I’ve always hated dogs in 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:The Last of Us Part 2. I've found this week that I'm in a bit of an odd place regarding my feelings on The Last of Us as a whole - I respect its commitment to realism and the heartfelt, unflinchingly bleak nature of its story, but not to the point of holding it sacred, and don't think the dalliance into 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:less meanin𓃲gful gameplay v🦩ia No Return detracts from what 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Naughty Dog’s sequel achieves at its core. But the dogs have always annoyed me, and it's through No Return that this hatred has been reignited.
Part of the reason I hate the dogs is it's the most obvious area where The Last of Us' fairly manipulative combat designs grate on me. Part 2 is a game that forces you to be violent and then punishes you for it - part of that is the nihilistic nature of the game and a core part of Ellie's downward spiral, but it likes to make it all very personal. As if Ellie isn't doing things, you are, and therefore you are the one making these awful choices. It's why you must tap Square to cave in a head with a pipe rather than just watch it play out, why you must wrest the knife from Mel to stab her in a mid-cinematic QTE. You're the real monster here.
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One of the few ways you get some degree of control in this is when you move through the map. Each key area is guarded by various armed patrols, but you can choose to sneak past them rather than smash their face with a baseball bat or shotgun blast them in the chest. Again, the odds aren't in your favour (rather than knock enemies out non-lethally as you can in most games, stealth attacks here are vicious and deadly), but with enough patience and effort, it is possible. Unless there are dogs.
Dogs are intended to raise the difficulty, as they can sniff you out even while you hide, are faster and offer smaller targets than regular enemies, and make silent arrow kills impossible; kill the owner first and the dog is off the leash to hunt you, kill the dog and the owner knows you're out there. They make it impossible to reject the game’s violence, and because dogs are typically very loveable creatures, whenever you resort to putting one down as necessary to progress, characters in the game wail about your inhumanity while the creature itself whines and pants its last breath.
They represent the worst of The Last of Us' approach to how it engages with players, but what No Return highlights is just how annoying they are. The boss at the end of No Return is not randomised (at least not the first six times), as it instead tasks you with beating one to unlock the next one. The Rattler Captain is not the hardest challenge - that would be the Rat King - but it is by far the most frustrating, and that's because of the dogs.
The Rattler Captain is not too tough a boss on their own, but the difficulty comes from the fact that this encounter has the most enemies overall, including different types of Rattlers with unique weapons and a range of vantage points. It also includes no less than three dogs, who were nearly always the cause of my demise. If the dogs themselves didn't kill me, they chased me out of hiding so someone else could, or distracted me for their owner or another Rattler to swoop in.
Half of this is less annoying than it is a challenge. Obviously winning at a game is good and losing is bad, but the dogs making this encounter a different experience to blasting the Bloater to bits is why No Return is🥂 so strong and offe🦂rs such replayability. But a) if the same thing kills me over and over, I reserve the right to hate it, and b) the dogs are cheating.
Ammo is scarce in No Return, and by the final boss encounter you can find yourself down to just a handful of rounds spread across multiple guns. With the Rattler Captain having so many cronies, you want to conserve this more than ever, so you rely on melee attacks. However, aside from machetes, melee weapons are far less effective or reliable with the dogs, possibly because no one wanted to animate a plank of wood with scissors taped to it being swung at man's best friend. This leaves you with the option to sneak around and melee kill as many as you can before the dogs sniff you out, or take out the dogs loudly and then deal with everyone rushing towards you armed only with a broken bat.
The dogs are what makes the Rattler Captain so tough, but just like the moral questions these dogs supposedly pose in the main game, it feels a little fake. They're only difficult because they appear immune to the most effective mode of attack, and because it's impossible to hide from them even when you're sensible enough not to run out all guns blazing. These dogs are the worst part of the game, and I hope they're all infected with cordyceps dog flu by the time we get a third game.
