At launch, the game was unplayable due to a heavy number of bugs and VRAM issues. Naughty Dog promised patches, and after waiting a few months, I have no problems running the game bug-free on high settings. Shaders still need to be compiled with every new graphics driver version, but it takes around 10 minutes for me instead of over 1 hour previously. In its original state, the game lacked optimization for graphics cards with 8GB or less of VRAM. This has since been fixed. Texture streaming can now be lowered to a "Normal" option, which mitigates excessive caching and allows for a better experience at the cost of textures loading in slower. Separately, VRAM usage can be reduced further by enabling DLSS on supported hardware.

As far as the actual content of the game goes, it's a 10+ year old masterpiece of storytelling and immersion that is worth playing through again in its overhauled "Part 1" glory. Cutscenes are now rendered in real-time to stunning effect. Facial animations and other advanced graphical techniques bask in realism as you become gripped with complex themes of love, loss, and survival. Woven inside a post-apocalyptic narrative is nuanced stealth/action gameplay that can challenge any player with an array of difficulty settings. Newcomers to the franchise thanks to the HBO series are also in for a real treat. It is one of the best video games of all time.

I hope that Naughty Dog isn't dissuaded from releasing "Part 2" on Steam. If they can learn from this experience and create a functional port, I will put my money behind it because playing on Steam is my preferred way to experience games.

Edit: The game has received multiple patches since this review was first posted. Naughty Dog has implemented a myriad of different changes, big and small, that only seek to benefit the game's integrity. I played through it all again recently and had zero issues whatsoever. An overall solid PC port after a rocky start.

There is no option to recommend *conditionally* so let me try to unpack this the best I can.
I've avoided purchasing this game for months because of the same negative reviews that YOU have been seeing. I read and researched into many complaints over those months and gained enough confidence on the situation to make the purchase, so good news. If you have had many questions about these bad reviews, I have some answers.

Is this a poor job of a port? Yes absolutely. Has this game crashed multiple times for many people? Yes. Are there more strict hardware requirements? Yes. Does this mean that its a random roulette of weather or not this game is going to work for you? No... So lets get into it.

This is a demanding, inefficiently ported title. The hardware requirements have a bar that must be reached, in which if you are below, you will likely encounter problems. Reportedly, that bar begins at:

GPU 6600xt/3060ti range (will cover VRAM shortly)
CPU ryzen 5/equivalent

If you have this hardware, you *CAN* get this game to work just fine for you (will discuss steps at the end). If you have hardware beneath this bar, some have reported they can run it at 720p.
VRAM. VRAM requirements begin at 8GB, as the game will reserve all of that. It will still play, but more than 8GB of VRAM is *highly recommended.

Lets talk about the crashes. It appears that the most common cause of the game crashes that many have experienced comes from starting game play before allowing the shaders to load. There is strong evidence for this in addition to reported resolved issues by allowing the shaders to load. Minimum requirement hardware users report this step can take over an hour to complete. Higher end hardware users report 5-15 minutes. You only need to let the shaders load once after install.

Now a more serious quirk that isnt addressed enough is the danger to ICUE software users. This port will try to highjack your ICUE settings upon first launch to link your LED's to the game play. Why is this dangerous? Well if your CPU cooler is running with ICUE, your coolant pump can turn off (like mine did), your fans can all turn off, etc... You can disable this quickly in the game main menu by turning off software integrations in settings. Crashes are linked to this issue.

So lets go over the steps to make the game work.
1. Meet the minimum hardware requirements (Nvidia gpu's might need an extra step for shaders)
2. Let the shaders load completely before beginning game play.
3. If you have ICUE, disable software/RGB integrations in the main menu settings. (You can do this while the shaders are loading).

-My experience with this title so far and some thoughts-
Upon following the 3 mentioned steps, I have encountered no problems with the game at all. Im using a 6700xt GPU(oc/uv) and a r7 7700x CPU. I am averaging 90fps at 1080p ultra settings. The game hasnt crashed. The game hasnt lagged. The game is working fine. I will update this post if it ever does. I am not expecting it to.
The port job is lazy and probably went to the lowest bidder. Your hardware wont give you as much as it normally does for this game. The game is from 2013 and expensive at $60 for some strange reason,
but its still a great play and if you follow the mentioned first-start steps, you very likely arent going to encounter problems.

So with this, I recommend this game, as it will work fine under *conditions,* and used the thumbs down because buying and playing a game shouldnt require this much research and work.
I hope this cleared things up for you.

---------------------UPDATE------------------------

Game campaign completed today. Settings stayed the same as earlier described. Confirmed. No crashes, no stutters, no problems.

Another shoddy port by Iron Galaxy(of Batman Arkham Knight, and UC Collection fame), with absolutely awful HW utilization(more CPU bound than most RTS games), suttery mouse camera movement(same issue from UC Collection), lack of Screen Dirt Effect setting toggle, and general lack of optimization.

Just remember: Sony hired the most infamous PC porting team to handle their two biggest IPs, despite owning Nixxes, the most famous PC porting team.

NOT RECOMMENDED until issues are fixed.

At launch, the game was unplayable due to a heavy amount of bugs and VRAM issues. Naughty Dog promised patches, and after waiting a few months, I have no problems running the game bug-free on high settings. Shaders still need to be compiled with every new graphics driver version, but it takes 15 minutes for me instead of over 1 hour previously.

In its original state, the game lacked optimization for graphics cards with 8GB of VRAM. This has since been fixed. Texture streaming can now be lowered to mitigate excessive cache and allow for a better experience at the cost of textures loading in slower. Separately, VRAM usage can be reduced further by enabling DLSS if your card supports it.

As far as the actual content of the game goes, it's a 10 year old masterpiece of storytelling and immersion that is worth playing through again in its overhauled "Part 1" glory. Cutscenes are now rendered in real-time to stunning effect. Facial animations and lighting bask in realism as you become gripped with complex themes of love, loss, and survival. Woven inside of a post-apocalyptic narrative is nuanced stealth/action gameplay that can challenge any player with an array of difficulty settings. Newcomers to the franchise thanks to the HBO series are also in for a real treat.

I hope that Naughty Dog isn't dissuaded from releasing "Part 2" onto PC. If they can learn from this experience and create a functional port, I will put my money behind it because playing on PC is my preferred way to experience games.

I simply wanna play the game.

This has been my favorite game of all time since it released on PS3 and I used to play it over and over and over again just because I loved it so much. The game itself is an amazing game but Iron Galaxy really take a ♥♥♥♥ on this game. Naughty Dog, if you care about your fans and one of your biggest games ever, you would fire Iron Galaxy and fix this port yourselves, because this is truly disgraceful.

I am 10hrs into the game at the time of writing this review to make sure it was just as bad as everyone is saying it is. It;s worse than I thought. I have had a total of 7 crashes, one of which required a full PC restart. The game somehow deleted my graphics driver from my computer causing me to have to spend an hour or two figuring out how to manually redownload it and the game changes my sensitivity back to default every time I open the game. (Btw 10hrs in and ive only just reached the Hotel because building shaders took about an hour and a few times it wasnt responding and I had to wait.)

I cannot say this loud enough. ***DO NOT BUY THIS GAME YET*** Iron Galaxy took a massive ♥♥♥♥ on my favorite title and it should not be allowed to stay like this. If Naughty Dog appreciates their fans even a little bit, theyll do something about this because this is simply unacceptable.

Have you tried launching the game before you released it?

The saddest part about this game isn't the cutscenes. It's finishing the game and knowing you'll never play it for the first time ever again.

8 years of avoiding spoilers. Worth it.

For ALL the people having problems with The Last of Us Crashing at 10% during the Building Shaders process there is only 1 FIX for this and I have verified it 3 times just to be sure.

Also if you turn off the Enable Shader Pre-caching option under Steam/Setttings/Downloads that WILL NOT work either.

The New Nvidia Drivers 555.85 RELEASED ON 5/21/2024 and 555.99 RELEASED ON 6/4/2024 both of these Driver Versions will CRASH THE SHADER COMPILATION PROCESS Which in turn will CRASH The Last Of Us rendering it Unplayable.

If you use either of the 2 Versions of Nvidia Drivers listed above you will get an error message after Launching The Last Of Us during the Shader Compilation at 10% that states:

"You don't have enough Vram or Ram to play this Game at its Current Settings and then the Game will Crash.

I have VERIFIED this with Both Versions of the Drivers listed above.

Nobody likes to rollback Drivers but for the game to work again I can and have Verified that if you want to Play the game with NO PROBLEMS you must Rollback your drivers to 552.44 RELEASED on 5/9/2024.

I always like to have all my drivers up to date but if It's going to break a Game especially a Sony Title then that's a Driver I DO NOT WANT. I hope this helps somebody out there looking to Fix or Play The Last of Us until Nvidia Addresses the Situation.

I have sent Feedback to Nvidia through Gforce Feedback but Don't know if that will do any good until they decide it's of enough Importance to them to Deal with It.

Alright, these are gonna be some harsh words that I´m about to say but I´ll say them anyway.
TLOU is an incredible game and I dont think that its necessary to explain why.
At this point everyone and their mothers have heard about the game so let´s skip that part.
I myself experienced TLOU shortly after release on the PS3 and have never heard about the game in any way possible.
When i got to play it, I was hooked on it so bad that i bought the game 3 more times.
Yes i bought the PS4 Remastered twice (Cause i lost the first copy) and after almost 10 years of waiting I bought it for the PC for the Full Price.... AGAIN, but now I´m finally able to play it... or am I?

Well release wasnt that pleasant but heres a short Rundown on how its state for me was on release, and how it is now.

For my Specs I´m running a Ryzen 5 2600 with 16 Gb of Ram, for the Gpu I´m having a RX5700XT (and yes its being bottlenecked by the Cpu) and im playing on a Full HD Monitor with only 60 hz cause my 144hz Monitor broke recently.
I also have FSR 2.0 activated on the "Quality" Setting.

Okay lets get started:
Release: The game was literally unplayable for me. Besides the extremely Long Shader Cache installation the game itself was horrible and in an absolute unacceptable state.
I had LOADING WINDOWS MID GAME. Even the Ps3 didnt have this (and yes I know the game is specifically coded for the ps3 and other Console Plattforms) but why did they decide to let the Worst Porting studio in the History of PC-Porting handle the biggest Trademark of their company. Well i had the game on all settings, Strict and Mixed (sometimes it didnt even care what my settings were and loaded low poly models instead) and it was just unplayable in every way so i decided to wait.

Patch 1.0.1.5: I mean... it fixed some stuff?
I still resorted to the widelyspread Oodle fix wich did increase my performance a bit and made it "playable" but not enjoyable. Still I managed to play for couple of hours wihtout wanting to rethink my choices in life.

Patch 1.0.2.0: Okay now we´re talking.
There are some major improvements for stability and performance in general.
Also they fixed the high Vram usage which was just a display error.
It wasnt displaying the right amount of vram usage when changing graphic settings.
Also it reduced the overall Cpu usage which is always nice.

Patch 1.0.2.1: Wonderful.
They fixed an Issue where you had massive camera jitter which was just unbearable.
Small Patch but definitely an Improvement.
At this point I´m also halfway through the Game.

Patch 1.0.3.0: What happened???
This patch focused on mostly audio based issues and various issues across the board but it somehow managed to kinda tank the performance a bit. At this point im almost done with the game but I noticed that my ram was filling to the brim and suddenly dumps everything leaving my cpu to be overloade and my storage doing nothing,
This causes my game to be left at about 30-40 fps for couple of minutes until my ram has been build up again.

Patch 1.0.4.0: WOW.
I finished the game before the Patch released but I´m playing my NG+ save on this patch and ist awesome.
Finally something with not only Major improvements, I´d say they´re Gigantic Improvements.
-More Graphic Settings
-Optimized CPU and GPU Usage
-Much better Performance
-More acceptable Loading Times (Still faster then GTA V)
-Better Texture Streaming across the Board
-And a much more fluent Experience
All the annoying issues at the beginning were gone or mostly fixed.
There are still some major issues, such as the definite memory leak that is happening and I´m pretty sure they can get it much more optimized, but overall the game is moving in a playable and enjoyable state...

which is exactly what it should because i think TLOU is an experience everyone should take the chance to have this experience. And without ad oubt, this remke of the game IS the definitive edition.
Still as a long time fan since the beginning, I´m more then dissapointed in what stae the long awaited PC-Port arrived and i hope for Naughty Dog that the can make this Port to state that its meant to be played, because as it is, it is disrespecting towards themselves, their whole Fanbase (which isnt a small one) and the story that is being told inside the Game.
And thats that.

Edit: Patch 1.0.5 has been released a couple of hours ago. Ill try to play it as soon as the 50gb update has finished.
Its focusing on every major issue so im excited to see for myself how it played out.
Also I know there are a lot of grammar issues in my review so far, but i aint gonna fix them, so go ahead, sue me.
Alright the Patch did fix a lot of stuff but theres something weird about it.
At this point im now able to play the game on Medium-High Settings without FSR Upscaling, and im reaching around 50-60 fps much more stable.
It aint perfect, but its more then playable, its almost enjoyable.
They also fixed the overloading ram issue that set my ram back for about 2-4 gb in space which is a lot.
There are more graphic settings, better resource utilization etc. but there is no real performance bump...
Yes the game runs much more stable and the frametimes are much tighter then before, but real preformance improvements in terms of raw fps, there is no significant difference, but I feel like this is the first version that should have gone to retail.

(Edit 30.05 Patch 1.0.5.1)
This patch does focus on stability improvements, even though I did not notice any real performance difference, I did notice a much faster boot and loading time then before. (This may vary tho)
Not much else then that but better then nothing :)
I´ll be keeping on updating until this game is in an almost perfect state.

Guess who´s back? Well that´d be me.
And I got some news.

I´ve noticed that there was a lot more fuss about TLOU since the release of the Part 2 Remaster on the PS5. There are a lot of speculations that it might release on to the PC aswell and that might spark some fellow gamers to play the first part, especially because it is much cheaper to get now.

But the question is... is it really fixed?
Because i went through the reviews of the game and some people are still suffering from crashes, stuttering and other, more weird problems. (Btw, dont even bother checking out Naughty Dogs "Known Issues" page, they didnt update it in a long time and there are still notes referring to old and fixed problems)
The game overall was playable the last time I played it, but maybe all this optimisation led to... lets say, complicated issues.

Right now ill be checking out the newest version which is v.1.1.2 on the 7th of february.
Im still using the same specs for reference at 1080p 60hz.

I am also running on the latest Radeon Drivers (24.1.1) with Anti-Lag and Enhanced Sync Enabled. (Anti-Lag for the best Frametimes possible and Enhanced Sync, cause in my opinion its better then normal V-Sync and its open-source sooo...)

Im playing on custom settings, balancing my cpu and gpu usage around the medium to high settings.

Shader cache building took me over 35 minutes but thats still faster then the 2 hours at launch, still not acceptable, and the game ran at around 55-60 fps with FSR disabled.
Enabling it doesnt make a big difference so ill leave it off.
But its playable it feels a bit smoother then the last time and i didnt notice anything off tbh.

So all the haters that say the game isnt optimized yet, well it isnt, but it was worse and now its playable, but you still need a good pc.
The game is very Cpu intensive and a good gpu doesnt hurt in that case, so if you want to play the game on its max settings, you need a pc that can handle it.

So thats it for my update on this, enjoy the game, love you and see you if Part 2 releases
(Had to shorten the review, it got too long :))