Original Platforms:
Uncharted: Drake's Fortune (2007), PS3
Uncharted 2: Among Thieves (2009), PS3
Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception (2011), PS3
My Platforms:
Uncharted: Nathan Drake Collection (2015), PS4
Uncharted 4: A Thief's End (2016), PS4
I only played the single-player story campaigns for each game. I played the first three games on Easy, I played U4 on the default difficulty ("Moderate"). Completion times were about 12-14 hours per game.
I played Uncharted 2 for a single night back when it first came out, but I did not finish it/it did not leave any particular impression on me. Beyond that I knew the games were well-reviewed, I didn't know much else about them besides that GAF likes them.
I made my own GIFs this time.
--------------------
Presenting the adventures of magician Nate the Great and former Macho Nacho employee Elena Fisher
Uncharted is a series of adventure games staged in linear setpieces. The protagonist and his pals are Indiana Jones types, seeking treasure and battling off goons with guns for it. Rest assured that no matter how remote and inaccessible an ancient cursed ruin is in Uncharted, it is going to be full to the brim of AK-47s and rocket launchers. The series's diversion from Jones lies in its explicitly criminal element: the protagonists are not looking to return anything to a museum.
The villain in every one of the games is an obsessed rich person with lots of guns at their command, and the later games add various character sketches as second-in-commands. Altogether the villains are about as exciting as Marvel movie villains that aren't Loki. Our protagonists show a bit more spunk, led by noted wiseass Nathan Drake. Humor underpins most of the dialogue, with the fourth game adding a measure of sweetness and drama. There are fake death scenes, villains killing innocents to demonstrate how evil they are, and the other cheesy elements you would expect of an old-style adventure film.
"I am the biggest douche!" "No it's me." "Nuh-uh." "Yuh-huh!"
When I played The Last of Us Remastered, another game by Uncharted dev Naughty Dog, I finished with the conclusion that the gameplay was the weakest part and I would have rather seen the story as a TV miniseries. But that also primed me to think more about what the videogame experience was contributing to Uncharted as I played it, the question of what would be lost if this was a series of films instead of a game where I had to play through each ruin investigation and gunfight.
For Uncharted 1-3, aside from the train setpieces in U2, I think about the same as I did of TLOU. Uncharted 4 though I found pretty satisfying to actually play, maybe not as much in the moment-to-moment basic gameplay but in the special sequences such as slippery slopes, the piton tool, swinging and rappelling, and the use of a 4x4 to ascend questionable terrain. The graphics in Uncharted 4 are what I hope are the first of many: vistas so realistic and amazing that I actively sought them out, not just playing the game to get through its scenarios but to discover the next fantastic sight. Even the mundane beginnings of the game, on a junk barge over a trash-filled river, become beautiful in the hands of ND's artists.
Setting the mood with lighting
This is not saying U1-3 lack graphical prowess, but the use of light and the tiny animations of plants, fabrics, and other details really pushed U4 to a special point of believability for me. If you want to see dramatic and strange environments, you don't need science fiction or fantasy- take a look at the handcrafted "real world" of Uncharted 4. It's a best-of collection of natural geometry, with serious attention to how lighting operates in different places and carefully tweaked particle volumes in the atmosphere. A lot of the outdoor scenes appear especially warm and inviting, but stray into the rain or a moment of terror and the game's visual temperature dims appropriately.
To continue on the trek of environmental details: the atmospheric soundtracks on all the games are really well-done and smart, shifting to match the situations you enter like a chameleon at your back. On the first game I thought the use of tribal music cues got a bit abusive, but that feeling faded on subsequent entries. All the games appeared to have the occasional distracting animation glitch, and at one point in Uncharted 4 my brother stood next to a bit of ruin architecture wondering "how they built that" on a loop for a solid minute. U4 also saw the return of a glitch I witnessed previously in TLOUR: one enemy fell through the floor. None of these problems were constant, but it does take you out of the moment quite effectively when it happens. And the moment is why I am here. Emerging from a cave into a cold and pink northern dawn, over hints of hexagonal rock formations ala the Giant's Causeway, is like evolving into a little creature that has eyes for the first time. Waking up in a rusting ship graveyard, clearing my way to the front car of a train speeding through paradise, the environmental moment- what I'm going to call the sum total of an environment's geometry, graphic design, and acoustic traits -is key. And in Uncharted, that moment can change at any time. The ground beneath your very feet will fall away to make the moment happen.
Go where only Nazis have gone before
Believing that I am accomplishing something, that I personally surmounted a challenge and discovered a wonderful environmental moment in its place, that is why I would rather play Uncharted than watch it as a movie. The game knows how to play to this angle: despite the action being in third-person, on-screen instructions are addressed to "You", the person driving Nathan Drake. Nathan talks to himself constantly, often with a joking self-awareness about the series's less realistic or frequently repeated elements. He is both the protagonist and the player's plucky sidekick.
Uncharted operates on a "one true timeline" basis: if you die you restart from a designated checkpoint with the same ammo and gun types you had at that time. This is helpful when you waste a lot of ammo only to die- you can use your restart and foreknowledge to save some clips, or make a beeline for a stronger weapon. In most scenarios checkpoints are available at important transitions as well, like when a gunfight with a handful of grunts adds an armored assault vehicle to the mix, or you move a piece of a guardian statue into place. For the most part, checkpoints are in the right spots to keep you from getting frustrated at having to redo a whole section over again. Other characters react to your death, screaming your name if they are allies or chuckling if they are enemies. That said, your death is typically animated with goofy ragdoll physics akin to Dark Souls, so the mourning of your friends comes off as a little funnier than it is probably supposed to.
Become a mega badass that can see the future through the power of checkpoints
The gunplay was definitely the low point of the game for me, though with my 35% accuracy rate (as noted in my Uncharted 4 stat screen) I should not be too surprised. Firefights in Uncharted involve squeezing yourself behind cover and popping in and out to shoot other enemies who are also behind cover. Early on there are"only AK-47 grunts and the like, later there are armored assholes with shotguns, laser-sight snipers, rocket launchers, and heavily armored gatling gun bearers. You are probably familiar with these enemy types and the escalation of enemy abilities from any other shooting game.
In some cases there are also humanoid enemies of a more supernatural/primitive variety, where you must adopt a run-and-gun strategy to steer clear of their melee attacks. Uncharted 3 is notable for putting an emphasis on fistfights, even though the animations are reused over and over again and winning fistfights requires QTEs similar to Witcher 2. The final bosses of both U3 and U4 are QTE melee fights. U1's is a combination of a cover puzzle and QTE, and U2's final boss is an environment gimmick. Fighting never feels great in this series.
You know what's even less fun than fighting? Fighting during your second drug trip sequence of the game.
Theoretically that is why the stealth option exists. Prior to U4 however, I had a lot of trouble effectively sneaking around enemies. In the early games, many scenarios will actually punish you for sneaking through an area without encountering any enemies- you will be auto-killed by enemies that magically appear when you try to leave, or your ally will be killed. Enemies also go on alert the moment they spot you, and every enemy in the scenario will start shooting at you at once.
U4 is different: it provides long grass and water as cover options, and you do not get punished for leaving enemies alone. At the default difficulty you can even escape some scenarios with enemies actively firing at you, provided you don't lose all your health while climbing or swinging away. U4 also adds marking- the ability to put a little marker over the heads of enemies as you scope them out from cover. Finally, U4 enemies take much longer to notice you, and similar to Metal Gear Solid they have multiple levels of alertness- passive, cautious, sweeping (where they do not see you but take different patrol routes to try and find you), and alert/shooting at you. If enemies go on alert status but you manage to pass out of sight for some time, they will downgrade to sweeping status, giving you time to recover health or plan a new stealth route. Evading the painful gun battles is much less of a time-wasting pain than it was in U1-3, where any mistake guaranteed a full-scale war.
Moisture is the essence of wetness, and wetness is the essence of beauty
The other anchor element of Uncharted is the puzzles, figuring out how to open Rube Goldberg gates in ruins for the most part. I found these puzzles disappointingly trivial to figure out, there was only one I had to break out a notepad for in the entire series. There are also environmental puzzles of "how do I get from where I am to the top of that hill", all solved simply by looking around and finding a ledge you missed or an area where your NPC ally needs to push a box down to you. Allies are at their strongest in Uncharted 4, where I have witnessed them OHKOing multiple enemies from cover. The rest of the time they're just rather talkative tools for getting through the environment. The game frequently wants you to care about the NPC's participation, laying down lots of obstacles you need two people to get past. Mostly I just get bored waiting for them to stroll over to the door or lever to help me lift it.
My reaction to the series's basic elements is why I say I generally like special setpieces and vehicle sequences more. In Uncharted, there is a godawful jet-ski ride where you have to grind slowly up rapids, dodge exploding barrels and guys shooting at you, and have to occasionally maneuver your jet-ski into cover so that you can clear the area before activating the gate that takes you to the next section. This is the antithesis of what a jet-ski ride sequence should be about. By Uncharted 4, the realistic slow travel by vehicles in hostile terrain is balanced by refreshing straightaways across storm-tossed seas, or fun winch-based mini-activities and scenes (just trust me the winching stuff is fun). There is a relief to using vehicles, not just a constant struggle.
Final Fantasy XV? Already out!
Uncharted 3 and 4 both have chase sequences on vehicles as well. They end up feeling a bit overused. By far my favorite vehicle setpiece is the train in Uncharted 2, both when it's up and running and when it's...less so. The devs apparently thought so too, because they make you play through one of the associated scenarios twice. Your buddy Nate has some new commentary on the second outing at least, mostly about how dumb he is. Don't worry Nate we've all been there, getting shot up for the crime of missing that ass.
So on the gameplay I am pretty lukewarm. The series definitely gets a little better as time goes on, but I can't say I feel a burning need to play any of the first three games over again. The characters don't change too much until the last game either, so I think you could safely ignore them from a story standpoint. I would have liked to see more challenging puzzles and fewer gunfights, and some of the new elements from Uncharted 4 like the piton and the slip-n-slides should have been in much earlier to mix up the gameplay. The climbing needs to be more complex, I really don't want the solution to an environmental ascent problem to be yet another conveniently placed box that I boost my NPC up to, then they push it down to me.
I don't need anyone's help. I'm fine by myself, really...
I went into this series assuming I would review each game separately. What I found is that Uncharted remakes the same game over and over again, hence why I written a collective blob of paragraphs instead. Uncharted 4 I found pretty fun. The others had singular moments that stamp themselves on your brain, amidst tedious gunfights and boring puzzles. And all the games have superb graphics, nifty adaptable soundtracks, and some of the most mobile sets you will find in games. I really can't say no to the graphics or the playability of the fourth game, so I am tentatively looking forward to another outing in the Naughty Dog-verse, even if it isn't with Nathan Drake.
My Previous LTTPs as someone usually asks:
Bayonetta 1 & 2
Metal Gear Solid 1/2/3/4/5/PW/MGR
Awaiting the next environmental moment
Uncharted: Drake's Fortune (2007), PS3
Uncharted 2: Among Thieves (2009), PS3
Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception (2011), PS3
My Platforms:
Uncharted: Nathan Drake Collection (2015), PS4
Uncharted 4: A Thief's End (2016), PS4
I only played the single-player story campaigns for each game. I played the first three games on Easy, I played U4 on the default difficulty ("Moderate"). Completion times were about 12-14 hours per game.
I played Uncharted 2 for a single night back when it first came out, but I did not finish it/it did not leave any particular impression on me. Beyond that I knew the games were well-reviewed, I didn't know much else about them besides that GAF likes them.
I made my own GIFs this time.
--------------------
Presenting the adventures of magician Nate the Great and former Macho Nacho employee Elena Fisher
Uncharted is a series of adventure games staged in linear setpieces. The protagonist and his pals are Indiana Jones types, seeking treasure and battling off goons with guns for it. Rest assured that no matter how remote and inaccessible an ancient cursed ruin is in Uncharted, it is going to be full to the brim of AK-47s and rocket launchers. The series's diversion from Jones lies in its explicitly criminal element: the protagonists are not looking to return anything to a museum.
The villain in every one of the games is an obsessed rich person with lots of guns at their command, and the later games add various character sketches as second-in-commands. Altogether the villains are about as exciting as Marvel movie villains that aren't Loki. Our protagonists show a bit more spunk, led by noted wiseass Nathan Drake. Humor underpins most of the dialogue, with the fourth game adding a measure of sweetness and drama. There are fake death scenes, villains killing innocents to demonstrate how evil they are, and the other cheesy elements you would expect of an old-style adventure film.
"I am the biggest douche!" "No it's me." "Nuh-uh." "Yuh-huh!"
When I played The Last of Us Remastered, another game by Uncharted dev Naughty Dog, I finished with the conclusion that the gameplay was the weakest part and I would have rather seen the story as a TV miniseries. But that also primed me to think more about what the videogame experience was contributing to Uncharted as I played it, the question of what would be lost if this was a series of films instead of a game where I had to play through each ruin investigation and gunfight.
For Uncharted 1-3, aside from the train setpieces in U2, I think about the same as I did of TLOU. Uncharted 4 though I found pretty satisfying to actually play, maybe not as much in the moment-to-moment basic gameplay but in the special sequences such as slippery slopes, the piton tool, swinging and rappelling, and the use of a 4x4 to ascend questionable terrain. The graphics in Uncharted 4 are what I hope are the first of many: vistas so realistic and amazing that I actively sought them out, not just playing the game to get through its scenarios but to discover the next fantastic sight. Even the mundane beginnings of the game, on a junk barge over a trash-filled river, become beautiful in the hands of ND's artists.
Setting the mood with lighting
This is not saying U1-3 lack graphical prowess, but the use of light and the tiny animations of plants, fabrics, and other details really pushed U4 to a special point of believability for me. If you want to see dramatic and strange environments, you don't need science fiction or fantasy- take a look at the handcrafted "real world" of Uncharted 4. It's a best-of collection of natural geometry, with serious attention to how lighting operates in different places and carefully tweaked particle volumes in the atmosphere. A lot of the outdoor scenes appear especially warm and inviting, but stray into the rain or a moment of terror and the game's visual temperature dims appropriately.
To continue on the trek of environmental details: the atmospheric soundtracks on all the games are really well-done and smart, shifting to match the situations you enter like a chameleon at your back. On the first game I thought the use of tribal music cues got a bit abusive, but that feeling faded on subsequent entries. All the games appeared to have the occasional distracting animation glitch, and at one point in Uncharted 4 my brother stood next to a bit of ruin architecture wondering "how they built that" on a loop for a solid minute. U4 also saw the return of a glitch I witnessed previously in TLOUR: one enemy fell through the floor. None of these problems were constant, but it does take you out of the moment quite effectively when it happens. And the moment is why I am here. Emerging from a cave into a cold and pink northern dawn, over hints of hexagonal rock formations ala the Giant's Causeway, is like evolving into a little creature that has eyes for the first time. Waking up in a rusting ship graveyard, clearing my way to the front car of a train speeding through paradise, the environmental moment- what I'm going to call the sum total of an environment's geometry, graphic design, and acoustic traits -is key. And in Uncharted, that moment can change at any time. The ground beneath your very feet will fall away to make the moment happen.
Go where only Nazis have gone before
Believing that I am accomplishing something, that I personally surmounted a challenge and discovered a wonderful environmental moment in its place, that is why I would rather play Uncharted than watch it as a movie. The game knows how to play to this angle: despite the action being in third-person, on-screen instructions are addressed to "You", the person driving Nathan Drake. Nathan talks to himself constantly, often with a joking self-awareness about the series's less realistic or frequently repeated elements. He is both the protagonist and the player's plucky sidekick.
Uncharted operates on a "one true timeline" basis: if you die you restart from a designated checkpoint with the same ammo and gun types you had at that time. This is helpful when you waste a lot of ammo only to die- you can use your restart and foreknowledge to save some clips, or make a beeline for a stronger weapon. In most scenarios checkpoints are available at important transitions as well, like when a gunfight with a handful of grunts adds an armored assault vehicle to the mix, or you move a piece of a guardian statue into place. For the most part, checkpoints are in the right spots to keep you from getting frustrated at having to redo a whole section over again. Other characters react to your death, screaming your name if they are allies or chuckling if they are enemies. That said, your death is typically animated with goofy ragdoll physics akin to Dark Souls, so the mourning of your friends comes off as a little funnier than it is probably supposed to.
Become a mega badass that can see the future through the power of checkpoints
The gunplay was definitely the low point of the game for me, though with my 35% accuracy rate (as noted in my Uncharted 4 stat screen) I should not be too surprised. Firefights in Uncharted involve squeezing yourself behind cover and popping in and out to shoot other enemies who are also behind cover. Early on there are"only AK-47 grunts and the like, later there are armored assholes with shotguns, laser-sight snipers, rocket launchers, and heavily armored gatling gun bearers. You are probably familiar with these enemy types and the escalation of enemy abilities from any other shooting game.
In some cases there are also humanoid enemies of a more supernatural/primitive variety, where you must adopt a run-and-gun strategy to steer clear of their melee attacks. Uncharted 3 is notable for putting an emphasis on fistfights, even though the animations are reused over and over again and winning fistfights requires QTEs similar to Witcher 2. The final bosses of both U3 and U4 are QTE melee fights. U1's is a combination of a cover puzzle and QTE, and U2's final boss is an environment gimmick. Fighting never feels great in this series.
You know what's even less fun than fighting? Fighting during your second drug trip sequence of the game.
Theoretically that is why the stealth option exists. Prior to U4 however, I had a lot of trouble effectively sneaking around enemies. In the early games, many scenarios will actually punish you for sneaking through an area without encountering any enemies- you will be auto-killed by enemies that magically appear when you try to leave, or your ally will be killed. Enemies also go on alert the moment they spot you, and every enemy in the scenario will start shooting at you at once.
U4 is different: it provides long grass and water as cover options, and you do not get punished for leaving enemies alone. At the default difficulty you can even escape some scenarios with enemies actively firing at you, provided you don't lose all your health while climbing or swinging away. U4 also adds marking- the ability to put a little marker over the heads of enemies as you scope them out from cover. Finally, U4 enemies take much longer to notice you, and similar to Metal Gear Solid they have multiple levels of alertness- passive, cautious, sweeping (where they do not see you but take different patrol routes to try and find you), and alert/shooting at you. If enemies go on alert status but you manage to pass out of sight for some time, they will downgrade to sweeping status, giving you time to recover health or plan a new stealth route. Evading the painful gun battles is much less of a time-wasting pain than it was in U1-3, where any mistake guaranteed a full-scale war.
Moisture is the essence of wetness, and wetness is the essence of beauty
The other anchor element of Uncharted is the puzzles, figuring out how to open Rube Goldberg gates in ruins for the most part. I found these puzzles disappointingly trivial to figure out, there was only one I had to break out a notepad for in the entire series. There are also environmental puzzles of "how do I get from where I am to the top of that hill", all solved simply by looking around and finding a ledge you missed or an area where your NPC ally needs to push a box down to you. Allies are at their strongest in Uncharted 4, where I have witnessed them OHKOing multiple enemies from cover. The rest of the time they're just rather talkative tools for getting through the environment. The game frequently wants you to care about the NPC's participation, laying down lots of obstacles you need two people to get past. Mostly I just get bored waiting for them to stroll over to the door or lever to help me lift it.
My reaction to the series's basic elements is why I say I generally like special setpieces and vehicle sequences more. In Uncharted, there is a godawful jet-ski ride where you have to grind slowly up rapids, dodge exploding barrels and guys shooting at you, and have to occasionally maneuver your jet-ski into cover so that you can clear the area before activating the gate that takes you to the next section. This is the antithesis of what a jet-ski ride sequence should be about. By Uncharted 4, the realistic slow travel by vehicles in hostile terrain is balanced by refreshing straightaways across storm-tossed seas, or fun winch-based mini-activities and scenes (just trust me the winching stuff is fun). There is a relief to using vehicles, not just a constant struggle.
Final Fantasy XV? Already out!
Uncharted 3 and 4 both have chase sequences on vehicles as well. They end up feeling a bit overused. By far my favorite vehicle setpiece is the train in Uncharted 2, both when it's up and running and when it's...less so. The devs apparently thought so too, because they make you play through one of the associated scenarios twice. Your buddy Nate has some new commentary on the second outing at least, mostly about how dumb he is. Don't worry Nate we've all been there, getting shot up for the crime of missing that ass.
So on the gameplay I am pretty lukewarm. The series definitely gets a little better as time goes on, but I can't say I feel a burning need to play any of the first three games over again. The characters don't change too much until the last game either, so I think you could safely ignore them from a story standpoint. I would have liked to see more challenging puzzles and fewer gunfights, and some of the new elements from Uncharted 4 like the piton and the slip-n-slides should have been in much earlier to mix up the gameplay. The climbing needs to be more complex, I really don't want the solution to an environmental ascent problem to be yet another conveniently placed box that I boost my NPC up to, then they push it down to me.
I don't need anyone's help. I'm fine by myself, really...
I went into this series assuming I would review each game separately. What I found is that Uncharted remakes the same game over and over again, hence why I written a collective blob of paragraphs instead. Uncharted 4 I found pretty fun. The others had singular moments that stamp themselves on your brain, amidst tedious gunfights and boring puzzles. And all the games have superb graphics, nifty adaptable soundtracks, and some of the most mobile sets you will find in games. I really can't say no to the graphics or the playability of the fourth game, so I am tentatively looking forward to another outing in the Naughty Dog-verse, even if it isn't with Nathan Drake.
My Previous LTTPs as someone usually asks:
Bayonetta 1 & 2
Metal Gear Solid 1/2/3/4/5/PW/MGR
Awaiting the next environmental moment