The Last of Us Part I Review-Bombed on Steam Over Performance Issues

A long-awaited multiplayer online mode for 2020 action-adventure game The Last of Us Part II from developer Naughty Dog and publisher Sony Interactive Entertainment has now become a standalone game, set to reveal in June 2023.

In order to coincide with HBO show, PC port for The Last of Us Part I was delayed to late March and is already out on stores. However, PC players are review-bombing TLoU on Steam because of frequent crashes and performance issues.

At launch day, The Last of Us PC version has garnered "mostly negative" reviews on Steam and many players are complaining about poor performance and recurring crashes due to lackluster optimization even on high-end PC hardware.

Majority of players are repeatedly having their game crashed, making it unplayable unless they roll out a patch soon. Some are reporting 100% CPU utilization in main menu with more than 8 GB of VRAM on their medium range set-ups.

PC players also report that shader building process may take almost an hour, yet you may face some crashes afterwards. Playing on a SSD system may take two-minutes of load-time and will crash playing once you are on a Steam Deck.

Despite facing a series of issues, The Last of Us Part I is doing pretty well in terms of sales, with a peak of over 36,000 users on release. It is still behind God of War and Horizon Zero Dawn but ahead of Days Gone and other new releases.

Unlike other PC release by Sony Interactive Entertainment, there are no reviews for The Last of Us PC version on Metacritic at launch. It means, Naughty Dog probably didn't offer any code to reviewers but players are furious regardless.

The Last of Us Part I port was handled by Naughty Dog and Iron Galaxy for Epic Games Store as well as Steam. Despite owning popular PC port expert Nixxes Software, why did Sony hire devs at Iron Galaxy is not making sense to players.