Like fine wine.
Naughty Dog must be making other developers feel shamed. The crew at Naughty Dog is pushing video game limits as far as we’ve seen to this day and further than many had ever thought possible on this current gen of consoles. Uncharted 3 is another great game and arguably from an objective standpoint the best in the series. Uncharted 2 was ground breaking in the sense that it’d never been done that well before and Uncharted 3 simply tweaked the formula even that much more.
The game play in Uncharted 3 is essentially that of the previous titles in the series…. Yes, completely awesome! The melee combat is superb and does have some added features like more stealth takedowns. The jumping and climbing around the environments also feels as good as ever. If I were to have one thing that bothered me about the game play it would be the shooting. It’s not bad by any means but does feel slightly lacking when put next to the standards in melee and character traversal. The aiming is ever so slightly clunky and it just doesn’t feel as smooth as it should compared to the rest of this game.
The story in Uncharted 3 is another engrossing one that will have you sitting on the edge of your seat at times. The new villains in this rendition are easily hated and you long for the chance to make them pay. The characters that Nathan Drake doesn’t want dead are equally as likable as the villains are hated. Although I did feel like I would have preferred more face time from a few select characters but that by no means ruined the experience. The puzzles in Uncharted 3 again meet at a perfect point where they make you think but will not having you raging 30 minutes later standing there clueless. Using Drakes notebook to solve the puzzles is also an excellent feature as it adds another level of depth to the story.
The guys at Naughty Dog have also found out fantastic and unique new ways to excite, shock and pull players in. Giving you the sense of urgency when the world around you if falling. Making it feel as though you really are crawling through very tight spaces, giving even you the player a slight sense of claustrophobia. Writing story twists well enough to not be obvious and even shocking, as well as knowing when to take the story seriously or put in mild humor.
The technology and skill sets that Naughty Dog have put into Uncharted 3 are nothing short of amazing. I don’t want to seem like I’m ogling this game at all, it’s a great game, not the best, I thoroughly enjoyed it but will not be playing it again anytime soon. That said on a PS3 in this generation the tech here is as far as I know the best I’ve seen not being processed by a PC. Shadows, textures, lighting, character animations, expressions, water effects, explosions all the way to cut scenes are to this day some of the best you have ever seen.
The Uncharted formula is starting to show it is aging just ever so slightly in the sense it is getting mildly predictable but that formula is still one of the best around. The single player experience will offer around 10 hours of fun and at least a handful of moments that will literally make you say “damn!”. Not to mention the multi-player has been over hauled to offer Uncharted fun against other players through various play modes. Uncharted 3 is easily worthy of 5 stars because you will have a great time playing it.
