"The Last of Us," Naughty Dog's follow-up to the popular "Uncharted" series, is being hailed as a "masterpiece" and "a work of art" by reviewers, and the company has the technology to rapidly build on its success for next-gen consoles like the PS4.

"Naughty Dog has delivered the most riveting, emotionally resonant story-driven epic of this console generation," hails Edge game critic.

"One of the finest games ever made," continues SFX.

"This is Naughty Dog pushing PS3 to its absolute limit. Over to you, PS4," chimed the Official PlayStation Magazine UK.

Without question, the studio's latest worldwide release, set for June 14, is pushing Naughty Dog further into the public eye.

But the question becomes, will Naughty Dog deliver for the PS4 come transition time?

"It's the end of a life cycle, and we are coming out before the PS4, and there are some examples of games that have come out after next-gen consoles have been released and have done rather well," says game director Bruce Straley to Digital Spy.

"We think fans who have the [PS3] at home are going to want to keep that around just a little bit longer to say, 'I'm ready for this experience'."

But Naughty Dog's current game engine will be used to power the studio's PS4 games once the time comes, reports IGN.

During the making of "Uncharted," the studio created a whole new engine which "caused a lot of turmoil," admits Straley.

"We learned our lesson in saying, as we move into development into next-gen, we want to take our current engine, port it immediately over as is and say, 'Okay, we have a great AI system, we have a good rendering system'. We have all these things that already work. Only when we hit a wall will we say, 'When do we need to change something? When do we need to scale it?"

For a list of reviews of "The Last of Us," click here.