is on disc; there are no PSN vouchers to redeem and nothing to download, but you will need 50GB of space, and you can still purchase all kinds of clothing and stuff for Factions play online. The game is bootable moments after you pop the disc in, by the way.
Gamers are used to “re-releases” by now, with plenty of “HD” and “Ultimate” editions being released annually. To standout, a re-release should, one would hope, be more than the same game with patches and DLC that gets released six to ten months after the original launch. Fortunately, Remastered addresses these concerns. Besides making the game available to play on the PS4, and carrying a $50 MSRP, TLOU Remastered runs in 1080p natively (up from 720p on PS3) and “targets” 60fps. Players have the option to lock the game at 30fps to ensure a completely smooth graphical experience, too, but a few hours into the main campaign again (and also some time spent in Left Behind and Factions), I haven’t experienced any significant performance problems. More important graphical upgrades include increased draw distance, higher res character models, and better lighting. I would not call the graphical improvements a night/day difference to the original, but it is distinguishable from the PS3 version clearly in a side-by-side comparison.
Anyway, a uh, super-hard difficulty mode is included now too, so you can play not only Hard, and Survivor, but now also Grounded mode. I dabbled in this very briefly before deciding Normal suited me just fine, thank you. Other tweaks and changes revolve primarily around the DualShock4. These include the Light Bar changing from Green to Orange to Red to mirror your health status, the speaker playing the distinctive ‘click’ sound of your flashlight as you toggle it on and off and also for playing audio recordings you find, and the Touch Pad is assigned to bring up your inventory. Furthermore, aiming and shooting is assigned to L2 and R2 now, but you can revert this to the PS3’s scheme of L1 and R1.
So a 142MB day one patch adds a couple of other goodies, too. These include a Photo Mode, which is something you can toggle on/off from the pause menu. When on, simply press L3 to enter Photo Mode. The game is instantly paused and you’re free to perform a variety of camera manipulations such as dollying, orbiting, rolling, and zooming. Other readily accessible options allow you to change the FOV (Field of View), add film grain, adjust the brightness, or intensity, and one or two other functions to help you get that perfect shot. TLOU was lauded for its beautiful graphics, which were not just technically awesome but the art direction was excellent too, so it’s no wonder that Remastered presents all kinds of opportunities to snap some great looking photos. Regardless of how much you use it, I liked that getting in and out of Photo Mode is an instant process.
The other “tangible” item the patch added was a one hour and twenty-five minute documentary called “Grounded: The Making of The Last Of Us.” I haven’t watched it all the way through yet (you access it via the main menu), but these types of thoughtful documentaries on the creation of such a quality game are always interesting.
Quality, indeed. With that, let’s get to the summary…
