Summary
The Last of Us Part 2 Remasteredcelebrates Naughty Dog’s brutal combat in the most tense way via No Return. Usually,The Last of Usdoes a superb job of varying gameplay from moment to moment between slow story beats, stealth, and combat, but No Return abandons the former foran action-packed roguelike experiencefrom the start of a run to its end, whether players succeed in defeating their run’s boss or fail anywhere after beginning their first encounter.
Therefore, certain tactics work well when adapted from muscle memory and others don’t.The Last of Us Part 2 Remastered’s ordinary story campaign has many tense encounters of its own, but never in a gauntlet onslaught of randomized modifiers and enemy factions. Then, if players are attempting to be competitive against themselves or others, there are score multipliers to consider when strategizing in any encounter. This is where one of the most simple and iconic combat techniques from Telltale’sThe Walking Deadcomes into play beautifully.
The Last of Us’ No Return Roguelike Can Learn a Lot from Telltale’s The Walking Dead
Scores are Important for Competitive No Return Runs in The Last of Us Part 2 Remastered
S-ranks are difficult to come by unless players are masterfully assessing how each enemy should be taken out, and that’s never more true than on higher difficulties like Grounded. It’s easy to see how a run can be tarnished immediately if players are locked into a path with some ofNo Return’s more tedious encounter modes—Assault and Capture are arguably more relaxed while Hunted and Holdout are far more demanding, but it all comes down to what enemy faction and modifiers are active.
Players never need to worry about a herd of clickers being invisible or Molotovs raining from the sky in the story campaign, for instance, and yet those are legitimate threats in No Return. That’s all without even addressing optional Gambits, which are typically challenging to execute while scrambling around, particularly whenone tasks players with feeding a Rattler to a clicker.
How players want to maneuver through an encounter is also predetermined by what character they have chosen because that means they’re stuck with a specific build and play style, though resources earned can contribute to other weapons and skills unlocked between runs. If enemies begin in search mode that’ll often make the beginning of an encounter more lenient, too, but thankfully there’s a tried-and-true strategy to employ thatThe Walking Dead’s Clementine is a seasoned veteranof, and as an added bonus it contributes to multiple score multipliers in No Return.
As long as players have a short gun on hand and can take enemies on one by one, players will find the tactic of shooting an enemy’s leg and rushing in to get a quick melee kill incredibly effective. InThe Walking Dead,this technique is popular because it prevents a walker from getting in close and allows characters to get in close to execute them with a melee weapon, thus preserving precious ammunition.
The same is true ofThe Last of Us Part 2 Remastered, though enemies are much faster and require better accuracy to knee-cap them before they close the distance.
If players can master this strategy they’ll be treated to a greater score since the entire sequence of actions contributes to stuns and melee kills as well; sometimes it isn’t worth it to go strictly for headshots, and again many different elements can incentivize a different play style on any encounter. Either way, it’s amusing to seeThe Walking Dead’s iconic strategy work so advantageously inThe Last of Us Part 2 Remastered’s No Return roguelike mode.
