THE LAST OF US

The Last of Us is a survival horror action-adventure game developed by Naughty Dog and published by Sony Computer Entertainment exclusively for the PlayStation 3. It was officially revealed on December 10, 2011, during the Spike TV Video Game Awards and released worldwide on June 14, 2013. It was released in Japan on June 20, 2013.
The player takes control of Joel (voiced and motion captured by Troy Baker), who is trekking across a post-apocalyptic United States in 2033, in order to escort the young Ellie (voiced and motion captured by Ashley Johnson) to a resistance group, the Fireflies, who believe Ellie may be the key to curing an infection that has ravaged the world. The player defends the characters against zombie-like creatures infected by a mutated strain Cordyceps fungus, as well as hostile humans such as bandits and cannibals, employing the use of firearms and stealth aided by capabilities such as a visual representation of sound in order to listen for locations of enemies. The player can also craft weapons or medical items by combining items scavenged in the world.
The Last of Us received critical acclaim, praised for its achievements in writing, choice-enabling gameplay, realistic action, emotional depth, sound design, and art direction. Many publications gave the game perfect scores, hailing it as one of the significant titles of the seventh console generation. The Last of Us scored the biggest video game launch of 2013 so far, selling over 1.3 million units in its first week. As of July 2013, the game has sold 3.4 million units, making it the fastest-selling PlayStation 3 game after 3 weeks.
The Last of Us uses third-person perspective and players take control of Joel, while Ellie is controlled by the AI for the majority of the game, although the player switches control in the later sections of the game. The game involves gun fighting, melee combat, and a cover system with no preset cover locations, only crouching near objects and navigating normally. The player fights off the Infected and the Survivors—humans that are not infected, but are hostile towards Joel and Ellie. A feature the developers call "dynamic stealth" allows for many different types of strategies and techniques that the player can use at any given time as they approach a new situation, to which enemies will react differently.Throughout their journey, Joel and Ellie use multiple ranged and melee weapons to help them defeat their enemies and continue through the levels. These include long weapons like a bolt action rifle, shotgun, bow, flamethrower, and assault rifle, as well as short-barreled guns like the pistol, revolver, scoped revolver-like handgun called the "El Diablo", and a sawed-off one handed shotgun called the "Shorty". There are also many different degradable melee weapons that can be scavenged from the environment like metal pipes, planks, baseball bats, machetes, and hatchets. Items like empty bottles and bricks can be picked up and thrown to distract or stun enemies, as well as be used as simple melee weapons.
Along with regular weapon and equipment slotting, the game also features a crafting system. By going into the backpack, the player can use recipes introduced throughout the game to forge useful supplies like Molotov cocktails from once useless consumables such as liquor, discarded towels, and broken razor blades. To force the player to make tough decisions based upon their current circumstance, all of the items created require some of the same consumables that can be used for another producible item. For example, the Molotov cocktail and health-kit items both require alcohol and rags to produce. Another aspect of the crafting system is that it happens in real-time, meaning that the game does not pause while crafting, forcing the player to choose their crafting time effectively in order to avoid being taken advantage of by enemies while busy.
The player is also able to collect toolboxes and parts, in the form of gears, to help upgrade their arms at an array of workbenches set throughout the game. Things like the number of weapon holsters, fire rate, clip capacity, reduced recoil, and range can be increased. Training manuals can be collected to increase the effectiveness of crafted items as well. For instance, the durability of crafted shivs can be increased, as can the radius of a Molotov explosion. Joel's physical abilities are upgradable too. The player can do things like improve his health-bar size or increase his crafting speed by collecting pills and medicinal plants throughout the game.
The game also features periods of no fighting, where the player can explore the environment and engage in non-combat oriented actions. These sections often involve conversation between the characters, either automatic or optional via prompt, where they discuss their current situation, surrounding environment, make jokes, and so on. Along with that, there are a multitude of collectibles that can be scavenged from the environment and stored/viewed in the backpack. Objects like notes, posters, maps, can be collected to provide the player extra knowledge on their current environment and its former or current inhabitants. Firefly pendants, with the inscribed names of their former owners, and a series of comics titled "Savage Starlight" can be found as well. The player must also solve simple platforming dilemmas that the characters come across while traversing the levels. These involve boosting each other up, using floatable planks to get Ellie (who cannot swim) across bodies of water, and finding ladders or dumpsters to climb upon to reach higher areas.
The game features an AI system called "Balance of Power". This new system allows enemies to react realistically to any combat situation they are placed in by taking cover if they see the player, calling for help if they need it and even taking advantage of the player's weaknesses, such as when
Joel runs out of ammunition, is distracted, or when he is being attacked by othe

Multiplayer

The Last of Us includes a separate multiplayer component called "Factions", a mode that adds to the world the single-player story established. From the beginning, the player is allowed to pick a faction, either Hunters or Fireflies, to become a part of. The player has 12 weeks to hold out by keeping their clan alive through collecting supplies during the matches, with each match counting as a day. By surviving to the end of the 12 weeks, the player has completed a journey and is allowed to chose their faction again. The focus of multiplayer play in The Last of Us is Clan growth and survival. Scavenging supplies is the way to accomplish these goals. Supplies are gained based on how well the player do in the match. Killing an enemy, assisting in a kill, reviving allies, and crafting items all earn a player's parts. At the end of the match, these parts are converted into supplies. Enemies also drop supplies when they die, which can be looted. While the player can populate their Clan with random non-player characters, they can also populate the Clan with their friends' names via Facebook. This personalizes the player's Clan and doesn't post to their Facebook wall. To further aid player's immersion, there are special events which allow the player to rescue his/her characters friends' names, among other things. Linking up with Facebook also gives the player access to three boosters. The mode also features a crafting system identical to that of the single-player, where the consumables can be found in certain supply box set throughout the maps.
Factions also lets the player customize loadouts to suit the player's playstyle. There are four customizable loadout slots. Each loadout has two weapon slots, four survival skill slots, and one purchasable equipment slot. When the player starts a Clan, it begins with eight loadout points to distribute into these slots. As the player's Clan's overall store of supplies grows, the player can eventually earn up to 13 loadout points. The amount of loadout points that the player gets is directly related to many how many supplies they earn throughout the life of the Clan.
The component features two game modes of eight players max: Supply Raid and Survivors. Both offer unique challenges to the Clan's survival and count towards the Clan's progression. Supply Raid is a standard Deathmatch, where the team who runs out of respawns first loses. Survivors is a no respawn mode where teams win rounds by killing off the entire enemy team or ending the round with more players, and win the match by winning four rounds. Crafting ingredients and producible items do not carry over between rounds. The multiplayer characters are also customizable of which their hats, helmets, masks, and emblems can be personalized.

Plot

The Last of Us takes place in United States, twenty years after a spore-based infection rapidly spread across the globe, wiping out a vast majority of the population by warping its hosts’ brains and turning them into deadly predators capable of killing with a single bite. The majority of the world’s population has been reduced to either struggling survivors or ravenous infected. The game features several locations across United States, including in Boston, Lincoln, Pittsburgh, and Salt Lake City.

Characters

The two main characters are Joel, a brutal survivor of a fungal pandemic that has devastated civilization (voiced by Troy Baker), and Ellie, a fourteen-year-old orphan that has grown up in the post-apocalyptic world (voiced by Ashley Johnson). Other characters include Tess (Annie Wersching), Joel's smuggler partner; Marlene (Merle Dandridge), leader of the Fireflies and a friend of Ellie’s mother; Robert (Robin Atkin Downes), An arms dealer; Sarah (Hana Hayes), Joel's daughter;Bill (W. Earl Brown), a skilled mechanic; survivors Henry and Sam (Brandon Scott and Nadji Jeter, respectively); Joel's brother, Tommy (Jeffrey Pierce) and his wife Maria (Ashley Scott); David (Nolan North), a leader of a group of survivors; and James (Reuben Langdon), David's ally.

Story

Joel is a single father living in Texas with his twelve-year-old daughter Sarah. On the early morning after his birthday, a sudden outbreak of a mutant Cordyceps fungus ravages the United States, which changes its human hosts into cannibalistic monsters. As Joel, his brother Tommy, and Sarah flee the initial chaos, Sarah is shot by a soldier and dies in Joel's arms.
In the 20 years that follow, much of civilization is destroyed by the infection, with pockets of survivors living in either heavily policed quarantine zones, independent settlements, or nomadic groups. Joel now lives in a quarantine zone in Boston, working as a smuggler alongside his friend Tess. Joel and Tess hunt down Robert, a local gangster, to recover a cache of weapons stolen from them. Before Tess kills him, Robert reveals that he traded the goods to the Fireflies, a rebel group fighting against the authorities governing the quarantine zones. Joel and Tess encounter the Fireflies' leader, Marlene, who promises them double their stolen cache in return for smuggling a teenage girl, Ellie, to Fireflies hiding outside quarantine. Joel, Tess, and Ellie sneak out in the night, but after an encounter with a patrol Ellie is revealed to be infected. Full infection normally occurs in under two days, but Ellie asserts she was infected three weeks ago, and that her immunity may lead to a cure. The trio fight their way out of the quarantine zone to the drop-off point, but find that the Fireflies there have been killed. Tess reveals she was bitten during an encounter with the infected, and chooses to sacrifice herself against approaching military soldiers to give the pair a chance to escape, believing in Ellie's importance as a cure.

Joel and Ellie trek westwards across the country, meeting temporary allies along the way as they struggle through abandoned cities and towns teeming with infected and violent bandits. In the fall, the two finally find Tommy (a former Fireflies member) in Wyoming, where he has assembled a fortified settlement near a hydroelectric dam. Joel contemplates leaving Ellie with Tommy, but after repelling bandits and being confronted by Ellie about Sarah, he ultimately decides to stay with her. Tommy directs them to a Fireflies enclave at the University of Eastern Colorado. The two find the place abandoned, but learn that the Fireflies had moved to a hospital in Salt Lake City. They are attacked by bandits as they leave, who severely wound Joel during the escape.
In the winter, Ellie and Joel take shelter in the mountains. Joel is on the brink of death and relies on Ellie to care for him. After killing a large stag while hunting, Ellie encounters David and James, a pair of scavengers willing to trade medicine in exchange for the meat. While James goes to recover the medicine, Ellie and David are attacked by a horde of Infected, but manage to fend them off. Afterwards, David reveals that the bandits Ellie and Joel killed at the university were part of his group; he allows Ellie to leave with the medicine. David sends a posse to track Ellie the following morning, forcing her to lead them away from Joel and be captured. Ellie learns that David and his men are cannibals and escapes after refusing to join them, but David eventually corners her in a burning restaurant. Meanwhile, Joel recovers from his fever and sets out to find Ellie, fighting through David's gang to the restaurant. He reaches Ellie as she violently kills David in self-defense; Joel consoles her before they flee together.
In the spring, Joel and Ellie arrive in Salt Lake City. They make their way through the flooded highway tunnels but are caught in the rapids, with Joel barely rescuing Ellie from drowning. A patrol of Fireflies capture them. Joel awakens in the hospital and is greeted by Marlene. She informs him that Ellie is being prepped for surgery: to produce a vaccine for the infection, the Fireflies have to remove and examine Ellie's infected brain, killing her in the process. Joel escapes and battles his way to the surgery room, from where he carries an unconscious Ellie to the basement parking garage. There he confronts and kills Marlene to prevent the Fireflies from pursuing them. On the drive out of the city, Ellie finally awakens, and Joel lies to her about the events, telling her that the Fireflies had tried and failed to produce a cure with other immune candidates and had given up trying. The pair arrive on the outskirts of Tommy's settlement. Ellie expresses her survivor's guilt and asks Joel to swear that his story about the Fireflies is true; he does.