The Last of Us Part 2 Remastered Review

thesixthaxis.com:

The Last of Us Part 2 released less than four years ago, but Sony and Naughty Dog are already revisiting it with a fresh remaster for PlayStation 5, aiming to bring it up to par with the recent The Last of Us Part 1 Remake, and continue to ride the wave of interest from the TV adaptation. We can argue all day about whether this remaster is necessary, but it’s already here regardless, so we had best take a look at it.

So what does the remaster mean in this case, for a game that could already be played with PS5 enhancements for 60fps via backward compatibility? Well, Naughty Dog has gone back in and made subtle tweaks. Texture quality is raised, Level of Detail distances are stretched out further, there’s improved animation sampling rates and more, but they’re all rather understated improvements. The headline options are really about resolution and frame rate. A new Fidelity Mode increased the maximum resolution to full 4K at 30fps, while you can play at 1440p upscaled to 4K with 60fps – the patched PS4 game was 1440p at 60fps on PS5 as well. For my money, the Performance Mode is the way to go here, but in both cases, you can now use Variable Refresh Rate to get a further performance uplift – sadly not something I could test with my TV.

A few years on from release and the game still looks fantastic though, going from almost photo-realistic in cutscenes to extremely good looking everywhere else. Character models are particularly incredible, especially facial expressions – there’s just so much detail, even on the terrified face of a poor WLF soldier that you’re choking to death. Strangely, short grass lets the game down a little bit, as it just looks a little more dated than everything else and, being a post-apocalyptic game, it’s all over the place. It’s not that it’s really that bad, it’s just that the rest of the game looks so good it sticks out a little bit. Other than that, though, The Last of Us Part 2 still looks gorgeous.

With the graphical changes out of the way,