The Last Guardian review by Tyson
Overall
Pass
Being someone who enjoyed Ico and Shadow of the Colossus it really hurts me to say that The Last Guardian is not a very good game. Even with its long development cycle there are so many poor yet easily avoidable design choices that hurt the overall game. I really recommend that you spend your money elsewhere and pick up some other PlayStation 4 game(s).
Gameplay
Like Ico and Shadow of the Colossus there isn't much told or explained of The Last Guardian's story. You start the game inside some kind of castle with some locked up animal creature named Trico. The game doesn't really tell you how you got there or what this animal creature is. It isn't until the end of the game that you actually find some of this information out. Outside of a few cutscenes you really don't get any story at all and this really bothered me. Throughout the game I wanted to know more about the world and its characters and the game just didn't deliver. Overall I found the story aspect about the game very disappointing.
While I found the story disappointing the gameplay ended up disappointing me even more. While the concept of the game is sound in that you use your playable character and Trico to explore an area and solve some puzzles its execution is all wrong. One major problem is that the kid you play as is constantly stumbling and falling around the games environment. This makes it such a pain to move around and I can't understand who on the development side thought this was fun. Another problem with moving around the environment is how the kid sticks to things. Trying to do a jump can be a pain because you end up sticking to a ledge or grabbing onto the wrong thing or even missing at what you are jumping at. Again this is another of those who thought that this was okay kind of thing. Even the puzzles that you do aren't all that great as well. Many of the games puzzles revolve around finding then pulling a switch to open a door.
The gameplay mechanics around your animal partner Trico don't work out well either. While you can give Trico commands to do certain things it seems at times that he will ignore them or do something different. Trico's constant weird responses to your commands just makes things frustrating as he is needed to help you combat enemies, cross long gaps, or climb up many structures. Again I have to ask who really thought that making Trico such a frustrating gameplay mechanic would be a good thing.
The Last Guardian also suffers for many other problems as well. The games camera is just a mess. Get used to having it give you the worse possible viewpoint at any given time. The camera also does this weird thing where when it switches a viewpoint the screen will go black for about a second and I found this very disorienting. But I think the biggest problem the game has is that I was constantly getting bored. I really couldn't play more then 30 minutes each session before I couldn't take it anymore.
Control
I found the control setup to be a bit disappointing. Moving around the environment was pain due to the playable character constantly falling. Button placement like having jump on the Triangle Button felt awkward and not having the ability to customize the control setup was disappointing.
Graphics
A bit disappointing considering that this game had almost a decade of work put into it. The game still has the look of its PS3 DNA in it. Sure the character models and world environments look good but they should have been so much better and that is disappointing. I did notice a few frame rate problems here and there as well.
Sound
Again another disappointment. I did like how Trico and the boy character sounded but nothing felt memorable here. I even wish that the games made up language could have been turned off for an english language voice track. Again after almost a decade of development this should have been much better than what we got.