Multiplayer Gameplay Premiere

Multiplayer Screens

Other Information

The gameplay itself is perhaps a little less inspired. Stealth is a much bigger emphasis, with maps littered with deserted cars and derelict buildings. Youll find yourself in a prone position most of the time, weaving around the extremities of the arenas in order to get the angle on your opponents. Without a true cover system the game simply detects when youre near walls and allows you to hug them tightly it can be difficult to peak around corners, but with practice youll eventually learn the best method to position your protagonist in order to scout out adversaries without giving yourself away. As youd expect, gunfire prompts you to appear on your enemys radar, so its best to be as deadly and quiet as possible at all times. Of course, its impossible to avoid chokeholds, and when youre caught in a conflict, youll have a handful of options. You can sprint away from danger to lose your pursuers or drop a smoke bomb if youve managed to craft one earlier. You can also engage in a fist-fight if youre close enough to your opponent, with each successful brawl or firefight unlocking the prospect of a deadly execution sequence. Fail to follow through with the finisher, and your enemies will have a short window of opportunity to resurrect their fallen partner, making ruthlessness a key attribute in the wasteland.

Previews

There has been a lot of buzz about The Last of Us' multiplayer. From grand statements that it will 'change gaming forever' to more than a fair bit of intrigue from the wider community, Naughty Dog has deliberately remained quiet on what it had planned. The time has now arrived for the developer to lift the lid.

Tying into the single-player, The Last of Us' online offering sees you choose a clan and then join in the effort to stay alive in the game's post-apocalyptic world. In order to introduce a sense of tension, though, you're only given 12 in-game weeks to do this (each match corresponds to a single day).

It's not just as simple as shooting people in the face so you don't succumb to the worst fate possible, either. Above all else, securing and protecting supplies is imperative to the survival effort. These resources become yet more important as your group grows. While lodging a bullet between someone's eyes will help in your quest, so do assists, revives, crafting items and physically picking up supply drops, obviously. It expands further than this too: members of your posse can suffer from sickness or get mauled by a pack of infected between matches. Overcoming such obstacles requires you to engage in specific missions you'll be set in upcoming rounds, such as achieving a certain amount of melee kills or headshots.

It is, to be frank, a very intelligent and well put together idea, and one that unlike many multiplayer modes actually connects to what you've experienced with the game's core narrative. Whether or not the premise is as good as the execution is another thing, mind.

While short, I did enjoy what I played, and the survival-based concepts are far more fascinating than blasting someone in the skull. You can jump into a game of Survivor essentially an all-out deathmatch but with no respawns or Supply Raid where you scavenge for items and have a team pool of 20 lives. It's nice to have a new focus in terms of what you're usually asked to do in a shooter, and the foundations here do work. I just can't see it gripping me in the same way, as say, Gears Of War has managed to do on multiple occasions.