Uncharted: Drake's Fortune (PS3)
Posted by 7th on February 13, 2008

Title: Uncharted: Drake's Fortune
Platform(s): Playstation 3
Genre: 3rd Person Shooter/Platformer
Developer: Naughty Dog
7th Score: 9.5/10

First off dear readers, sorry I've been gone for so long. Work's been hectic, I had surgery in January, life is life. On with the show!

I'm going to get this out of the way right now. You can call me a Sony fanboy, scream bias all you want, compare this to a Sony Defense Force review, but it has to be said. Uncharted: Drake's Fortune is the best game of its type that I have ever played, and is certainly one of the the best overall, PERIOD. Rarely have I been so totally engrossed in a title. From the first moment I popped it in the PS3, I could not put it down. Three days later, I'd completed the main quest, but had plenty of treasure hunting still left to uncover, and new difficulty levels to try. This is the real deal folks: a must-have title for PS3.

The story revolves around Nathan Drake, a down on his luck treasure hunter. He's not Indiana Jones. No degrees, no professorship. He's just an everage guy (who looks a hell of a lot like the captain from Firefly) with a sarcastic sense of humor, who just so happens to be the last living descendent of one Sir Frances Drake. After much investigation, Nathan discovers the coffin of his famous ancestor beneath the waves of the Caribbean. Inside, instead of finding a body, he finds Drake's journal, which includes a story of treasures untold from a place thought to be legend: El Dorado.

Nathan has a woman with him, Elena Fisher, a journalist looking to get herself a good Discovery Channel style documentary out of Drake's exploits. In fact, she bankrolled his quest to find the remains of Sir Frances. But when Nathan's boat is suddenly attacked by unknown assailants, she gets a lot more story than what she paid for, joins in the firefight, and is with him in one way or another through the rest of the game.

But we're not talking about Resident Evil 4 style "Keep the girl from harm" type stuff. This woman has balls of solid brass. During several sections of the game, she's right there beside you, taking out the bad guys you miss. She's a video game first, a heroine sidekick that holds her own.

Also along for the ride is Sully, a Hawaiian-shirt wearing con-man, and Drake's partner. The voice actor sounds amazingly like Leslie Nielsen, so much so I was somewhat surprised to see that it wasn't him when I watched the supplemental "making of" videos. He's your typical fast talking "in it for the money" kinda guy, but he is loyal to Nathan, and though you don't play along with him nearly as much as Elena, there are several missions where he's taking out bad guys, helping you open secret doors, setting off traps, and so on.

At its core, Uncharted is a sort of amalgamation of the duck-and-cover, over the shoulder 3rd person shooters like Resident evil 4 and Gears of War, and the platforming/puzzle solving mechanics from games like Tomb Raider Anniversary. But when mixed with the sky high production values, and Naughty Dog's signature tight-as-an-Amish-virgin controls, you have a title that takes tried and true mechanics and elevates them above its predecessors.

Your typical Uncharted level is structured in the following manner. You'll have a cutscene, followed by Drake being dropped into a given area. You'll traverse some platforming puzzles, such as combining climbing/platforming elements, swinging with vines, etc to find a way to get past a closed iron gate, or turning the power on to a locked security door, and so on. This will lead you to an area where there are a number of structures behind which you can take cover. When you see this, expect for a large number of armed men to attack you. At this point, you can either run and gun (an easy way to get killed) or take cover behind a pillar/rock/tree/what have you, and pick them off Gears of War style.

The AI of these guys is pretty relentless. They will find you, and they will try to either flank you, or smoke you out with grenades. They will also frequently jump to other safe spots as they make their way to you, which, if you're not an especially good shot, will cause you to run low of ammo real quick. When this occurs, you have one of two options. You can either try to take out a large number at once with a grenade, or pick out one with a large rifle, run up to him and beat the crap out of him using a simple but highly effective brawling combo system, steal his gun, then blow the rest of his compadres away before they get to you. This is what you'll spend a large amount of the game doing.

I know what you're thinking. It sounds repetitive, right? Well, I can understand that. Certainly other reviewers have chosen that as the main reason they didn't give them game a perfect score. However, I can't really say that I agree. Really, the only thing repetitive about the firefights is that, until you get to the underground levels of the game, you're going to be killing the same 10 or 11 dirty Mexican pirates over and over again. There's not as much character model variety here as there should be. But the firefights themselves are ALL unique, because of the excellent level designs.

You will have levels where you have a high vantage point so you can take many of them out with sniping techniques before even dropping down to their level. You'll have areas where you're pinned down by a guy with a floor-mounted anti-aircraft gun while dozens of his buddies try to flank you. You'll have firefights in claustrophobic caves where you can only see a few feet in front of you, firefights in ancient, dimly-lit cathedrals while leaping from pillar to pew, firefights in large Raiders-inspired Nazi Submarine launching bays, and on and on and on. The terrain, not the mechanics of the fight itself, is what gaves the action its variety. For each fight, you must alter your strategy, especially in the last third of the game where it becomes less about duck-and-cover and more about frag-and-forget, but I'll get to that in a minute.

A word about the graphics. There is only thing thing that Naughty Dog could have possibly done to make the visuals for this game any better than they already are, and that is to make them 60 frames per second.

I don't understand this generation's inability to consistently hit 60 fps with their engines. You've got Gears of War, Burnout Paradise, Ninja Gaiden Sigma, Devil May Cry 4, Madden '08 (on 360 anyway) Ratchet and Clank: Tools of Destruction, and that's just about it as far as big league AAA titles. Why? if Devil May Cry 4 can run in 60 fps, why not Uncharted?

Regardless, the graphics are jaw dropping. There are numerous moments where you'll come around a corner and find yourself on a cliff's edge looking out over an endless ocean, and you just have to stare at it, at the artistry of it. I can think of no current-gen game released thus far for any platform that looks as good as this game does. It's to the point of being awe inspiring.

Take the water effects. Water is vibrantly realistic in Uncharted, and has an effect on the physics of the player in ways you've never seen in a game before. If Drake jumps in the water, he comes out with his clothes soaking wet. And it takes several minutes for his shirt and jeans to gradually dry off.

Speaking of his clothes, he's wearing a generic white shirt and jeans throughout the game. This ensemble slowly picks up more and more dirt as the game progresses, until by the last scene, he's quite filthy. Again, this is not something gamers are used to seeing.

As palm leaves sway in the breeze, their shadows pass over Drake in real time just as they do to the world around him. When he runs and leaps at a rock out cropping, he doesn't do so the same way each time, but can sometimes almost miss his grip, grasp it with both hands, trip slightly, and so on. He must have hundreds of potential animations for his various actions, and it lends him a level of realism that's new to this genre.

As for the sound, well, if you've seen movies like Indiana Jones, The Mummy films, Stargate, and the Pirates of the Caribbean films, then you'll be right at home with Uncharted's soundtrack. The orchestration is varied, but has that "big budget adventure film" feel to it from start to finish. It's inspiring when it needs to be, touching when it wants to be, and chilling when the mood calls for it. It's one of the best scores I've ever heard in a video game.

The voice acting is top notch. This is probably the best voice acting I've ever heard for a game title. It just works. This is a movie I'd love to watch, though the plot somewhat leans towards a sci-fi/fantasy twist towards the end that I didn't really care for, and is the reason I kept Uncharted half a point from a perfect score.

Sound effects are bombastic and realistic. One cool aspect is explosions. If a grenade, for example, goes off close enough to Drake, he loses his hearing, replaced by a high pitched whine. And it stays that way for a while, just like it would if you had been standing there. It's a subtle, but very nice touch.

So, why does Uncharted not receive the never granted 10/10 from me? Really, it's just some minor things, but issues that bugged me, nonetheless.

One is the game's length. There are well over 20 chapters to the game, and there's plenty of ground to explore and baddies to kill. But if you're a skilled gamer, and don't take the time to hunt for all the hidden extra goodies, you can smash your way through the entire adventure in less than 10 hours play time. Yes, there are additional difficulty levels, and yeah there are hidden treasures and something like 60 different Xbox Live style "achievements" to earn that award you with new clothes for Drake, videos, concept art, and so on. But essentially, if you've beat the game, you've beat the game.

Short of the second jet ski level, where you're going upstream and shooting at moving targets simultaneously, the title is a bit on the easy side. Drake's life subscribes to the "graying world" method of life depletion. Rather than having a sectioned lifebar, the world around Drake loses its color, and the sound around him becomes farther away and less distinct as he takes more damage. Eventually he falls over dead and everything goes black. So the key to keeping him alive is just to watch the color around you. if it's getting close to black and white, find a place to hide or run back to the area's entrance and hide until everything is bright and shiny again. Hooray! Your wounds have healed perfectly!

My other main gripe is the story flow. You spend most of the game leaping from cliffsides, exploring ancient temples, and so on, hunting for El Dorado, and then all of a sudden you're in an underground abandoned Nazi base that's infested with "The Descent"-inspired CHUDs (Cannibalistic Humanoid Underground Dwellers. Get a Netflix account, already!) You go from Gears of War duck-and-cover to "RUN LIKE HELL AND SHOOT ANYTHING THAT MOVES!" style gameplay, because these critters are fast, and will hunt you down. There's no place to take cover, there's nowhere to hide. You just switch to the shotgun so you have a wide spray radius and charge towards your destination, blasting as many of Gollum's uglier cousins as you can. Sure, you can put your back against the wall and hope to just shoot them all and THEN continue, but you run the risk of either running out of ammo or missing that ONE CHUD that's hiding behind a steel pipe just waiting to rip your neck open when you run by. And for God's sake, when you get to the section where you and Elena are being chased through a corridor by a posse of these nasty beasties, don't bother trying to shoot any. Just run. True, the camera angle is reversed so you can't see where you're going in true Hollywood "Hero running towards the camera" style fashion, but just run. And jump when they get close.

It's jarring. Yes, there is an explanation for these creatures that I won't divulge here, but it's a complete tonal shift from the rest of the game, as if the writers decided that pure treasure hunting adventure wasn't plot enough. The story had to have its Ghosts Coming Out of the Ark, so to speak. And this in turn alters the way you have to play the game to survive. Now there's nothing wrong with changing up the game style perse, but when you change it to where there's no strategy other than "run that way and pull trigger rapidly," you're kicking your own ass.

In the end, that section of the game doesn't last too long before you're back to ducking behind walls to take out evil hispanics and maniacal Europeans. In fact, the final fight involves a quick succession of gunfights, followed by a final game boss that you take out God of War timed scene style with a couple of dodges and a quick punch to the jaw. And yet, by the time he's lying unconscious on the ground, you have a complete sense of satisfaction and accomplishment, especially when Sully... whoops! Don't wanna give it way, do I.

Buy this game. Buy it NOW. If you don't have a PS3, buy one, and then buy this game. You will thank me for it. Despite its few faults, it is as thrilling, engrossing, and addicting an action game as I've ever played, and I've played Symphony of the Night to completion on hard mode. Trust me on this one, no current-gen library is complete if Uncharted isn't a part of it.

-=7th=-