[Locke]

I've got less than five percent of the Last of Us to polish off this weekend, but now I'm basically done with the game. Is the expansion pack good? I saw it was going for 12 quid on PSN, that is more expensive than some of the full games you can get on PSN.

Now, to be honest, pretty much all of the hype around Last of Us' storytelling lives up. It uses the familiar to set groundwork and then really goes wild. Honestly it isn't even the story of Joel and Ellie I care all that about, it's the story of Last of Us' world.

Like BioShock the game world is scattered with the fragments of a thousand stories, and each one paints a vivid picture and gives you a deeper understanding of the context of the gameplay. It is the quiet moments where I get to just explore and find memorable moments, which feel natural and not scripted, so they feel special that make the game. Moments like that are the reason why BioShock is my favourite game, and why I am loving this.

Sadly for all the great bits of storytelling, when it comes to actually "playing it" the game really falls down by being really fucking hard. From Clickers, to forced stealth, to forced survival, to all manner of cheap deaths, the moments when I'm not discovering the game world have been an utter slog of my patience.

The most amount of fun I have playing this, is stealth sections with Joel where I get to pick off people with a bow and arrow. I really love archers in games, I liked using archery in Skyrim.

The other big downside is the length, sure most RPGs are too long but for a full priced title I was shocked I was inches from completion and hadn't even put in 12 hours yet. It hasn't been so bad for me, as I haven't really had a lot of free time lately, but if you didn't have much to do you could probably sit down and play the majority of this in a single sitting, if your patience can handle it.