The Last of Us has no shortage of terrifying and anxiety-inducing antagonists. Spontaneous, aggroed clickers flailing about are endlessly daunting, for example, and groups of gun-toting bandits scuttling around behind cover incite nerve-wracking cat-and-mouse encounters. But, while The Last of Us usually has a balanced back-and-forth of players being the mouse, enemies being the cat, and vice versa, Part 2 decided to throw dogs into its aromatic cocktail of tense stealth mechanics.
Dogs were a hot-button topic in The Last of Us Part 2 at launch. In the midst of the game’s violent themes bleeding into the morality of killing dogs, it’s interesting how controversial they were as a brand-new enemy type for the Washington Liberation Front and Rattler factions. These dogs may indeed be adorable to anyone besides cynophobes, but they are tremendously threatening in gameplay encounters and can fling all planned strategies into disarray. This was true of Part 2’s story campaign, and it’s also true of its roguelike mode, No Return.
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The Last of Us Part 2’s Dogs are No Mere Pets
Military attack dogs are introduced as companions of The Last of Us Part 2’s Washington Liberation Front soldiers. As Ellie, players trek further into enemy territory daily and scent-tracking dogs suddenly become a huge problem in both stealth and combat during Day 2, when Ellie is by her lonesome as a pregnant Dina rests at their theater hideout. The fact that they track players’ ‘scent’—illustrated by a silhouetted trail between the dog and Ellie while Listen Mode is toggled—means they’ll eventually be discovered and gnawed on in a button-mashing grapple if they aren’t able to create a diversion, maintain distance, or kill the dog before it locates them.
It may be much less efficient or convenient to do so, but players can evade every dog that appears in a story campaign encounter if they kill the dog’s handler to distract them or use stealth to get by unseen.
An important distinction to make is that Ellie isn’t running around murdering harmless pets but is instead defending herself against dogs that are taken into the field and trained to kill, especially when it’s a Seraphite the WLF is at war with. Plus, the only dog that is canonically killed by Ellie is Alice at the aquarium, and the alternative to Ellie defending herself would’ve been allowing the dog to maul her. Either way, dogs make for quite a peculiar enemy type as they’re basically the only ones in all of the Last of Us franchise that players might feel conflicted about killing.
Dogs in The Last of Us Part 2 aren’t Always Man’s Best Friend
Conversely, dogs that appear in The Last of Us Part 2’s No Return count toward remaining enemy tallies and must be killed in order to complete the encounters they spawn into. This technically goes against the ethos of dogs being avoidable to prevent having to harm them, and yet, because No Return is a roguelike game mode completely separated from the story, it is easier to delineate between how dogs are impactful in the narrative versus gameplay.
Dogs spawn at the Logging Camp for WLF encounters and the Resort for the Rattler Captain boss encounter, but both settings have upper floors and platforms that dogs are unable to reach or ascend, meaning they’re sitting ducks somewhere below until players cut them down to complete the encounter.
It’s here that the moral conundrum of killing dogs in-game is put to bed as No Return helps put into perspective that dogs are enemies. However, it can be a cruel knife-twist of irony that Abby and Abby-aligned characters in The Last of Us Part 2’s No Return may be tasked with slaying dogs in any one of six encounters per run when they befriend and care for dogs of their own in the story.
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OpenCritic Reviews
- Top Critic Avg: 89 /100 Critics Rec: 90%
- Released
- January 19, 2024
- ESRB
- M for Mature: Blood and Gore, Intense Violence, Nudity, Sexual Content, Strong Language, Use of Drugs
- Developer(s)
- Naughty Dog
- Publisher(s)
- Sony Interactive Entertainment
WHERE TO PLAY
- Engine
- Proprietary Engine
- Franchise
- The Last of Us
- PC Release Date
- April 3, 2025
- PS5 Release Date
- January 19, 2024
- Genre(s)
- Action-Adventure
- Platform(s)
- PlayStation 5
- OpenCritic Rating
- Mighty
- PS Plus Availability
- N/A
