I really didn't like Uncharted 3, I felt it was a chore to play through but I didn't realize that I didn't like it until about 50% of the way through, and then I felt determined to finish it -- assuming that it got better, which it didn't. And also it's not so much that I hate UC3, but it's also that it's a game that was highly praised by critics when it came out, and I hate it. If I hate a game that has a 70% aggregate score or something, or even an 80, I'll just assume it's not my style of game... BUt because UC3 had so much praise, I feel like it's more important to talk about.
Now, I don't have any "Great TPS" to compare it to because you can find flaws in every game , and Uncharted 3 still has excellent production quality, likable main characters, good writing, and does some things really well.
There are two things that just bother the hell out of me in most shooters, and that is illogical bullet sponging and triggered monster closets, and Uncharted 3 specifically has both of these things to a ridiculous degree.
So, here's what I mean about illogical bullet sponging. Enemies later in the game take an inordinate amount of bullets to take down, especially compared to enemies earlier in the game, and in UC3, there is no indication why they should take more. Sure, you have your "boss" guys who wear a football helmet and if you need to shoot that off of them to get to their head, that's fine, but enemies seemingly just have more health with no visual indication that they should have more health. If you want the enemies to take more health, give me some visual cue that they should have more health, like they're wearing more armor, more protection, or something. The helmet guys make sense, but the vast amount of grunts don't. Terrorist A in an early level is wearing the same costume, for the most part, as terrorist B does in a later level, and in early level you can dispatch him with a few shots from a handgun, and in a later level, it takes 12 bullets with your machine gun.
Throughout most of UC3, I found myself using melee because I found that hitting somebody with the butt of my gun in his chest was more powerful than shooting him in his chest with the same gun... And you also get that unvulnerability mechanic while locked in combat as well, which you don't if you choose to shoot the guy.
Monster closets are my second big complaint, and I know that most games have them, but Uncharted 3's are cheap and feel lazy to me. The worst example is a level where you're asked to perform stealth to take out about 12 enemies. This is at a military air base with lots of shipping containers. So, because I dreaded playing through the waves of enemies, I really wanted to defeat this area using stealth, and I dispatched 10 of my enemies without being seen. The final two were standing next to a door.. I didn't know how to kill both of them at the same time (I later found out you're supposed to throw a gasoline bottle at them and then shoot it ... however, the irrationality of when somebody sees/hears you in Uncharted 3 in stealth made me not want to do this, but regardless), I have a sniper rifle, and I shoot one guy in the face and then immediately shoot the other guy... literally like a split second later. Of course, the last guy miraculously "noticed" me and this tripped the monster closet. He didn't have time to trigger an alarm or yell for his buddies. The right way I was supposed to do this was to throw a gas can at them and blow it up, as if that would somehow be less noticeable than shooting them both in the face at nearly the same time.
In this particular area, I was standing on top of a shipping container in the middle of this area, and a guy with a shotgun spawned NEXT TO ME and then shot me in the back and killed me. He just spawned next to me on a shipping container in the middle of the area and he wasn't there a second before, and he appears. Other bad guys pop out of shipping containers in the middle of this space with rocket launchers... and that's bad enough, but this guy actually spawned next to me, in the middle of the area. The guys popping out of shipping containers with grenade launchers, I just have to assume that they're chilling in there all day and all night, no food no bathroom, no lights, nothing, just waiting for some guy to "notice" me and then they pop out. Some life they have. This bothers me much less in a game like The Last of Us, where 4 zombies can be packed into a shipping container or wandering in the basement of some random building because, well, they're zombies and they do have nothing better to do than wander around.
The level design of UC3 also bugged me because you knew when you were entering a monster closet zone. You walk into an area and see a zone with a lot of half-height walls and some guns scattered around, and you realize "aah, this is a monster closet zone, time to use my rifle-powered melee attack to kill a wave of 30 guys who somehow all pour out of the same shipping container or lonely desert hut." I'd consider this an "Encounter" and by mid-way through the game, these encounters, 2 or 3 per level, just felt so contrived and so staged.
There's more that bugged me about the game, like stupid and cheap AI, the bad narrative, that stupid water level that they throw you into for absolutely no narrative reason but just to lengthen the game (That Drake comments something along the lines of "I'm exactly where I was before that..." is a pretty clear indication that 6 people were in a room and were like "Well, the game is only 6.5 hours long... we need to lengthen it... Where can we insert a meaningless, story-less level with enemies you've never met before who have nothing to do with any other enemies in the game? Oh, right here. Voila, 8.5 hour game.")
UC2 didn't feel as bad as this to me, and I don't really know why. I'm sure if I went back and played it again after UC3, I'd find a lot of the same frustrations, but I think that the illusion of these things was never broken for me. I didn't notice that a zone I walked into was all half-height walls and guns were placed in particular areas for me, or I didn't notice that the train closet held 5 bad guys with shotguns (how did they get there, what were they doing with each other in that closet?)
For a while, I felt like I had to complain about UC3 because I consider it the worst game that I ever finished (typically when I hate a game, I just give up on it, but this one I kept thinking it would get better, until I was at the end), and now I don't feel like I have to do that anymore because it's been widely complained about, so I'm happy with people enjoying the game even though I really hated it.
