A brightly coloured, endlessly entertaining, warm and adventurous action game.
Uncharted, now well know for its high quality and great character was a bit of a risk when originally released by naughty dog. The studio better known for cartoony platformers had a good run on both Jak and Daxter and crash bandicoot before that. But as with Crash, Jak and Daxter was starting to go stale. With the ps3 came the chance to launch something new. Something drastically different from that which had come before.
Taking influence from the classic movies of the 50’s, naughty dog went about creating an adventure movie of a game. Something that shows us the player thrills and spills that other games are not showing, and in a new and at the same time classic way. The game is and was a success, thanks in no small part to the perfectly realized world naughty dog created.
It’s a world of two parts. Part one is believable places that look and feel natural and organic. The forests are lush and green; buildings and objects within are rusted and creaky, covered in vines and life. One can be forgiven for stopping for a second to take in all the beauty in the landscape around them. This would be a bad idea, as things in the story move at such a break neck pace that you wouldn’t get much chance to see anything in depth.
The second part is the characters, and the word character is the most apt word indeed. The lead character, Nathan drake is, according to him, the long lost descendant of Sir Francis drake. In this has led our hero off on a quest to find sir drakes legendary treasure. Nathan is a vet when it comes to treasure hunting, but unlike other games where he would be near perfect and all knowing here Nathan is human. He’s clumsy, awkward, and both behaves and moves with a stunning naturalness both in cut scenes and game play it self. He is at all times likable, funny and endearing. His attempts to make it through in one piece believable. Yes he’s doing things that most people couldn’t or wouldn’t do, but it’s possible to believe that this is a normal human being who happens to be capable because of experience and luck and not thanks to a large dose of steroids. The supporting cast also, both on the friendly and unfriendly side are believable as both people and movie character types. The classic British villain clearly marked out from the start, and voiced also classily by legendary Kain voice artist Simon Templeman.
The game is one of 3 parts. Platforming and most notable platform traversal, shooting and cover use and lastly puzzle solving.
All done in games before, most notably and directly tomb raider but here defined and perfected. Nathan moves around the world he’s in with both a human awkwardness and a perfectly realised grace. Animation on all movements from leaping over gaps to dangling over a gaping pit and shuffling by hand to safety is never hard to look at. You tend to find yourself looking forward to the next playground to explore and clamber all over. The smallest part of the game is puzzle solving, each simple to solve but taxing and inventive enough to make the eventual solving still feel like an accomplishment. Lastly the shooting, both much stronger then in past tomb based games, but also the games one big weakness. This is not to say that there’s strictly anything wrong with any of the shooting and cover mechanics in the game but that the game seems to solely rely on constant shootout after shootout that these moments become long, drawn out and even eventually close to boring. The take up too much screen time this is even more notable when Nathan has quite good and simple fighting and sneaking abilities that you just don’t get to use as more often then not you enter a room and then it fills with people who already know where you are and even more amazingly how many bullets you have. These shootouts are impressive still, the final “boss” encounter a highlight of this, but they break up the pace too much and often feel like a bit of filler. There are some moments that help, scenes on Jet Ski are fun and the shock reveal of a new threat in the games last quarter help to change up the shooting sections a bit. But this is still an issue when the game it so well constructed throughout.
Overall on a system that is devoid of many good platformers this is a standout,
Don’t let this original game be overshadowed by its more popular sequel it’s a title that needs to be experienced at least once.