The Last of Us Part I PC Review: A Port So Disappointing, It Deserves an ‘Early Access’ Tag

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There's no denying that The Last of Us has been on every PC gamer's radar since marking its first steps on the PS3 in 2013. A title so monumental, it was released two more times across subsequent PlayStation generations, adapting and surviving the test of time. The new PC version of The Last of Us Part I is a basic port of the PS5 remake — rebuilt from the ground up with shiny new visuals and modernised mechanics, so it stands toe-to-toe with the benchmark set by 2020's The Last of Us Part II. As one of Naughty Dog's most defining games and after a three-week delay for extra polish, you'd expect it to be in the best shape at launch. However, we thought wrong, as the studio partnered with Iron Galaxy for porting duties — the same folks behind Batman: Arkham Knight's horrendous PC version. The result is an unoptimised mess, posing problems long before you even actually start playing the game.

If you've spent enough time on the internet this past week, the cursed images of a caveman Joel and a spaghetti-haired Ellie must be ingrained into your brain. While hilarious, such visual glitches are not excusable from AAA publishers like Sony Interactive Entertainment (SIE), whose thought process I struggle to understand. It's bizarre, because the company already has an in-house porting team Nixxes Software, which brought near-perfect renditions of Spider-Man and Spider-Man: Miles Morales to PC, with ultra-smooth framerates and visuals that even support hardware dating back to the Nvidia GTX 950 days.

Instead, they partnered with this third-party alternative, which previously did a passable job with the Uncharted port — most underlying issues of which were fixed in a later patch. With such an erratic track record, it's hard to see