After not having done a complete playthrough of Naughty Dog’s bleak post-apocalyptic favourite since The Last of Us made its debut on the PlayStation 3, I was eager to jump back into the worn-out shoes of Joel Miller with the release of the PlayStation 5 remake on PC. Unfortunately, due to the volatile nature of The Last of Us‘ initial PC release, I wanted to give Naughty Dog and Iron Galaxy the benefit of the doubt and wait until a few patches rolled out for PlayStation’s latest PC port.
As of the writing of this review, I have played version 1.0.2.1 of The Last of Us, which, compared to its initial release, can be considered an adequate port of an otherwise stellar game. Gone are the weird and unsightly graphical artifacts present at the game’s launch. However, even with my 7900 XT GPU, The Last of Us exhibits some minor albeit noticeable artifacts due to requiring FSR to achieve a good level of performance at 1440p and 4k.
Issues compound with longer than average loading times, which again are better than what they once were but when compared to other PC releases, are disappointing—particularly taking into account the roughly 40 minutes it took for The Last of Us to build its initial shader cache on the first install on my AMD Ryzen 7 3800XT. Actually playing The Last of Us, fortunately, feels on par with the PlayStation 5 release with the added flourish of higher framerates and graphical touches that warrant a play-through if you have the capable hardware to get the job done.
Steam’s native DualSense support also means 1:1 controller parity with the PlayStation 5 release of The Last of Us, which not only includes all the accessibility options present in its initial release but now has the benefit that comes with the flexibility of PC gaming. Keyboard and mouse controls also feel as they should, making getting headshots easier than ever, although ultimately, I did prefer the controller due to its excellent use of its haptics.
“The Last of Us on PC feels like an infected facsimile of a dearly departed friend.”
If you’ve never played the original or are a strictly PC player, The Last of Us is a decent approximation of its console counterpart. One that will no doubt get better with time, but as of right now, even with numerous patches already out, The Last of Us on PC feels like an infected facsimile of a dearly departed friend.
