Every gamer worldwide has been waiting to see The Last of Us: Part II, and we finally got to see Sony’s E3 2018 latest offering. The game started out as a trailer and looked absolutely beautiful but then soon transitioned to a look at the stealth and combat sections of the game.

We will be playing out as Ellie, but she is all grown up. It was nice to see the new dynamics of the older Ellie play out versus the younger Ellie. This time around, she was more than capable of protecting herself. After the first game, Ellie has acquired skills as a proficient warrior and moves about with finesse. She can be seen holding a machete and while she was smaller in size than most of her enemies, Ellie was able to utilize her agility and cleverness to get the better of them.

Lying down

This is a marked change from the older game and will definitely help players remain hidden as hordes of enemies approach. One scene shows Ellie laying under a car, trying to hide from an enemy. This allowed her to calculate the perfect moment to strike the enemy and fire the killing blow.

Where is Joel?

Joel was arguably the most important influence on Ellie and without him, she would not have been able to survive. So gamers obviously wanted to see more of him, but perhaps out of strategy (or necessity) the E3 trailer did not focus on Joel at all. The playable character of the first game was nowhere to be seen. Ellie can be seen wearing clothes that are similar to his to pay her tributes. We do know for a fact that Joel will be making an appearance in The Last of Us: Part II, but we have no idea what role he will have.

The blood and gore is getting brutal

The first offering of the series was brutal and heart wrenching, but this trailer only seemed to up the ante. There is a lot of close quarter combat that often ends in blood and gore. In one scene we can see Ellie hurl an axe onto the enemy’s face and it just sticks there. Ellie then brutally kills another enemy with several strikes of arrows to the chest; this causes him to fall to his knees in an incapacitated state of condition.

Ellie then proceeds to knock his head off with a knife, the touch of indifference that she showed at the brutal kill sent goosebumps down our spines. Another particularly violent scene saw Ellie shoot her unsuspecting enemy in the face when he spots her lying under the car.

Then there was an enemy who brutally disembowels a victim who was tied up on a rope. That stomach churning scene wasn’t easy to watch for most viewers, but we managed to pull through, thanks to the desensitization from watching the Resident Evil 2 Remake. 

These snippets of brutality are a preview of what gamers can expect from the full release. The game will also see the return of a multiplayer mode, in particular the very popular Factions mode. Naughty Dogs was careful enough to not give out too many details though.