Naughty Dog has earned high praise for the storytelling, characters, and gameplay of The Last of Us 2, but there's one thing that stands out as its best overall feature: its level design. The Last of Us 2 offers some truly great areas for players to explore, many of which feel extremely intuitive thanks to Naughty Dog's attention to detail.
While fan outrage at certain aspects of the game's story led to The Last of Us 2 review-bombing on Metacritic, publications generally loved it. A few critic reviews took major issue with The Last of Us 2's hyper-violence, however, which has been the major point of controversy so far, and fans have touched on both this and their disappointment in decisions Naughty Dog made for some of the first game's characters.
Whether its violent gameplay meshes well with its violence-condemning story is a valid question. But what is certain is Naughty Dog mostly nailed The Last of Us 2's moment-to-moment gameplay, in itself. There are stretches where it feels repetitive and sluggish, especially in the later parts of the game (more on that below), but The Last of Us 2's level design makes fighting through and exploring post-apocalypse Seattle an entertaining and seamless experience.
How Last Of Us 2's Level Design Feels Like Real Life (At Least, At First)
In its early stages, navigating The Last of Us 2's environments feels almost instinctual. The verticality enabled by its playable characters' increased mobility allowed Naughty Dog to get more creative with how players get from point A to point B. Ellie hops over fences, climbs onto cars and into windows, es through apartments and down fire escapes - all making standard level traversal more interesting. These would be standard features in many other games, but they're special here because of their realism.
Naughty Dog's attention to detail turned The Last of Us 2's environments into what feel like destroyed versions of real-life neighborhoods. Navigation is intuitive because players can essentially approach getting around as they would in the real world. This makes taking on enemies tense, but also empowering, since players can use common sense to figure out the best way to make it out alive. It's particularly apparent in the section shown off in The Last of Us 2's Suburbs gameplay demo: Crawling through tall grass, hiding behind bushes, hopping fences, and sprinting through backyards, it feels like a high-stakes game of hide-and-seek or capture the flag.
Unfortunately, as The Last of Us 2's long runtime drags on, Naughty Dogs' level design tricks start to become more apparent. In nearly every instance where navigation is the main task at hand, players will annoyingly have to take the long way around an obstacle. Nothing is ever just an easy, "open the door and you're there" situation, which eventually makes exploration sections feel like needless padding. There are limitations to exploration that break the previously mentioned immersion, too. For example, players can't climb on anything with even a tad bit of overgrowth on its lip, meaning otherwise reachable ledges are made inaccessible by just a bit of ivy. Still, though it can get tiresome, The Last of Us 2's level design is generally quite good, and it leads to some of the most seamless emergent action sequences in modern gaming.
The Last Of Us Part 2 released for PlayStation 4 on June 19, 2020.
