To hold me over until The Last of Us Part II came out, I replaced AC Odyssey as the sister, Cassandra. While the story line content was identical, the voice over for the female character was much better overall, so it made the whole game feel better than before. I bought the "season pass" for 20 bucks which adds quite a bit of additional play time. The first DLC introduces your character to one of the early Assassins, and shows how they create a lineage that passes through into some of the earlier games. It was pretty good. The DLC I was looking forward to though, the Fate of Atlantis, stinks. Holy mother of wash, rinse, repeat. It is just the same side missions over, and over and over to accrue tokens/skills/whatever to move onto another part, and the story isn't even interesting. What a stinker.
Now, onto the one I've been waiting for: The Last of Us Part II.
I've been binge playing since Friday. So far, it's definitely enjoyable. There is a huge plot twist early in the game that effectively sets up the entire story. What I did NOT anticipate, is that it seems as though > 50% of the game (at least to this point, and I've got to be a good ways in), is played as an entirely new character.
The graphics are beautiful as usual, the time and money they spent doing the face capture for each of the characters is like nothing we've ever seen in the PS4 era. The music/audio is perfect. I don't think I've ever played a game where I felt this "uneasy" the entire time. Just when you think you're safe, you're not.
I don't know that I'm a huge fan of some of the new mechanics dealing with the enemies and dogs - it's just too hard to be stealthy/avoid combat in a number of scenes, so it turns into a lot of run and gun. Some of the new zombies are a great addition (stalkers), some are a serious PITA to deal with (the new boss types/big ones), since you get swarmed at times in very tight/cramped quarters with nowhere to go. You can't even tell what's going on at times, because you've accidentally backed up into a box/coffee table/etc and get stuck.
So far, I don't know that I can say I like it more than the first game. The reason the first game was so perfect was that you started seeing the relationship building/character growth from Day 1 of the main characters. The majority of Part II is solo play, and lacks the interaction needed for character growth. For the new playable character, it's mostly backstory to try and make the character relatable, but players have become so invested in Joel and Ellie during the series, it's almost like you don't really care what her backstory is. That said, there's still a lot of game to go, and that could change.
What blew my mind, was that after seeing the 95% positive critic reviews prior to release, the game had thousands of horrid reviews within hours of release (it's like a 3.5/10 on metacritic right now, for what is absolutely one of the best PS4 games ever released). Apparently, this was part of some big negative campaign, much based on leaked pre-release footage/story, that was launched against the game for prominently featuring two gay characters (one of whom we already knew was gay from the first game), and then a transgender character later on. And there's no way of pretending that those bad reviews are anything other than some anti-gay campaign, because you're at least 20 hours into the game or more before coming across the transgender character, so you can't claim you were so "upset" by the game after it's been in stores for 6 hours. What a bunch of ******* losers.