The Last of Us Part 1 Review Predictions

Reviews for The Last of Us Part 1 will release on August 31. Just how well is it going to fare?

The original game sits with a 95 percent on Metacritic, with its sequel scoring an almost equally impressive 93 percent. That gives this arguably unnecessary PS5 remake a lot to live up to – and I’m not sure it’s going to make it.

That’s not to say it’s going to score badly. Even with all the debate about what this adds to the original PS3 game, I would still expect things to be just fine for fans of The Last of Us. Don’t expect too many 50s, 60s or 70s, except from sites that are looking for hits or looking to prove a point. That’s presuming that the game itself isn’t a buggy mess or something like that, and with Naughty Dog that doesn’t seem like a likely outcome.

And anybody who wants to knock down points for it just being the same game released again – it’s kind of hard to blame them. But we’ll get into that a little later.

The Last of Us Part 1 Review Predictions

If I were a betting man, I’d put The Last of Us Part 1 between 85 and 89. Most critics won’t judge it too harshly for being a graphical update, and a good deal of them will praise it as though that’s the only thing that matters. At the very worst, you can expect the majority of sites to run with some variety of “best way for newcomers, but a hard sell for all but the biggest veterans of the franchise”.

85 to 89 isn’t bad news in the grand scheme of things. It may go a little higher – into the upper 90s – but it won’t go any lower. If it doesn’t hit 90, you can expect some gloating from Twitter’s anti-PlayStation communities. You can expect some glorious meltdowns to go along with them. And actually, even a 89 will feel like a travesty compared to the mid-90 scores of its predecessors. You don’t want your latest product, even if it’s a remake, to score below the two classics if you can help it. The gulf between 89 and 90 is huge.

But all of that will be community bubble stuff for the most part.

I think price should get a mention, as well as the removal of the Factions multiplayer mode. But neither of these things will come up as often as they should, especially the latter.

Should The Score Be Lower?

This is a valid question given all of the above. I expect there will be a few outliers who will lay into Sony for this. The price will be too high, the graphics will be the only real changes and an entire mode has been ditched in the transfer from PS4 to PS5.

But ultimately critics have to review the game that is in front of them. And The Last of Us, while dated, is still a classic game. Nobody will run down Super Mario 64, nobody will run down Ocarina of Time, and nobody will run down The Last of Us.

This will be a successful release critically, but how financially successful will it be? I’m fascinated to see how well it sells. Both the original and its sequel were huge. But there is a lot of negativity around this release. The biggest question – why? – has still not really been answered.

But that famous fear of missing out – the hype I’ve spoken about before – will inevitably win over a few people on release day. Will it be enough?

Note: We get to do this all again in a few months when the PC version is released. That should do better, for obvious reasons.