The Last of Us - Multiplayer Impressions

Whilst the gaming world is enamored with the incredible single player experience. I have found myself drawn to the multi-player game, Factions. I don't really indulge in multi-player sides of games these day, so for me to find myself choosing to play Factions over finishing the single player is quite a big thing for me. The reason for this is simple. Naughty Dog have taken a tried and tested formula and wrapped it up in some nice new wrapping paper, that expands on the world of The Last of Us.


Factions sees you choosing a side to play on, either Hunters or Fireflies. The difference here is down to the customization options available to you afterwards. Once you pick your faction you are tied to them for 12 weeks of game time. You become the head of your clan and have a small number of survivors living with you. These survivors can be made out of random generated names or more interestingly, you can link the game to your Facebook account and the survivors will take their names out of your friend list.

Your clan has to survive 12 weeks before being extracted to a safe zone. During your time, you need to provide supplies, medication and other survivors. To do this you enter one of two game modes, Supply Raid or Survivors. Supply Raid sees stashes left out in the open which contains supplies vital for your team's success and the overall health of your clan. You and three other faction members need to collect these supplies along with an enemy team, fighting for the very same supplies. Each team gets twenty reinforcements and whichever team runs out of lives first loses.

In Survivors, you must eliminate everyone else until you are left standing at the end of the match. It is a best of seven rounds format and supplies go to the team that wins four of seven rounds by having the last man or woman standing. There's no respawns but you can buy weapons and ammo between rounds and anything you buy will carry over into the next round, crafted items and materials picked up however will not.

Each match counts as one game day, towards your 12 week goal. The materials and supplies you find during the match are counted up at the end and go towards your camps overall supply level. The higher this is then the more you can unlock and also the more survivors join your camp. Of course it would be boring if your camp just kept growing with your progress in the field. So as your camp grows, events may happen to affect the well being of your survivors. A hunter attack could kill off and injure survivors, infection or disease may need you to find medication to help cure them. In order to do this you must accept missions in the form of challenges. They take the form of Kill three enemies by execution or revive 5 team mates, and you are given a set amount of matches to perform to these tasks. Your success at these missions determines what happens to your survivors. Only revive 2 people and only 10% of your camp population will be saved.

By adding a simple layer of thematic wrapping over the standard online shooter model, Naughty Dog has created a fresh take on multi-player that even has a cynical old gamer like me happy to go online again. Bravo!