But watching them die in front of your eyes helps breathe life into the world, underlining that the infected do have eyes (and teeth) for other humans.
Up until that point they’re just the bad guys, spawned in like the infected to oppose you. Throw a carefully placed brick and you can watch the mushroom-headed infected descend on the human antagonists. The latter is a revelation compared to the main game, and I’m not just talking about Ellie’s adorable but doomed romance. But putting the infected there solely to challenge you and rarely making them an obstacle for anyone else not only undermines the menace of the infected - it makes The Last of Us’s world just that little bit less convincing.īut The Last of Us Part II and The Last of Us: Left Behind are a different matter entirely. You could be fending off a fungal behemoth or opening up a scavenger’s jugular vein, but outside of the opening sequence and the odd cutscene, you’re the only one who can die at the hands of the infected - and for the most part, it’s only Joel and Ellie who encounter them.Īdmittedly, in a world where a fungus has turned people into zombies, “realism” is debatable. Instead, The Last of Us pits you against the formerly human infected or the currently human survivors. It’s a feature that was introduced in The Last of Us: Left Behind DLC and became standard in The Last of Us Part II, but it’s absent from the first game.
Rather, the one change that could elevate The Last of Us Part I nearer to perfection is the ability to weaponize the infected. No, I don’t mean the way it turned every other PlayStation 3 into an aircraft turbine, though the doomsayer in me is anticipating a worldwide chorus of coil whine. The original The Last of Us is getting a remake as The Last of Us Part I, and it’s Naughty Dog’s chance to fix the only real flaw from the original.