The Last Of Us: Left Behind is now available as a standalone download on the PlayStation store for players to be able to get without having the full game. Although if you haven’t played the full game before I highly recommend getting The Last Of Us either on the PS4 or PS3 as it’s a must have game that should be in everyone’s collection. Our review for the full version of The Last Of Us can be read right here.
The Last of Us: Left Behind Standalone – Launch Trailer | PS4 & PS3
The Last Of Us: Left Behind Review
The Last Of Us: Left Behind is a short game that focuses on Ellie for its story as well as her being the playable character throughout all of Left Behind. For those who purchase this game without playing the full game, they might get part of the main game spoiled as Left Behind takes place kind of in the middle of the story. For those who have played through all of The Last Of Us, they should easily remember the point in which the game takes place.
What’s happening in the Left Behind is that Joel has become very injured and it’s up to Ellie to keep him alive. To do this she’ll need to venture out into the world where she’ll need to find a medical kit so she can save Joel before his time runs out. Along the way Ellie will experience flashbacks to an earlier time in her life, a time she spent with her best friend Riley.
It’s nice being able to know what Ellie’s life was like before we met her in The Last Of Us and it’s also very interesting to see how she was with her friends, especially ones that are the same age as her. It’s not necessary to go too much into what goes on with Ellie’s flashbacks for this review, as the length of the whole game is only a few hours long and I wouldn’t want to spoil it. But you do spend most of your time exploring Ellie’s friendship with Riley and this adds a lot to the development and understanding of Ellie’s character. Mainly because we get to see how difficult it has been for her to survive, but also how she has grown up in this horrible environment where it’s hard just to have fun or just to be a kid at all.
Gameplay in The Last Of Us: Left Behind is mixed well between moments where you are just chatting to Riley and messing around, to dangerous times where you have to take out a lot of bad guys who are trying to find Joel so they can murder him while he is still injured. I enjoyed it quite a lot as there is a lot you get to do, I particularly enjoyed the water fight scene between Riley and Ellie as well as the video game moment, where Ellie played a video game for the first time with Riley.
The shootout scenes with the enemies were well constructed and were difficult enough to provide a solid challenge. I played through this on the hardened difficulty in the beginning, but lowered down to hard to get through some stages as I just kept dying all the time. Having not played the game since it launched, I had forgotten the buttons. But I intend to try get through it on hardened when I go through it a second time. So the challenge with this game is there for those that enjoy it and those who have played the main game before will have a fairly good idea of what that is like.
When looking back at the main game, one of the best times was when you got a chance to play as Ellie for a bit and this DLC adds more of that for us to experience. Slowly you discover how she got her bow as well as experiencing some great levels. While it’s only a short experience, for fans of The Last Of Us who may have played the game on the PS3 such as myself and haven’t gotten a chance to play Left Behind, the standalone DLC provides that chance as you don’t need to repurchase the full game to get to play it, especially if you’d like to play it on the PS4. You could of course just get the DLC for your PS3 or just get the remastered copy, it’s up to you. For those who haven’t played the main game at all and then just dive into this, I’d say it’s better to look around and see if you can find a cheap copy of the remastered game because that will give you the full experience, that’s not to say that this isn’t good, it’s just you might not grasp the story as well without knowing the context for what’s going on in Left Behind. Either way, Left Behind is a solid purchase with a great story for players to discover and explore as they get a glimpse into Ellie’s life before The Last Of Us.
