The Last of Us Part II Remastered review for PC

The real question about the PC port for The Last of Us Part II Remastered isn’t whether the game is any good: that’s been answered twice over with a pretty definitive “yes.” Rather, the question is: how does it run?

After all, The Last of Us Part I infamously arrived on PC in a pretty abysmal state. Even if it’s finally gotten better now, you’d be entirely justified in being skeptical about how well The Last of Us Part II would perform now that it’s also made the jump to PC.

Thankfully, TLOU II has none of the issues that plagued the first game at launch (and for awhile after) on PC. It comes with a range of performance options and it seems optimized for even mid-range hardware. PC Gamer does a good job of breaking things down into concrete numbers, but from my non-technical perspective, I feel comfortable saying the game doesn’t just run, it looks pretty nice as well.

As for whether the game itself is any good, as noted above, both Jim and Benny – and pretty much everyone else – adored the game when it came to PS4 and PS5, respectively. While I don’t love it quite as much for reasons I’ll get into shortly, I don’t think there’s any denying that the game does an excellent job of telling a tight, tense story that builds on everything we saw in the first game. On top of that, of course, it looks well-done and incredibly well-polished, living up to Sony’s modern standards.

That said, as I noted in the previous paragraph, I don’t love The Last of Us Part II Remastered quite as much as most people. In part this is because of my aversion to a lot of modern-day Sony games, where the focus is more on being the gaming equivalent of a prestige drama than on, you know, just having fun. On top of that, this is a gritty, intense, incredibly violent game – which undoubtedly has a time and place, but I can’t say it’s the sort of game I’ll ever find myself going back to.

But as a technical achievement, there aren’t many games that surpass The Last of Us Part II Remastered. For better and for worse, it’s everything that’s come to define modern Sony games – and it runs just fine on PC, which is an undeniable plus.

PlayStation Publishing provided us with a Last of Us Part II Remastered PC code for review purposes.