'The Last of Us Part I' is a gorgeous, faithful, expensive remake
engadget.comEver since Sony and Naughty Dog announced The Last of Us Part I, a $70, ground-up PS5 remake of the classic 2013 PS3 game, there’s been an intense discussion around whether this even needs to exist. After all, Naughty Dog remastered the original game in 2014 for the PS4, giving it 1080p graphics at 60 fps, and it still looks solid. But, compared to The Last of Us Part II, which came out in June of 2020, the original shows its age. Facial expressions are less lifelike, and the environments, while still beautiful and well-designed, lack a certain level of depth and detail.
As Naughty Dog co-president and The Last of Us co-creator Neil Druckmann tells it, the idea for this remake came when they were animating flashbacks for Part II. When I first played the sequel, I took note of a very brief sequence showing the game’s protagonists Joel and Ellie walking through a ruined city — the vastly improved animation and fidelity of the scene made me want to see more of a world that I had spent so much time in rendered with modern technology.
Now, two years later, my wish has been granted. The Last of Us Part I is a complete rebuild of the game (and its excellent two-ish hour DLC Left Behind), but it’s a bit of a different beast than remakes like Resident Evil 2 and Final Fantasy VII. It’s a massive visual upgrade over the original, and there are numerous other significant improvements — but the experience of playing the game itself will be extremely familiar to anyone who has experienced The Last of Us on the PS3 or PS4.
Level design and enemy placement is identical to the original, but the enemy AI has been significantly improved, which means some encounters can play out quite a bit differently. The music and voice performances are
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