The Last of Us, for the Playstation 3, is one of the most visually stunning games on console to date while also delivering an exhilarating and fun gameplay experience. After a small intro section that I dare not spoil, things pick up 20 years later with you playing as a grizzled older man named Joel, who gets tasked with transporting a spunky teenage girl named Ellie to a resistance group called the Fireflies.

On their way there, you have to fight through hordes of ‘the infected’ as well as bandits, who are known as ‘Hunters.’ This game is a perfect love-child of Cormac McCarthy’s book The Road and Robert Kirkman’s The Walking Dead comic in the way it feels, looks and plays, yet it also feels very original.

If you needed one reason to play this game, it would be for the story. The game hooks you in and makes you care about the characters. People get fleshed out during cutscenes and dialogue that take you on a wild rollercoaster ride of emotion that I, again, dare not spoil.

Through these instances you learn more about Joel and Ellie along with the world, and it becomes harder and harder not to care about their fate. Throughout the game there will be countless times where Joel and Ellie will banter back and forth, adding to your familiarity with them. Ellie dares Joel to sing for her or Ellie trying to learn how to whistle as you walk through this visually stunning, apocalyptic landscape.

The visual fidelity of the landscape that you adventure through draws you in. Trees are growing out of shattered storefronts. A collapsed skyscraper is being propped up against another. The world looks deserted outside of the quarantine zone that you start in with all the flora and fauna taking back the cityscape.

None of the scenery looks like this calamity just happened yesterday either. Drawers and cabinets in houses are left open by looters, and dirt and grime covers everything. In one of the levels where Joel and Ellie are walking through a neighborhood, houses left and right are all bordered up, but have yet to be abandoned. Some even have messages painted on the sides telling looters to stay away and that they have a gun.

The detail in this game gets even crazier when you’re in combat. Enemies are smart and will sneak up behind you if you are not careful. Luckily Joel’s listening mechanic allows the player to listen and see through walls for sounds of enemies moving. If you aren’t on your toes, bad things will happen, such as getting smacked in the face by a hunter with a log when rounding a corner.

Joel had the last laugh by slamming the hunter’s face into a wall. I turned the camera around to be shocked at the detail. Joel’s nose bleeding all over the place and blood stained his right sleeve where he had been shot. This wasn’t a scripted event; this was just from me fighting an encounter.

To prevent further nosebleeds, the crafting system in the game comes in handy. It allows the player to have an edge on enemies by crafting weapons. On every level you can rummage through houses and buildings for supplies.

You can combine duct tape and scissors into a shiv or alcohol and rags into a molotov to incinerate your pesky enemies who are behind cover. Scissors can even be added to a club to give it the ability to impale your enemies in a one-hit kill. Players will also find upgrade materials that will allow them improve their guns or make holsters so you can switch between guns and not have to take time to rummage through your backpack to grab the six-shooter when your other handgun is out of ammo.

The Last of Us is an amazing, single player experience, but there is also a multiplayer side to it that is actually really fun. You can either play as the Fireflies or the Hunters. Hunters are more rag-tag with sleeveless shirts and ripped jeans. The point of multiplayer is to have your clan survive for 12 weeks as well as to just have fun of course. The more multiplayer you play, the more your population grows or shrinks depending on how well you do. The more kills you get, the more food you get to give to your population. The more your camp grows, the larger a quota you need to fill to make sure your population doesn’t starve and get sick.

Within the multiplayer, there are two modes to play. Supply Raid is a mode where two teams of four both start with 20 lives and the first team to completely wipe out the other team, wins. Survive is a round-based game type where the objective is to win four rounds and each round is finished when one side is all taken out. Unlike other games where multiplayer focuses on action, The Last of Us’s multiplayer focuses on stealth. Running and gunning isn’t going to cut it when you take two bullets to the chest and you’re down for the count, so sneaking around the large maps is paramount.

I have been playing the games since 1998, and when I finished playing The Last of Us, I had the feeling it was one of the best games I have ever played. I about cried multiple times at how heart-wrenching, sad or joyous some of the events that happened were. Few games are this gorgeous and tell this good of a tale that words can’t honestly describe. This game sets the bar for not only the other series from Naughty Dog, but also for all games in general.

10/10