The Last of Us, and its subsequent remasters, are excellent games. Naughty Dog created a story and world so compelling, not only are we still talking about it a decade later, but a new audience is doing the same in the wake of the first season of the critically acclaimed HBO adaptation. While the game’s recent arrival on PC should be cause for celebration, it’s currently causing only controversy. The bottom line: You really shouldn’t buy The Last of Us, Part 1 on Steam, at least for the time being.
The game currently has a 33% approval rating on the digital gaming platform, which as a Last of Us fan, is kinda nuts. It’s totally opposite what I’d assume to see from a classic that has rarely suffered a bad review. For context, on Metacritic, different ports of The Last of Us—playable on the Playstation 3, PS4, and PS5—have scores ranging from 88% to 95%, and the PS5 version of The Last of Us Part 1 has 4.8 out of 5 stars on Amazon.
The issue isn’t that players are judging The Last of Us, Part 1 to be a bad game on its own merits. However, the game’s port to PC is under heavy fire for its poor performance and frequent crashes. One only need scroll through the most helpful Steam reviews to see comments like:
“Crashes every 20 minutes. Game is badly optimized. Game looks great just needs to be better optimized.”“Wow this runs like crap.”“I waited for almost 2.5 hours for the game to build shaders while crashing in the main menu every 5 or so mintutes [sic] - one of the most frustrating experiences I’ve had with a game.”It seems the fault is not necessarily’s Naughty Dog. Rather, the blames lies with Iron Galax, the developers who ported the game to PC. This isn’t the first Sony port to face these types of issues, either—the PC versions of Horizon Zero Dawn and Uncharted were also rough to play compared to their PlayStation counterparts.
To be fair, not every review is scathing, or even highly critical. One reviewer even offered a recommendation to fix the problem: “For those people who are experiencing crashes with a Nvidia GPU, delete your current Nvidia driver and install the Nvidia 522.25 version driver. Most stable driver version of all time.”
We also see PC fans bragging about their platform of choice finally getting Sony exclusives: “Your Playstation console isn’t special anymore. Now give me Bloodborne.” If only it ran half as well as it does on PlayStation, maybe you’d have a point.
Of course, if The Last of Us, Part 1 did run well, it’d be an instant recommendation, even at $70. But in its current state, it simply isn’t worth your time. If you haven’t made the purchase yet, wait until Iron Galaxy has sorted its shit out. Naughty Dog is on the case, too, promising fans it is committed to fixing issues. If you already bought it and can’t return it, sit tight—hopefully, the problems will be fixed fast, so you can actually enjoy playing one of the best video games of the last decade.
