It was one of the most anticipated games on PC today and after a long wait it was released just yesterday. The Last of Us Part I arrived on Steam and other distribution platforms, and it was planned to be able to be installed and run on the Steam Deck, despite the fact that said console does not fully comply with official minimum requirements.

I already told you that it was clear to me that the claims for The Last of Us Part I were inflated, and indeed they are, but they’re bloated for the worst possible reason, which is that the game’s optimization is so bad that even with high-end equipment the experience is not good and in general we are facing a game that deserves to be considered the worst console adaptation exclusively for PC.

The Last of Us Part II uses the graphics engine of The Last of Us Part II, which was released on PS4and although it has better graphics quality than The Last of Us Remastered On a technical level, this is no miracle. What I mean by that is that their hardware requirements are absurd and disproportionate, and seem to have been artificially inflated, as going from a higher quality mode to a lower quality mode has minimal performance impact in many cases.

You can take a nap while you wait for The Last of Us Part I

And I’m not exaggerating at all. When we open the title for the first time, we will find a message about preloading the shaders, which depends on the specifications of our computerit can take up to an hour to complete. Is it possible to play without preloading the shaders? Yes, but we will have frequent interruptions with the “wait” message, as well as tearing and stuttering. Those last two issues also don’t go away completely even if we let the pre-start shader finish before we start playing.

At the performance level, it confirms what I told you when we saw their claims that they were inflated. It is possible to play The Last of Us Part I on PC with everything on high and maintain averages of more than 60 FPS at 1080p with a GeForce RTX 3050although yes, pulling DLSS in quality mode to maintain good stability.

That’s a positive thing, but the game doesn’t quite scale well at different graphics settings irregular and unjustified performance on many occasions and suffers a bottleneck even in the latest generation CPUs when we use very powerful graphics cards, especially in resolutions lower than 4K or when we activate DLSS or FSR.

We might think that none of this is that serious and that it’s almost “our daily bread” for PC gamers after all, but it’s true that The Last of Us Part I It is also very broken, so broken that it suffers from constant shutdowns and crashes, has such significant drops in performance that even with a high-end graphics card it is not possible to play with total fluidity. The list of issues and bugs mainly revolves around everything I just told you about, and it can be seen that it has affected a huge number of users on Steam.

It’s funny because on Steam a total of 6,065 reviews (at the time of writing) are negative and only 2,882 are positive. Some of these positive reviews highlight negative points, which in themselves introduce a contradictory element and should make the review negative. I mean you can’t say the game is good when you point out that you had to wait 45 minutes for the shaders to load and you have performance issues and crashes.

I was also able to appreciate a disproportionate consumption of resources that is difficult to explain and justifyespecially considering that this is a game based on the graphics engine of The Last of Us Part II, a title that was developed for the PS4, and if we compare it to what other games released a few years ago, e.g. like Red Dead Redemption 2 to give a famous example.

The Last of Us Part I is an example of how not to port a game to PC

It also happens an “insult” to the PC gaming community and another blot on Iron Galaxy’s resumeresponsible for the development of this port, who already caused a huge fiasco in 2015 with Batman Arkham Knight for PC, a game that was one of the biggest disasters in the history of PC gaming, so much so that it ended up being a return option on Steam for the whole year of 2015 .

Many they directly blamed the poor state of The Last of Us Part I on Iron Galaxyand ensured that if Nixxes Software was in charge of development, things would be completely different. We’ll never know, but it’s clear that the best thing we can do right now is to stay away from this port and wait for the necessary patches to fix all the issues The Last of Us Part I has on PC and improve optimizations and resource utilization.

In my case, I was able to play the original title on PS3 and later enjoyed it in the remastered edition for PS4. Despite everything, I was going to give this PC version a chance, but it’s clear to me that I won’t, and that I’m not going to spend a dime on future ports that aren’t compatible in this state unless I think it’s necessary for professional reasonssuch as performing performance comparisons or sharing technical analysis with you.

With The Last of Us Part I for PC, the disappointment I experienced was so huge that I preferred to go straight from the technical analysis, and I think Sony should seriously rethink their strategy when it comes to porting PS4 and PS5 exclusive games to PCbecause this way of inflating requirements and making optimization visible by its absence is a mistake that damages their image and that of their franchises.