What could have been the best Uncharted story, with the most beautiful and varied locations powered by the most stunning GFX on consoles, is bogged down by horrific level design and cheap, unfair combat. It ultimately doesn't matter when the trophies for beating it on its "Crushing" difficulty setting can be earned with cheats like infinite ammo and one hit kills turned on. So that leaves the only recommendable way to play this game: to turn the settings to easy, turn on all the aim assists, and plow through it as fast as possible. You want as much time enjoying the story and as little actually playing it.
The PSOne reference in the early chapters ironically foreshadowed how broken and dated these controls now feel a decade after "Drake's Fortune." Thankfully there's no trophy for beating the game on your first try, or without dying. There is virtually no consistency to how far Drake can jump and stick his landings. Drake can fall seemingly 50 feet sometimes, yet instantly dies sometimes on a two foot drop. How? Well, thanks to poor level design, sometimes blatantly obvious, easier paths of escape lead to instant death, all because the game wants to force you to take a dramatic "longcut" so to speak. Like that scene in Hot Fuzz, I think, where cops hop a fence with an open gate right next to them, only your punishment for trying the gate is falling ten inches to YOUR DOOM. So if you see a small three foot drop from the roof of the house to the roof to the garage, then to the top of the trash bins, then to the street, be wary.
I finished the first six, awesome chapters in about an hour and forty five minutes. Chapter seven was the introduction to all the gun-play flaws this game had to offer, but I held out hope. If I knew just how worse it'd get I might've quit. God damn though, the prison chapters, and the childhood flashback chapters were worth all the surrounding bullshit. If you played 2 & 3, two of the best PS3 games ever, you owe it to yourself to play this game to experience those moments. Incredible, engaging story with stellar voice acting and unbelievably genuine facial expressions and animations.
Nearly every death I experienced in Uncharted 4 felt like a ripoff. I didn't throw my controller through the TV, but few games, and no big budget flagship game, come this close to making it happen. The stealth aspects are completely unintuitive, the camera is a nuisance as enemies flank you from all directions with impossible accuracy that feels like x-ray vision , and the constant back and forth between real gameplay and quick-time-event scripted sequences left me utterly confused as to how to control Drake or what moves I could make at a given time. It does the thing where you think you're watching a cut-scene, put the controller down (or await an on screen Q.T.E. button prompt) and then wham, in an instant you were expected to resume playing to make jump across a canyon or something and fall to your death. It does the thing were you go "wait a minute, I can't make a jump that far," and waste ten minutes looking for another path only to find out you were supposed to try and fail the jump to trigger yet another scene where they control Drake for you. One terrible sequence involves an armored car, which after destroying another with rockets moments before, is suddenly literally invincible, and kills you with one bullet through walls, all because you were supposed to dangle from a ledge a certain way to trigger yet another cut-scene. In addition, your A.I. companions are almost worthless, rarely kill anything, and laughably walk around in plain sight of the enemies during stealth sequences. Uncharted gameplay just doesn't hold up anymore, and the levels seem built to look pretty and not to be strategically fun. Turn "Game Mode" on your HDTV up if you wanna beat the final encounter.
Assuming you're on any difficulty higher than super easy mode, and the middle chapters can really drag, at about an hour each versus fifteen minutes in the early parts. This is what really spoiled this game for me, realizing minutes in that this mission was going to be a combat heavy one, and fearing, rightfully so, that I'd be stuck playing it for an hour before the next shake up or return to the good stuff. The fact that so many chapters conclude with the same "uh oh, here comes the Shoreline Private Military Corporation outta nowhere" battle really wears you out.
Finally, the multiplayer, which for starters walks back on all the cool mid match destructible level changes and zany sandbox levels from Uncharted 3, happens to be one of the most frustratingly imbalanced matchmaking systems I've ever come across. I lost about my first twelve matches in a row, and lifetime win percentage a year later after occasionally going back to see if it was ever fixed, remains about 25%. It is almost never a close loss, and you'd wish they had an "FF" option like Rocket League, cause I've never played an online shooter where this many matches ended 40 kills to 20. Once they have that 27 to 9 lead, you kinda wanna just move along and not have to run things out for what feels like the end of a Monopoly game type of eternity.
All in all, the more you play of Uncharted 4, the less you'll like it. Its a great Redbox rental in that case, plow through and enjoy the story, stop to take in the amazing scenery, play a few quick rounds of multiplayer without caring if you win or lose, and hope that if they ever reboot the franchise, its a drastically newer, different type of game. Hell, in "Naughty Dog, Inc." tradition, maybe a cart racer!