Calling HBO’s ‘The Last of Us’ ‘aggressively average’ goes down about as well as you’d expect

The clock is ticking down for the release of HBO Max’s highly anticipated The Last of Us television adaptation, and fans of the game will no doubt continue frothing at the mouth with excitement with every passing second. The acclaim the show has gotten from reviewers with early screeners has surely also been shoveling coal into this particular hype train.

But, as with any acclaimed property, there’s always an outlier; Insider’s Kirsten Acuna, in one of 2023’s biggest entertainment deviations so far, gave a lukewarm review of the upcoming nine-episode series. Her claim is an especially weighty one, as her work as a prominent The Walking Dead correspondent means she’s all too familiar with analyzing human-centric, zombie-adjacent content, and it’s caused quite the conversation on Twitter.

Twitter is hardly known for doling out good advice, but one user was happy to give Acuna some:

But, evidently, the replies weren’t nearly as hostile as one may have thought.

Indeed, Acuna’s reputation seems to have preceded her. Although, perhaps it helps that very few people have the means to truly contradict her, considering the show hasn’t been released yet.

In any case, we expected sad Twitter, and we got sad Twitter.

Acuna’s review may seem like a hefty counter-opinion, considering the series has been dubbed as one of the greatest live-action video game adaptations of all time. Indeed, with modern gaming drawing an abundance (arguably an overabundance) of critical praise for its storytelling, it’s no wonder game adaptations are beginning to fly as high as they are. Even so, it makes one wonder what the game had to offer that Acuna found to be lacking in the series.

In any case, we can all make our own judgments when The Last of Us premieres on HBO Max on Jan. 15.