The Last of Us Part II Remastered will add a fair bit of new features to Naughty Dog’s PlayStation 4 swan song when it comes to PlayStation 5. This includes cut levels, a guitar free-play mode, and commentary from the development team. But the big headliner of the re-release is a roguelike mode akin to Resident Evil’s Mercenaries called No Return.
You might’ve missed it in all the Grand Theft Auto 6 hoopla yesterday, December 4, but Naughty Dog released a trailer for the mode that showed off maps, playable characters, and new costumes for a few of them. While previous playable characters Ellie and Abby are naturally here, No Return also lets you play as several other characters from throughout The Last of Us Part II.
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Dina, Jesse, Lev, Yara, and Manny appear on the character select screen shown in the video, with Tommy, Joel, and Mel appearing as unlockable heroes. Each character has a different starting load-out and can craft different items while in combat, which seems to be in service of giving them distinct playstyles. This is in line with The Last of Us Part II’s base game, which gave Ellie and Abby discernible load-outs that each required you to play differently. The whole thing looks evocative of Resident Evil’s Mercenaries mode, which has you fighting waves of zombies as you attempt to survive and reach a new high score based on the carnage you can cause before the time runs out.
Each run can take you to one of several locales from The Last of Us Part II, and can have different enemy factions to fight. In the trailer, you can see human and infected enemies, but it’s unclear if they will intermingle as they did in certain segments of the original game. It also looks like you’ll be able to fight the horrifying Rat King boss as anyone now, rather than just as Abby in the main story. That fight was doable because Abby’s arsenal was geared toward military-grade firearms and explosives, whereas Ellie’s ramshackle kit was more effective for stealth until you reached higher upgrade trees. So I guess we’ll see if everyone else can handle that monstrosity.
Check out the trailer here:
The Last of Us Part II Remastered is coming to PlayStation 5 on January 19, following what feels like a non-stop assembly line of Last of Us remakes and retellings. Thankfully, if you own the PS4 version of Part II, you can upgrade to the PS5 version for just $10.