After initially playing through a chunk of Uncharted 4 two years ago before dropping it (I got as far as Scotland), I figured "Hey, it's 2019, let's start the year off by going back and finally closing out the Nathan Drake saga". I'd been a pretty big Uncharted fan in my teenage years, so this had been a long time coming, and I was kinda excited to return and say goodbye to the characters I'd grown fond of all those years back.
What followed was, in my eyes, one of the most subpar gaming experiences I've ever had the displeasure of experiencing. I'm not quite sure where to begin, but for a game that won consensus GOTY in 2016, I expected a lot more. This was, to me, the weakest entry in the Uncharted saga (of the mainline titles, I haven't yet played Golden Abyss or The Lost Legacy). I guess I'll just go ahead with some bullet point critique, as there's a lot to go over.
EDIT: It's been made apparent to me that I've potentially cast some undue harshness and hyperbole on the game, in my criticism. After being informed of the game's rough development cycle, it's easier to understand just why some elements of it fell short. I'd like to make it clear I'm not trying to poo poo on Naughty Dog in general here, or being inflammatory for the sake of it. I'd just finished this yesterday, so if I got a bit carried away in my derision due to not taking a more measured look at the bigger picture, I apologize.
What followed was, in my eyes, one of the most subpar gaming experiences I've ever had the displeasure of experiencing. I'm not quite sure where to begin, but for a game that won consensus GOTY in 2016, I expected a lot more. This was, to me, the weakest entry in the Uncharted saga (of the mainline titles, I haven't yet played Golden Abyss or The Lost Legacy). I guess I'll just go ahead with some bullet point critique, as there's a lot to go over.
- To start off with, let's acknowledge the elephant in the room that I reckon most, deep down, feel is fairly stupid: the sudden emergence of Sam Drake, the "hey its me ur brother" moment of discovery where it's revealed that our hero had a secret older sibling who was merely in prison for every other adventure he's had! I'm sorry, but what?! After they went so far in the last game as to paint Drake as a lone orphan boy, pulled off the streets by Victor Sullivan, with no known relatives (Marlowe being aware of who he really is), they invoke one of the lamest tropes possible... ? It felt like they didn't know where to go with Nate and friends anymore, so they manufactured some drama in the cheapest way, forming the entire game's premise around a hardly believable brother dynamic. Yup, apparently you don't lose your shit when you discover your brother didn't actually die in prison 15 years ago, you just sorta go "Wow, you're back!", tell him a couple stories, then fly out to pull heists and search for treasure immediately after. It feels completely inorganic and unearned. In a game with such leisurely pacing, I've gotta wonder why they didn't do more to establish the fact that a close, thought dead relative re-entering your life out of the blue is something you wouldn't just accept and process within a day.
- Ignoring the above and taking Sam as his own character, he's not particularly great. I don't feel as though he did much to reveal new sides of Nathan we hadn't seen before. Honestly, I wouldn't have minded a retread of the last game's father and son dynamic between Nate and Sully, a relationship far more compelling than this one. Nate and Elena, thankfully, got some good scenes together, Sully mostly got shafted, Charlie Cutter only gets a mention at the start (despite leaving the fight prematurely in the last game), and Chloe may as well have never existed, despite being a major player in Uncharted 2 and 3. At least she gets her own spinoff, which I'm looking forward to playing.
- It's the worst paced Uncharted game, with potentially the worst game design yet. Most of the gameplay consists of either holding forward to walk, or the standard, no-fail climbing segments that were all too prevalent this time around. Every now and then, the game feels like it's going to open up and let you get creative, encourage player agency, or have any kind of emergent gameplay, but it's all a farce. They give you a boat to explore some islands, but none of them have anything of note to them. They give you a jeep to drive around in, but it's just a graphical showcase for you to gawk at, not an opportunity for good gameplay (unless you enjoy driving up a muddy hill 5 times in a row). What's the point of these open-ended levels, then? Chasing trends for the sake of it? The game only suffered from it, in my view.
- They decided to spoil the most impressive, most exciting, coolest setpiece in the entire game at E3. The whole thing. It reminds me of those movie trailers that shove every good joke in the movie in the two minute trailer. The game peaks here, during the Madagascar truck segment, and never reaches that high again. When I think of Uncharted 3, and how the game suffered due to being written around setpieces instead of the other way around, I begin to think maybe that wasn't so bad compared to this.
- The villains are pretty terrible. As we all know, towards the end of the game, it is revealed that Sam was spinning a lie the entire time, that he didn't break out of prison with the help of a drug lord, but rather, Rafe himself bailed him out. I didn't like this. Why? Simple: Hector Alcazar seemed a more compelling villain than Rafe Adler. To discover he actually died six months prior to the start of the game was a disappointment. I don't know that Rafe has a single memorable or iconic scene in the entire game, and that's a problem. Nadine? She's hardly worth mentioning as well, sadly. Uncharted isn't known for its strong villains, to be sure, but Flynn and Lazarevic were at least memorable and intriguing in their own right.
EDIT: It's been made apparent to me that I've potentially cast some undue harshness and hyperbole on the game, in my criticism. After being informed of the game's rough development cycle, it's easier to understand just why some elements of it fell short. I'd like to make it clear I'm not trying to poo poo on Naughty Dog in general here, or being inflammatory for the sake of it. I'd just finished this yesterday, so if I got a bit carried away in my derision due to not taking a more measured look at the bigger picture, I apologize.
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