The Last of Us

Alright the basics, this game is 3rd Person Over The Shoulder Post-Apocalyptic Shooter. Spoiler Alert. Wow that's a mouthful. In the game you play as Joel's Daughter, Ellie, and for most of the game Joel.

The Good

• Gameplay: Most important to any game is the gameplay and in this case it's awesome. I liked the crafting of being able to make Molotov cocktails, smoke bombs, regular bombs, added a blade to weapons, and making medical kits to patch yourself up. This is the first game at the very least to have all this stuff so it's definitely contributing to the industry in this regard.
• Controls: They are common to other games, straight forward, easy to learn difficult to master.
• Graphics: Obviously this game has it down with those; textures are good; models are detailed for the most part, animation is realistic, etc. Naughty Dog did it right.
• Sound: Voice acting is superb and fitting, sound effects are realistic and emotionally grabbing, dialogue is appropriate and worth remembering.
• Story: The game's setting for the apocalypse has some vagueness to it, but seems realistic, most characters are cool.

The Bad

• Menu: The menu for the weapons is frustrating one reason being it's in the form of a cross rather than circle a.k.a. wheel. I've selected the wrong weapon on accident to to the frustration of having scroll left and right up and down in the menu. It would've been much easier with a wheel that the player could just scroll around and get the right one.
• Pacing: First few sections of the game are kind of boring from playing as Joel's daughter to running around with Bill. The game didn't get really fun until fighting the Hunters and the rest of the game from there.
• Effects: Joel doesn't have blood prints after stepping in blood. Also character models are repeated a lot I mean seriously how many times does the black, bald guy with the gas mask and red shirt show up. I've seen you at least 5 times! Enemies getting blasted back for gun shots is kind of ridiculous.
• Weird Mechanics: For some reason in the game when you kill a survivor their weapon often disappears not allowing you to pick it up, ammo doesn't always appear from an enemy that had some, you can't dodge melee attacks, and Ellie doesn't stab clickers even sometimes when they latch onto Joel among other things. One thing that REALLY annoyed me was you couldn't do a finishing smash on an enemy, such as flip stomp or a gun bash unless you were spotted by them. In order to kill an enemy in a single move/attack you had to either strangle them, or cut them with a shiv.
• Details: For some reason Ellie didn't attack the Cannibal who kicked the door on Joel as he opened it and started choking him over the edge of the railing at the university, which led to him falling of the edge and getting stabbed on at metal pole. She was off screen when it was happening and it seemed out of character considering, that she usually stabs for Joel or shoots when he's attacked by a survivor. For some reason Joel and the rest of his family that is seen in the game don't have their full names revealed. Neither does Ellie, Riley, Sam and his brother Henry. The only person that their first and last name revealed in the was Jimmy Cooper and he's only significant has Joel's first onscreen kill! It isn't quite detailed how the plague started other than the fungus appearing in some crops. It would've been nice to see some already dead survivors (hunters for instance) that were that way because of some past enemies they failed against. The player only sees dead survivors, and soldiers in terms of non infected people. My BIGGEST complaint is that there were NO female hunters in the game for Joel and Ellie to have to mess up. There were female tourists and infected and non fightable survivors in the quarantine zone, but no hostile females to smash in other than some doctors at the end. Kind of ruins the immersion and realism. The only asshole survivors you're fighting in this game are men basically.

So I recommend this game to anyone who not only wants a good game with a story to boot, but a post-apocalyptic real time shooter, in a genre that's still too small in number of games. It's got some really annoying flaws but some reason good strengths. Check it out if it's what you're looking for.