There are two things I would like to state up front. One, I’ve never been a big fan of action/adventure game, and so, going into Uncharted, I played it with almost no expectation of what it has to do in order to be consider “good.” Second, Playstation fans who have been waiting for that one definitive buy since Resistance, this game is it. In order to really reach the major faults of this game, you would really have to be digging for oil. Probably the biggest thing detractors will try to mention is the lack of online (which is complete BS for a game of this genre), and lack of length (which is also BS as well). If you’re one of those people that want to read bad things about Uncharted, this review isn’t for you. Because you are going to see me gush over this game as if it was the remake of Chrono Trigger. But don’t worry, the game does have some faults, but by the end of the day, those faults are like mosquito bites to an elephant.

Storyline

As far as storyline goes, you’re not going to be finding an MGS2-like storyline here. But what you will find is a simple story about a treasure hunter who wants to know what his great granddaddy was doing, and getting into a whole lot of trouble in the process. In fact, one of Uncharted’s strong points is in the simplicity and deliverance of its storyline. Sure, there are twists here and then, and some “unexpected” turns around the 75% mark of the storyline, which totally took me by surprise, but everything else, is as simple and easy to understand as Naughty Dog could have made it.

So without spoiling most of it, I guess I’ll just share what you’ll discover within the first hour of playing this game. You play as Nathan Drake, a treasure hunter who’s chasing after what his ancestor, Sir Francis Drake, was chasing. You’ll soon discover that Francis Drake faked his own death, and was onto something big. As his great grandson, you, of course, want to find out what it is. Along the way, you meet a diverse cast including Elena Fisher, the reporter that initially sponsored your trip to find Francis Drake’s coffin. And then there’s Sullivan, the kind of guy you wouldn’t trust with your younger sister, but would with watching your back. There are a few others you’ll meet along the way, including the hilarious Eddy Raja, who was almost voiced to perfection.

One of the things I like most about the storyline though is that as a character, Elena held her own in the presence of Nathan. She’s not the weak, vulnerable, and over-reliant female archetype that you would see in other games. Instead, she’s strong, sometime more enthusiastic than Drake, and just as eager as her male co-star to do some treasure hunting.

Presentation

Ah yes, the voice acting. Needless to say, each and every actor captured their character’s persona down to a T. This is not Final Fantasy X voice acting. It’s more of Final Fantasy 12 voice acting if you’ve played the two rpgs. And that’s where Uncharted’s hidden strength comes in. Not only is the voice acting well done, but the dialogs that accompanied it are, for the lack of a better word, just awesome. You will rarely find any cliché, boring, trite lines in this game. Instead, they’re fresh, inventive, and original to the character that says it. I would even go as far as to say they’re even witty at certain points. My favorite would have to be Sullivan. Almost everything that comes out of his mouth is pure genius.

As far as overall presentation goes, Uncharted takes the backseat to no one this fall. The production budget for this game must have been quite substantial in order for the presentation to be so smooth. Now, don’t get me wrong. Uncharted tries nothing new here. But, what it lacks in creativity is made up in consistency. Thanks to the wonders of motion capture, the animations in Uncharted are superb. In my playtime, only once or twice did Nathan move in some, peculiar manners that humans shouldn’t be able to do. But besides those one or two hiccups, the rest of the game was amazing. Close quarter melee combat was beautifully animated alongside that of the gun-fighting dynamics. But let’s not focus on Drake alone though. His enemies were also wonderfully animated. Running, jumping, shooting. The last game that I’ve been so impressed with as far as animations during in-game and cutscene sequences go was Heavenly Sword.

One of my favorite things about Uncharted though, is the small attention to details. By itself, it doesn’t do much, but when used in an orchestrated manner of a whole, oh boy does it work wonder. The grass bends when Nathan runs across it, his shirt gets wet when he enters water, his breathing animation become more labor when you have him running instead of walking. Heck, even the menu tells you how long ago was your last saved if you kept the pointer there long enough.

All of these tiny details might not sell a game, but they’re just beautiful to see in-game. It goes to show you how proud the developers are of their game. Shoot, during the river stage, if you shoot an enemy, and they fall down into the river, the ragdoll will float past you and beyond!

As mentioned above, the cutscenes is this game is just great. A lot of the time, they’re not doing a whole lot, but the small details in the character’s movement and animation, say, a wink, or desperation, just takes your body from your couch and suck it into the game as if you were standing there with the character itself.

Oh, did I mention how this game totally lacks loading time? Okay, that’s a little lie. There is “some” loading, as in when you’re loading a save game, and at few certain story point, but besides that, everything is loaded on the fly, including the 20 or so something chapters that you’ll go through as you progress with your quest. The people at Naughty Dogs must have definitely learned this trick from the Santa Monica team that worked with the God of War franchise.

There are quite a bit of destructible, sometimes including the cover you’re hiding behind, but that is to be expected from this generation of games, and the ones that don’t are surely not trying hard enough.

The only one thing that just totally caught me out of nowhere as the freezing. I’ve read online that certain people were encountering freezing with Uncharted. At first, I didn’t believe them until it happened to me. It was during a sequence when you had to run away from the enemy. Of course, that was the only time it froze on me. Can’t say whether it’s the game or the console, though.

Graphics & Sounds

I guess I’ll get the bad things out of the way first so that they don’t detract from my near-fanboy love that the graphic section of the game is going to get. The sound is as you would expect for an adventure game. Not spectacular, but not horribly bad. The guns sound like they would, and when the music is not playing, they do a well enough job to remind you that you are in a forest, or a crypt. At first, I thought I would love the music after the first hour was done. But then as I progressed, I realized that besides a few memorable tracks, the rest was really forgettable. I would have loved for a few more orchestrated pieces to go with the game, but I guess it’s understandable that more music would have detracted from the gameplay.

The only graphical fault I encountered in my playthrough was certain slowdown during certain parts of the game. 95% of the game ran at a smooth framerate, but there were certain points in which there are so many things happening on screen that it kind of slow downed for a few seconds, and then went right back to its smoothness. A lot of people mentioned screen tearing and the likes, but in my adventure, there was only one time in which I noticed a slight tearing, or even if it was tearing. It was either that, or aliasing, but yeah, that was the only time. Either I am lucky, is blind, or these people that are complaining about the screen tearing might need a new TV.

Okay, enough with the complaints. Time to put on the love cap. Ladies and gentleman, you have met the new benchmark for console gaming graphics. In terms of technical graphics, Uncharted is to the console as Crysis is to the PC. This game is just beautiful. There’s no other word that describe how gorgeous it really is. I already mentioned about the cutscenes earlier, but everything about this game just eschewed beauty. Of course, the nature settings helped, but the developer could have taken the easy way out and not render them that much. But no, they didn’t. Each trees and leaves are realistically generated and colored. Oh, and this game is not all about the flora and fauna folks. It has a large spectrum of colors associated with it. Throughout the entire game, you go from lively forests to damp and humid tunnels and crypts. The amounts of details in each of these settings are just insane.

And let’s not forget about the lighting. The first “wow” moment comes pretty fast actually. When you’re standing right next to a flowing waterfall, and you look toward the distance to see a setting sun that’s just beautifully generated with all the rays of a sunset hitting at you from all the various angles, you know you’re seeing something special.

However, and this is a big however, I want to point out something that a lot of people might have missed and ignored. This game’s lighting greatness is not only for the outdoor, but for the indoor as well. My favorite would have to be fire fights when the flashlight is on. The last time I’ve seen lighting that sharp would have been F.E.A.R for the PC.

I really cannot say how much I love the graphic of Uncharted. Not only does it excel in a technical aspect, but artistically it is wonderfully done as well. When you’re inside one of these buildings, you might not see it, but when you’re outside and looking back at it, they are brilliantly drawn and designed.

Oh, and the water. See, I just cannot stop rambling on about the graphic. The lighting was well done. The water, on the other hand, is just above and beyond a lot of other consoles game currently released. There are other games that have better water graphics than Uncharted, but man does it not give them some competition, especially when the water is flowing and falling.

There is pretty, and there is pretty with substance. Uncharted is definitely the latter.

Gameplay

Which, rightly so, leads me into the gameplay segments. I think I could best describe the gameplay of Uncharted as, built for the casuals, designed for the hardcore. What I mean is, everything is extremely accessible. Remember what I said earlier about how I’ve never played this type of game before? Yes, I’ve died plenty of times, but still, everything is very accessible, from the jumping to the shooting and everything in between.

Again, as I mentioned earlier, one of Uncharted’s strength is in its simplicity. Playing as Nathan Drake, you’re always in the third person perspective. Shooting is just a simple procedure of using the shoulder buttons. My only brief playtime with Gears was at a cousin’s apartment, but yes, even I can tell these two games share the similarity when it comes to using cover.

For Nate, using cover is as simple as running up to a structure, pressing a button, and he’ll automatically go into cover. There is no auto-aim when he shoots, but the sensitivity of the joysticks is at a point well enough so that you’re not struggling when you’re trying to find the enemy.

Speaking of the enemy, they do their job. By that, I mean, their AI is sufficient enough to give you a difficult time when encountering them. Their strength does not come in their intelligence, but by their numbers. There are certain points in the story in which the enemy will just keep coming at you. Once you think you’re done with one wave, the next wave blows a door and rain in on you. The enemy AI does a well enough job to hide under cover, and to pop up to shoot when they have a chance. What I’ve actually noticed while playing is that, if you’re popping out, and have your shooting counter at their head, waiting for them to pop out, they actually won’t. They’ll stay hiding until you pop back into cover, and then they’ll come out.

Of course, they also do things like throwing grenades at you if you’re hiding in cover long enough, and they might sometime circle around you if you don’t move around. By the way, speaking of grenades, these pirates and mercenaries must have played for the MLB, because when they throw their grenades, boy they can they toss that SOB. Heck, not only can they toss it far, they can toss it pretty accurately too. Although, they do make mistakes. Not a lot, but I’ve seen some that don’t know how to throw, so the grenades bounced off a wall, and land directly on top of them.

So, is this the best AI I’ve seen? Not at all. But is it the best AI I’ve seen on this-gen console? Not the best, but, it is good. Are there rooms for improvement in Uncharted 2? Oh definitely. The enemy AI could use some more flanking, some more cover fire option, or do more positions attacking. But, that could be said for almost any game. As for this game, the AI is definitely sufficient, and at times, challenging enough to give you a sense that although they might not be smarter than you, they got numbers on their side.

One of Uncharted’s down point, or if you can even criticize it at all, is that it is very linear. Again, I haven’t played games in this genre, so I do not know if they’ve always been linear, or if they’ve always been open ended with multiple paths to one end. Perhaps someone who has played the Tomb Raider series will be able to write up a post-secondary opinion. As mentioned, there is no branching path. There is only one linear path to take, and although it is linear, boy is it nor gorgeous.

Speaking of down point, another criticism I have of the gameplay is the fact that, there’s not enough variety in the guns. You have your different variations of the handguns, the machine guns, and the shotguns, and although they do have certain strength and weaknesses (there’s a 1-shot kill handgun that only holds 7 bullets total), they still don’t offer any ingenuity in terms of attacking the enemy. Of course, anything radical would have been bad, but, it would have been nice if perhaps you could use a Spanish musket or something. Or do the Spaniards have muskets back then? Well, I digress. It’s not a big fault, but it’s something that would have added an extra layer of fun.

So, back to being in love with this game. Ah yes, its length. I think it took me, around 12 hours, or two days of 6 hour playthrough, to beat this game. This is with some exploration in trying to find the jewels, which I’ll discuss later. It’s funny though, I actually lost track of the time while playing this game, because its pacing is pure genius.

Just when you think you’ve seen enough green and pretty, you’re introduced to gray. Just when you’re getting sick of gray and close space, you’re reintroduced to green but now it’s green and orange. The same could be spoken off for the gameplay. Just when you think you’re sick of shooting guys dead, you’re introduced to some jumping and climbing. When you’re sick of that, you’re introduced to other gameplay mechanics like riding on the back of a truck, or riding on top of a wave rider. When you’re sick of that, you have a partner, whose AI can handle on their own. And when you’re sick of that partner, you’re back to being yourself.

Indeed, Uncharted never felt repetitive to me in my long stretches with the game because of its pure balance of mechanics and gameplay. You’re always introduced to new situations, and when you think the game is just going stop surprising you, it does it in an entire new and different way (Chapter 18 or so, I’m looking at you!)

There is one small gripe which may just be nitpicking. This game is shown as semi-real, semi- fantasy. But, would it have been difficult to introduce some kind of grip meter when Nate is jumping to and fro? For your everyday average man, he sure has a super-glue grip that can allow him to hang on for a while. Again, I guess this falls back to accessibility. If there had been a grip meter, it might have been harder for casuals and new to the genre player like myself. In the end, I think it was a wise decision by the dev to not include a grip meter, but hey, I’m just griping for griping sake.

Oh by the way, do you know that this game is not all about running and shooting? There’s the melee combat, which, although not suggested when facing more than 2 or 3 enemies, is great to take out an enemy. There’s three way to melee. One is tapping the square button five times, one is to alternate between square and triangle, and the other one is a punch and shoot combo.

My favorite though would have to be the sneaking up behind the enemy melee. It’s hard to stay quiet, and get an opportunity to approach an enemy from behind, but if you do, try a stealth kid. Very gratifying. And don’t worry, even though you’re pressing the same button, there are a variety of attack animations. My favorite would be the slide nut-kick, when you’re running, and if pressed at the right time, you’ll slide up to an enemy and kick them in the nut. Again, very gratifying. All of the attack animations are superbly animated and sometimes, vividly painful.

One thing I want to mention is the lack of boss fights. Perhaps boss fights would not have been right for this game, because of the way it presented itself. If carefully placed, the enemies do go down in one shot to the head, so introducing some tough, multihead-shot kill boss would have been a little bit random.

Speaking of shooting, you really can kill an enemy with one shot to the head. A handgun usually takes 3-4 shots to kill an enemy. A machinegun takes about 3-5. But a carefully placed headshot would only need one.

So, in the end, none of the gameplay you’ll see in Uncharted is new. But, just because it’s not new doesn’t mean it’s bad. Instead, they’re wonderfully executed and design, and is almost instantly playable for noobs to the genre like myself.

Replayability

There are three game modes, and I would highly suggest people start on Normal, and if it’s your first time playing a game that has shooting, I would say easy, because this game is very, very challenging. Replayability totally depends on the kind of gamer that you are. There is no multiplayer, so if you’re looking to go online, you’ll be disappointed. However, and this is a big one, that’s not a bad thing. Games like this aren’t really meant for multiplayer, and I’d rather have a complete package in the single player mode, than have resources be put into a weak multiplayer (ala The Darkness). Because as much as we like to believe it, not everyone has high speed broadband internet.

So, then, what kinds of replayability are there? Along the storyline, you’ll be able to collect treasures and get rewards for accomplishing certain requirements, like killing 10 people with a headshot, and so on. There are 60 treasures in all, and in my first playthrough, I collected 30, meaning I must have missed the other 30.

Each unlocked medals give you points, and each point goes toward your total point, which is then used to unlock various secrets the game have. I wasn’t able to unlock all of them, but some unlockables are costumes, different filters, and weapon selections.

Speaking of different filter, this might be the first game in which I’m going to play through again because of one of its unlockable. Remember how I said Uncharted is a very vibrant and beautiful game? There is a filter call the black and white filter, which basically turns your game into a black and white game.

It’ll definitely be fun to play through the game again in this filter, to see if it’ll have the same touch when in black and white. There’s no minigames, or sidequests though. Just, unlocked options that you can select on the fly, or on your next playthrough.

Final Remark

When it comes to trying to find the right point for this game, it is very hard. As you know by now, I love this game. It’s just oozing of pure awesomeness. However, do I deduct points for what it doesn’t have? Or what it try to do but fail (which is not much?). My previous games, I came to my final score very easily because of the way it was offered. But for Uncharted, it was different. I had a blast playing this game. Is it worth the $60 investment? Oh definitely. Shoot, every PS3 owners owe it to themselves to buy this game. However, to justify the final score, I have to see what this game really is, compared to its competitions. It did not try anything new, but it did do almost everything right. Hopefully, this is going to be one that I can live with.  In any case, this is one franchise where I hope there’s enough game purchase to warrant a sequel, because it has franchise written all over it.

The Good: Beautiful graphic. Near perfect pacing. Wonderful variety of gameplay mechanics. Great voice acting and scripting. Amazingly executed animations. Good AI. Okay sounds but wonderful music (for a couple of tracks). Enough unlockables to induce a 2^nd playthrough. No loading through 95% of the game. Did I mention beautiful graphic? This game will sometime cause you to stop playing and to just admire the scenery. I could go on and on, but I’ll stop here on the good.

The Bad: Enemy’s AI amazing and accurate arm strength when it comes to throwing grenades. Lack of diverse guns. One-time screen tearing that never appeared again. Slowdown when there’s a lot of stuff happening onscreen. The guns could use a little bit more balancing.

The Ugly: Yeah…so the freezing…that was particularly random. Only happened once, but still. The last level of the game. If you’ve beaten the game, you definitely know what I’m referring to. Was probably the only part where I was frustrated at how difficult this game is.

Final Score: 18/20