Warning: You guys probably won't like what I have to say about this game.
My problem with it is that they made Joel seem evil out of nowhere. It bugs me how you go from feeling like a good guy to all of a sudden being a selfish ****. I actually tried to leave the operating room and let her be operated on, hoping there would be a decision allowed to be made. Nope. Then I had to walk back in and kill those people for NO REASON. To me it feels like this game should have had two endings. When the credits rolled I was like WTF and waited for an after-scene, but nope.
Literally exactly what I did. I didn't want to kill any of the Fireflies at all. They were working for the good of humanity.
I feel a bit cheated by the story telling at that point, really. Joel and Ellie have traveled literally across the country together, have shared innumerable near-death experiences, won against all odds, and obviously bonded along the way. And now you guys are just going to put her in the operating room without letting Joel say goodbye? Maybe if you guys hadn't been so stubbornly matter-of-fact about it, Joel would have come around. Maybe if he had heard Ellie say it was what she wanted, he would have allowed it.
That would have been a proper ending, as it would have forced Joel to deal with losing someone as he obviously didn't with his daughter. It would have been a sacrifice that the player would have mourned while understanding the necessity of it. It would have played off of the recurring theme that everything happens for a reason. Instead we get an ending that drags on too long and ends on a flat note.
Honestly, it came across to me like cheap story telling. People acting irrationally when behaving like thinking adults could solve their problems is my biggest issue with many post-apocalyptic stories, and I really expected Naughty Dog to steer clear of that trope.
Sure, the characters were memorable. I loved Ellie as a character pretty much immediately; ND did a top-notch job with her dialogue and expressions. And as the story continued, I started caring about what was going to happen to Ellie. As I got closer and closer to the ending, I grew more apprehensive about how it was all going to end. Sure, as soon as I saw the Firefly patch on those soldiers' arms, I knew what was going to happen (which is an issue in and of itself, which I'll get to later). But that doesn't compensate for the horrendously repetitive gameplay/"levels" for me. Stealth became tedious and aggravating, as I observed that its mechanics weren't terribly consistent. Running and gunning was obviously never the best solution, but towards the end I found myself doing it just so I wouldn't have to spend ten minutes doing the same stealth combat I'd been doing for the past ten hours.
Another part of the ending I didn't like was the need for Ellie to have her brain operated on. Why? Clearly the infection is spread through the bloodstream, which means the immune system is responsible for giving her, you know, immunity. So the bloodstream is where the vaccine could be found, where the doctors could observe her antibodies and white blood cells targeting the infection and preventing it from causing aggression/physical mutation; her immune system was the key, not her brain. Obviously I'm not a doctor, but that just seems a bit iffy to me, and again seemed like cheap story telling.
Overall I'd give the game a 7/10. It's fun enough for the intense moments and beautifully rendered and compelling cutscenes, but this game does not deserve GOTY in my opinion.