Wanted to include this, but editing time expired:

"Then again, if the characters are evil or unrelatable, does that make the beggining of the story less interesting? No. I was enthused from the start to see how Joel turned up after losing his daughter, to find out more about Tess and their relationship (never fully explained in the game), and also to see how the world turned up after the outbreak. If you can't follow a plot with "evil" and ruthless characters I suppose you also have never watched a Tarantino movie, or anything with an anti-hero as a protagonist - which is certainly your choice to make, but you can't really fault the story based on this."

The reviewer gets the story so "wrong" it hurts.

SPOILERS AHEAD, you have been warned.

For starters, there's a factual error: Joel doesn't have a questionable job before the outbreak: it is heavily implied he works as a contractor.

Then, you say the story is lacking relatable characters other than Ellie at the beggining and that the game supposedly would suffer for it. Honestly, I couldn't disagree more.

Even in a hardened and ruthless world, Joel and Tess, while being no saints (if they were they likely wouldn't be alive), do show more humanity than most would in the same circumstances - just consider the fact that they turned away from being bandits, rapists or cannibals, which, in that world is in fact a virtue). Joel is easier to sympathize with when you consider the way his daughter was taken from him at the beggining of the game.

But then again, yes, he and Tess are shown to be ruthless, but that's the point: to show how even a loving stand up father gets his personality messed up with the outbreak. For me, particularly, Joel was so relatable because he acts towards Ellie the exact same way I do towards my girlfriend when I'm in a bad mood and stressed out: closed up and making faces and noises when she fails to comply with a request or instruction. This just made him seem so much more real to me.

I really have no idea what the reviewer means when he says that Joel's actions are so brutal they attract disgust even from other hardened survivors. The game never hints at that, so I'm thinking maybe the reviewer got his view of Joel influenced by what happens in the last 2 acts of the game.

Tess becomes easier to like towards the moment of her death, when she sacrifices herself. It doesn't feel forced or cheesy and actually makes sense. And this also invalidates the reviewer's criticism about characters being one dimensional. I found that most every one of them has some level of depth.

But what makes it crystal clear that this guy didn't get the characters or the story is the fact that he states Ellie is so relatable because she's always scared. WHAT? Ellie is shown to be a really tough no bullshit girl, which is what makes her so likeable and original in the first place. If she were constantly scared she'd just be "Little girl in videogame #2559". In fact, Sam (the black kid) has a dialogue specifically about this, asking why is she never scared of the stuff that goes on, to which Ellie confesses being scared only of ending up alone - which eventually happens for a while and is shown to traumatize her.

Anyways, when you consider how wrong the reviewer got these things, maybe because of some personal bias towards the characters or just plain not paying attention, it becomes easy to see where that 8.0 score comes from.