Nathan Drake is a supposed descendant of Sir Francis Drake. He and a television journalist named Elena are working together to find the coffin of Sir Francis Drake. Elena's t.v. company is funding the expeditions and Nathan the hired hand/jack of all trades. Nathan knows when they find the coffin that it is going to be empty and he is right, inside is Drakes journal. Elena wants to know what's in it and is upset that Nathan tells her he was only using her for the funding and has no intention of letting her share in the secrets of the journal which he knew was there all along.
The pair are attacked by pirates and survive thanks to the Intervention of Sully, a friend and father figure for Nathan. Sully urges Nathan to ditch Elena and go after the gold of Eldorado which the journal shows the way to. With Elena firmly ditched the two head into the jungles and find that the spanish took the gold a long time ago.
Thinking the trail has gone cold a despondent Sully confesses to huge debts and very nasty men after him to reclaim them. On the way back the unexpected fInding a Uboat in the jungle prompts an investigation and the trail gets warm again. Sullys debtors turn up and seemingly kill him, whilst running from them Nathan runs into Elena who has followed the pair. Nathan and Elena make a truce and set off after the treasure together. They travel by plane to a seemingly uninhabited Island where they are shot down and spiral into the adventure of several lifetimes.
Nathan is an interesting hero, likable and funny. Elena his reluctant at first love interest. The enemies also are given fairly good characterization, Roman is a huge cliche and reminiscent of the bad guy in Die Hard 1. Navarro is a good nemesis although is fairly underused. Eddie is a great bad guy, seemingly incompetent but funny and even likable at times.
The heart of the story concerns the theme of treasure hunting, or greed basically. The characters go to huge lengths to recover gold. The bill for cars, boats and helicopters and ammunition probably comes close to the money the idol will be worth. Well maybe not, though my point is that an awful lot of money is spent on the pursuit of more money. The twist in the tail about the Golden Idol of El Dorado is interesting, however not fully explained. It may be a theme for the next game, and I hope it is, not the idol turning up again, but whatever supernatural power it possesses and what is behind that power.
Now come the inevitable problems with the plot. There is little actually wrong with the story itself, it's a workable Indiana Jones script that never got made. The problems come with integrating it into the game and the mistakes made were so easily rectifiable.
On several occasions you are instructed to do certain things, like go up to a tower to do something, sometimes this order is given without the motivation first being established. I spent some of my play time wondering why I was actually going somewhere. For example at the government house you arrive and Elena waits at a certain point with no explanation. She tells you that the zip line from a nearby tower will do the trick. What trick? I go to the zip line after much fighting and puzzling and use it. To find that we were wanting to go through the door Elena is standing in the general area of. The game just never actually pointed out that the door was where we wanted to go, and we could get inside the building an alternative way by using the zip line.
My next major gripe with the storytelling was a problem again with the integration of game and story. On several occasions you crack fairly complex combination puzzles with the aid of the Drake's journal. You go into these unexplored areas which have never seen human occupation for hundreds of years expecting to find treasures. What you find mostly are mercenaries? How did the enemies get here before you? I thought you had the super secret journal? Now I know why they did this. It's a game, you have to have enemies in a game. All could so easily have been sorted with just making these secret areas smaller and have you coming back out into public areas before meeting the bad guys, or as actually does happen once near the end you see the enemies blowing their way into the secret catacombs rather than work through the puzzles. It is a nit pick, however every time it happened I groaned and was taken out of the story.
I enjoyed the story and look forward to Nathan's next adventures, my advice and why I gave this an 8 for story rather than a 9 is to wrap up loose ends unless they are being kept for the next game, and if so signpost that. Keep the motivation before the action and keep the thugs out of the secret tombs only you are supposed to be able to get into.
Uncharted is a game split into two distinct and separate halves, well that's not strictly true, there are actually three gameplay styles. These have a rough 50, 30 and 20 percent weighting to them. There is the shooting sequences which take the form of a third person shooter, the puzzling elements which take the form of a tomb raider style 3D platform puzzler an there is significant sections of the game where you ride on a jet ski or drive a jeep.
The 3D platform puzzling section borrows heavily from Tomb raider. However it takes Lara as its template and throws out the annoying parts of Tomb Raider and keeps only the fun. You explore areas at times with other a.i. characters which allows for story to flow as conversation, rather than the slightly mad talking to herself that Lara does. You encounter various puzzles in the form of environmental obstacles and also traps and locks left behind by the long dead.
There are also long sections where you clamber around the ruins like an acrobat jumping from ledge to ledge hanging on by your fingertips to crumbling masonry, swinging on vines. The animation of Drake outclasses Lara's smoother moves in that he feels heavier, more human and less like a machine. He stumbles and scrambles, looks like it hurts and that he's going to fall.
In Tomb Raider you are presented with huge puzzles and sometimes it all feels wearisome. Here they realized that and the platform puzzling is shorter for the most part and thanks to more obvious handholds and use of a fixed camera in places makes it much easier to negotiate these sections. The result is you get all the great fun gameplay of a Tomb raider game without any real frustration. It take the difficulty out of the game but since this is roughly fifty percent a third person shooter then the ease of the 3D platform puzzling section of the game isn't a problem it's a novelty fun game mechanic that breaks up the shooting and allows for some story telling outside of the cut scenes.
There is a later section of the game which throws out all I have said above and brings you firmly into Lara territory, however it can be forgiven as it's near the end of the game and a break from the norm rather than the rule. There is also a few unintuitive bits in the platforming, for example at one point I kept dying on a crumbling rock jump, until I realized that you had to wait for the rock to actually crumble and fall a bit before jumping, which was a solitary experience, and thus unprepared for as jumping quickly seemed to be the solution on all the other crumbling rock sections.
On the puzzles, which are varied, you are given help in the form of consulting Drake's journal which gives clues or solutions to the puzzles. Sully and Elena also pipe up with useful information as well.
The shooting sections of the game are it's mainstay, View is third person, with aiming using R1 to aim and L1 to shoot. You can get yourself into cover where popping out to shoot is fairly essential to survival, running and gunning is not really a viable option if you want to live long. Some cover collapses after a certain amount of pounding and the enemies will work their way to flanking you unless you suppress them with fire. They also like to use grenades to get you out of cover. Ammunition and new guns are found on the bodies of the dead enemies.
The shooting takes place in the same maps as the 3D platform puzzling however you stay firmly on the ground during the firefights and enemies are cleared before moving on the the platforming.
There are a variety of enemies, mostly mercenaries, pirates and swat team type enemies. They use all of the available weapons, including rocket launchers, shotguns etc. They use emplaced guns which you can liberate and use as well.
There are a few environmental obstacles to negotiate here as well, shooting padlocks from locked doors, balancing on logs using the sixaxxis, sliding on zip lines. There are also primitive spring loaded traps to avoid. There are also treasures to be found for trophies.
My main criticism of the game is the way bullets interact with your enemies. It seemed to me that you could spray a mercenary with a machine gun in the chest and it would take an awful lot of bullets to kill him. If you carefully shot them three or four times in the chest then they went down like a sack of potatoes. I played around with this and found that there seems to an "I'm hit" animation that is triggered when you shoot someone. Whilst this short staggering around screaming animation is playing they don't seem to take any more damage, so bullets fired into them when they are in the animation cycle seem wasted. If you wait and plug them after each animation then they go down a lot quicker and you save a hell of a lot of bullets that are in short supply anyway. Once I realized this I got on an awful lot better in the game, it's a shame as it takes you out of the game and reminds you that this is a game when you have to do something so obviously game like to get ahead.
Like most third person shooters of the last few years the game is broken up into what I call "fight room" like sections. Basically you enter an area, enemies enter in groups from various points and you shoot at each other until you eventually conquer all the enemies, an exit then becomes available and you can progress. I criticize these games for their box like fight rooms, however, Uncharted whilst strictly adhering to this formula does it in a way that the fight rooms feel natural and less obviously cubes with cover scattered around.
There is variety in the weapons with all the usual bases covered, pistols, shotguns, machine guns, sniper rifles, rockets and grenades of various types.
In three distinct sections of the game you ride around on a jet ski. The physics for the waves and surf are excellent here, rivaling Wave-race. As you drive around a river system avoiding exploding barrels in the water and enemies from the shore who take pot shots at you. There is some puzzling here as well with gates to unlock.The pacing of the longest jet ski section is made slow by the need to take it easy and shoot all the enemies and barrels. Charging like a lunatic, driving full speed is suicide as the barrels are everywhere and hitting them with the jet ski makes them explode. I can't help feeling that this section would have been a lot more fun if they had just let you drive like a crazy man and enjoy bouncing around on the water.
There is also a section where you ride on a jeep using its mounted gun as Elena drives. You take out a whole fleet of vehicles during this long car chase section which is enormous fun.
The A.i. is above average, tending not to do anything obviously stupid. They take cover, move when grenades get lobbed into that cover and generally try and get close enough to flank you if you don't shoot directly at them to suppress them. One thing that I haven't seen a.i. do previously, though I am sure it's not entirely new is hide and lay in wait for you. At certain points enemies seem to be hiding and only attack when you get close enough to melee or give you a shotgun blast in the face. This tactic is shocking and entertaining at first, however once you know where the enemies are hiding it becomes easy to blast them as they lurk.
Later in the game you encounter a different type of enemy and the cover tactics go out the window for panic stricken run and gunning with the shotgun.
Mention must be made of the good helper a.i. which tends to only hang around when there is not much going on, but occasionally is present in firefights.
There is only really one traditional boss fight which comes at the end of the game and is a mixture of quicktime events and shooting.
The environments are all wonderfully detailed, the jungles lush, the ruins crumbly and everything has that real world feel to it that suggests many man hours of hard work and care. The game has it's own particular look with what I can only describe as a skinny look to the characters, which makes a welcome contrast with the bulky space marine that seems so common in other games. Nathan isn't built like a tank, he is more of a Bruce Lee.
The graphics in this game are great, everything moves at a steady frame rate. The water effects are particularly noteworthy. Many small touches have been added to the animation of the characters to make them feel more real. If I was to nitpick about the graphics I would suggest that the frame rate is being kept up by a motion blur disguised reduction in texture detail as you pan the camera faster than a certain speed. Which is very noticeable. Hardly a problem but something that shows the smoke and mirrors that cover the limitations of the engine.
The music is adequate and sound effects excellent.
Checkpoint distribution was fair and intuitive at all times, I can't recall ever being put back further than I would have liked.
I received 42% of the trophies for one play through on the hard difficulty. The in game clock says that I played for 11 hours, though I have to say I would have guessed at 15 hours if there wasn't an in game clock. TIme flies when you are having fun I suppose
There is no multiplayer in the game.
I really did enjoy playing this game, reading back the review I sound quite negative, but this game is a really good roller coaster ride and I had fun from start to finish. I wanted to play when I was away from it and will come back to it again and try on the harder difficulty setting which I unlocked by completing it when I get the time. This game is definitely worth a full purchase, especially as it's now available on the platinum range of half price games.
Scoring
Graphics 9
Gameplay 9
Story 8
Level Design 9
A.i. 8
Total 8.6
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