3. The Human Enemies
It's a survival game so you're bound to have different typed of enemies that you've got to get around right? Wrong. Naughty Dog give you two types of foes to face, humans and infected. The humans are a mixture of melee and ranged fighters whilst the infected are also restricted to two groups, clickers and normal infected. Now to deal with the humans first, surely after 20 years people would have adapted themselves to living in the ruins of cities thronged with infected. No one seems to have any body armour until the very end of the game and whilst your character seems to have a plethora weapons your enemies seem to have a rather restricted armoury. Now I've never lived in the post-apocalyptic ruins of America so can't claim to be an expert, but surely you could improvise and pick up any old rubbish to use to protect yourself? Tie pieces of wood to your arms or fashion sheets of plastic as some rudimentary body armour? Hell, there should be enough military bodies lying around judging by all the weapons and ammo I kept picking it up so surely if you're going to be living in such dangerous area it might be an idea to pick some stuff up. To be a tad hypocritical and use the other side of the argument, after 20 years everything would have been picked clean so why on earth does every enemy have a gun they can use on me? It seems rather than use one extreme or another, Naughty Dog adopted the middle ground and decide that there would be enough weapons to kit out a modern army, but nothing but rags to wear as protection. I'm going to be using I Am Alive in this article a lot as an example as the games are extremely similar, both in over-all game-play and mediocrity. However, there is something that I Am Alive did that made the game actually seem like a survival game. I haven't played that many survival games as I'm somewhat of a wimp who jumps at loud noises and people walking by me on the street, but isn't the whole point of a survival game to make things difficult for you? You shouldn't be handed everything from the get go and the paths you should take shouldn't be that obvious. If an accident of epic proportions has happened you don't expect to find a shotgun round every corner and ammo under every table. Perhaps if we were experiencing the game a few days or weeks after the original infection I could get my head around finding armaments everywhere, solider would drop their weapons and kits as they ran screaming from the hordes of infected. Twenty years later though Joel seems to find a different handgun in every new area and enough ammo for it to allow you to shoot down any infected person you find. I Am Alive decided to do things very differently and gave you one handgun whilst supplying you with about 3 bullets. This made me feel like I was actually playing a survival game and when I sneaked up on enemies I actually had to think about how to take them down rather than brandishing my weapons like some mid-western bandito.
It's not just the distribution of weapons and ammo that made I Am Alive feel more like a survival game than The Last of Us, but by the way enemies would react. In The Last of Us if you brandished a weapon or locked or pointed it at a human enemy, whether they had a gun or not, they still try to run at you and in fact would ignore your weapon completely. Sure the whole "Please don't kill me" sequence was fun at first, it lost it's realism when you realise that just minutes ago this chap was sprinting straight at you as your brandished a shot-gun at his face. The tell you to enjoy the little things and this is exactly what I Am Alive tried to accomplish and succeeded where The Last of Us failed. If I walked into a group of enemies in I Am Alive holding my pistol I could heard them saying such things as "he's got a gun" "watch out" and if I pointed said weapon at people they'd tell me to "take it easy buddy" and tell their friends to not make a move. If I kept the weapon pointed at them long enough and didn't fire they'd tell each other I was bluffing or that I wouldn't waste a bullet on them before charging me. This is what I Am Alive did so brilliantly that The Last Of Us failed to grasp, I felt like I was playing a post-apocalyptic survival game with the former but not so much with the latter. If I decided not to sneak around a group of enemies in The Last Of Us (which I did most of the times considering I could have supplied the British Army with the ammo I was carrying) they couldn't care less if I was armed with a stick of plywood or a double-barrelled shot gun. It was all the same to them and they always pulled the same tricks; run to cover and pop a few shots at me before edging closer and closer. There was nothing new about the combat and after the first instance it became obvious what was going to happen (though at what point I was a tad confused when Ellie said there was a sniper on the first floor, took me quite a while to realise that for us British chaps this means the second floor).