The Last of Us™ Part II Remastered

One of the most technically impressive games I've ever played. It looks better than 99% games you can play today and runs great, which makes sense since they had to optimize it for the original Playstation 4. Something that always amazes me every time I play this game are animations. It looks soooo smooth and fluid, everything you do, every action looks it like it was made in a single animation sequence. Doesn't matter if you're running, jumping, walking, grabbing items while moving, in the middle of melee combat, etc, everything just looks exceptionally smooth and fluid. To make it my point clearer, on most games, when you interact with an item, the character you're controlling first needs get "ready" in a very specific position before doing the animation, this makes it very clear when an animation ends and when another begins. E.g. On RDR2 every time you loot, the character first sets himself in a very specific position and then it does the looting animation. But on TLOU2, it always looks like single fluid animation, the character doesn't have to stop to grab an item from a shelf for example. A sequence that stuck with while playing, I killed an npc with an arrow to the head, the arrow got stuck on the head and you can grab it again when this happens, the ragdoll physics kick in and the npc starts to fall on it's own weight but while this was happening I started to run towards it, just when I was running besides the falling npc I pressed the button to grab the arrow, Ellie grabs the arrow from the npc's head that was falling to the ground, while at same time I was running, this all looked it was made in single animation, it was seriously impressive. There are youtube videos showcasing how impressive and seamless animations look in this game. They mention this animation system that they created in the documentary "Grounded II: Making The Last of Us Part II". It's seriously impressive stuff that I have not seen anywhere else. The combat feels restless and even stressing, you're always on edge. And this is not only because of scarce resources, but the entire game was design to feel like this, even if you play with infinite ammunition. The combination of adaptive music, enemy AI (which is by far the best I've seen in any game), breathing system, gore, ragdolls (NPC feel like they actually have weight), environment design and more, are all the elements that keep you on the edge any time there's combat. The gameplay / movement in this game is just the best of any third person game out there. After playing TLOU2, I feel it has ruined every other third person game for me, everything feels stiff compared to TLOU2 which feels "free" and fluid. I mentioned the enemy AI before, but it deserves it's own section because once again, there's almost no game that comes close. The enemy AI can: - Coordinate attacks - They are constantly communicating with each other - Once they have been alerted of your presence, they never go "idle" again and keep hunting you - They have better awareness - Their cover selection actually feels smart There's a lot more but that's what comes to my mind when thinking about the AI. Overall, without going into more detail because I could go on forever. This is one of the most technically impressive games ever created. And all the criticism this game receives is related to the story, not its technical achievements. Talking about the story, Naughtydog's storytelling continues to be one of the best in the industry and this game does a completely 180 on Part 1 which is all about love and hope, Part 2 is the complete opposite, honestly it makes you feel sad and at some points you don't even want to continue with the story because it goes into very dark places. TLOU2 is simple a work of art from beginning to end, and in my personal opinion, one of the biggest technical achievements of the industry. 11/10 masterpiece.