Topic: User Impressions/Reviews Thread

Expand

Shadow of the Colossus
Platform: PS4
Completion Status: Beat it several times, and attained a Platinum trophy after completing all trophy challenges; 40+ hours of playtime to plat

When Wander entered The Forbidden Lands, the first thing that stood out to him was the uncanny way in which the sun washed out the desolate fields and hills around him. Everything about this place seemed somehow wrong. He'd stolen the Ancient Sword and ridden his loyal steed Agro to this place, the abode of Dormin, against the will of his own people. Desperate circumstances called for desperate measures, however, and if he ever began to doubt his resolve, even a cursory glance back at the figure wrapped in a blanket behind reminded him that no other acceptable path lay before him.

Arriving at the shrine, Wander dismounts from Agro and gently carries over the blanketed form to the altar at the head of the shrine. Throwing off the fabric reveals the lifeless form of a beautiful young girl. Wanders steals a sad glance at the girl, Mono, before an agitated cry from Agro forces him to turn his attention to the strange, shadowy figures materializing in the shrine around him. Wander quickly dispels these entities by unsheathing his Ancient Sword and using its ability to channel the light of the sun.

Upon doing this, a playful, malicious cacophany of voices suddenly flood Wander's mind. He has gained the attention of Dormin. Wander explains to the legion of disquieting voices that the girl was sacrificed because she had a cursed fate, and that he set out to these lands when he heard there existed an entity who was able to control the souls of the dead. Dormin agrees to help the boy perform the forbidden ritual and reclaim the maiden's soul... if he does what Dormin asks. Wander is tasked with destroying a series of 16 enormous stone idols that line the walls of the shrine. But the only way these idols can be destroyed by human hands, it's explained, is by slaying colossi who wander The Forbidden Lands that are the living incarnations of these idols.

The price you pay may be heavy, Dormin warns the boy.

Wander grips his sword and icily replies: it doesn't matter.

Thus opens Shadow of the Colossus, Fumito Ueda's legacy-defining 2005 PS2 classic. It's an incredibly strong foundation for the rest of the game, which, indeed, tasks the player with seeking out and killing sixteen colossi who are dotted across an expansive world. This is not really a story-driven experience, but snappy pacing, strong atmosphere, and the almost fairy tale-like narrative combine to create a compelling experience nonetheless. SotC eschews excessive tutorialization and, after briefly explaining the controls of the game and how the player can focus the rays of the sun to point them in the direction of their next target, it lets them off the hook. Although there's arguably not a lot to be found in this game. The game design is both ambitious and also weirdly restrictive: exploration is largely pointless because there's little to be found in the environments other than fruit trees and lizards. Eating fruit will VERY slowly increase the player's health, and killing lizards in order to collect their tails will even more slowly increase their stamina gauge. Other than engaging with these arguably unrewarding collectibles, the only thing for the player to do is to track down and kill the colossi.

Thankfully, the fantastic environmental design makes the task of finding them engaging on its own, and the battles, like in a Zelda game, are more like puzzles than actual combat. Wander can only slay a colossus by stabbing it in various peak points across its body, but just the act of being able to grab onto these creatures and scale them requires a lot of "out of the box" thinking, which often requires some form of interaction with the environments you fight the colossi in. Design-wise, these fights feel like the natural evolution of boss encounters in the early 3D Zelda games on the Nintendo 64, but with a sense of scope that wasn't really possible on that hardware. The actual act of slaying these creatures mostly involves the player hanging on for dear life as the colossi wildly trash around, tossing poor Wander to and fro as the player slowly inches him across their bodies and prays to whatever deity they choose to believe in that their stamina meter will survive the process (the meter recovers when the player stops gripping the colossi's body, so savvy players will quickly learn there are places on these creatures which are more stable than others, allowing them to recover their strength before going in for the kill).

The variety one will encounter in the game's sixteen bosses is pretty strong as well. The first few bosses are fairly simple mechanically and aesthetically, but the player will encounter, variously, a Dune-like sand worm that chases the player from under the sand, a flying wyrm that'll need to be sniped in the air from horseback in order to bring it down to the surface, electric eels who attack the player from under the water, etc. Despite the player having access to a very basic moveset (Wander can grab environments, stab enemies he's holding onto, fire arrows from a bow, and roll; that's it), the game continually finds fresh ways to keep this boss rush from feeling samey, and aside from maybe the very first colossi, all of them are marvelously iconic enemies.

So, these sixteen bosses, and the process of finding them, will happily occupy 6 - 8 hours of the player's time. It's extremely well-paced, the fights are epic, and despite the ending being a bit baffling the first time one sees it, the strong emotions it evokes still make it satisfying enough, as one does not expect myth or fairy tales to wrap up conventionally. End the game here, and you have a real solid couple of evenings on your Playstation console.

Or you could... chase the trophies.

I won't front: I don't regret going for the platinum trophy at all, but this is NOT a good trophy list, and the process of achieving them kind of destroys the experience over time for a variety of reasons. Firstly, you're going from a snappy sub-10 hour experience to a 40+ hour one where you're just continually engaging with the same content over and over. The once impressive and cinematic fights with the colossi will lose their luster as you fight to shave time off in the process of completing time trials and, hell, just grinding the same bosses over and over near the end to max out your health and stamina (you can probably achieve the same thing by eating all of the fruit and hunting all of the lizards in this game, but believe me when I say that's a fate far too cruel to inflict on yourself). If you're like me, you'll also find yourself raging at Wander's inability to stop stumbling around like an idiot or stab a moving target he's literally clinging to. Nothing is more frustrating than building up the charge for a powerful stab, only for the colossi to move even slightly and cancel your attack animation. This is less of an issue on the normal difficulty, but on hard, these creatures are shaking their bodies more often than not. IMO the exacting specifications of a time trial are a poor match for fights that, once you learn the mechanics, are largely dependent on luck in order to succeed.

The bigger issue, putting aside the grinding of identical content and time trials that are a poor match for the game design, is that most of these trophies don't really open up avenues of new appreciation for the player. A few do, and these trophies are genuinely cool, like one that requires the player to kill a certain colossus without triggering the cinematic cutscene that breaks its wrist armor and allows Wander to climb up its arm. I appreciate challenges like that. But most of these trophies don't ask the player to do anything that'll increase their appreciation of the game.

Not the worst trophy list in the world (there are no online trophies or inane trophies like "run [x] miles"), but I don't think this is a trophy set that ultimately improves the player's experience of the game as they complete it.

SotC suffered a lengthy development cycle where it was retooled as a single-player adventure after the original concept of creating a multiplayer follow-up to his previous cult classic, Ico, didn't pan out. This release timing is actually fairly appropriate, since SotC always felt like it emphasized scale to the detriment of performance. Memories are often kind to older games we played in the past when new games weren't constantly put under a microscope and their performance deficits trumpeted out across the internet via blog posts, news articles, and social media videos, but even at the time, SotC felt ROUGH, with the game's framerate often running down close to single-digits when the player faced off against the game's massive bosses (imagine a first-party Sony game performing that way today! Words like "unplayable" and "scandalous" would be bandied about a lot, I guarantee you). The trade-off was battles on a scale unseen in other games released in that console generation. Another unusual aspect of the release was how it functioned like an open world, allowing the player to free roam across its expanses without encountering loading screens. As such, SotC always felt very much like a game that barely should have even run on the hardware, and was a late-generation PS2 release that arguably blurred the lines between PS2 and PS3 game development philosophies.

These performance anomalies were rectified in 2011 when Bluepoint Games remastered the original PS2 game for the PS3, allowing it to run at a much more stable framerate that didn't falter nearly as often and updating some of the basic texture work in the original to make it fit for release on Sony's first HD platform. It still wasn't a "pretty" game (the barren, PS2-era environments and bloom lighting that washed out details in the environments were still present, maintaining the look of the original game), but it felt like SotC had finally met the platform it probably should have released on in the first place. This seemed like it'd be the definitive version of the classic until Sony announced the 2018 release of a full-throated PS4 remake of the game.

While nearly identical to the original release content-wise (at least in terms of the core campaign), SotC on PS4 was very visually ambitious, being a ground-up reworking of the original game that updated it to current-gen standards. This reworking actually proved to be a little controversial in certain respects. For example, the harsh bloom lighting and striking contrast between light and dark in the original was replaced by gorgeous natural lighting that nevertheless changed the mood of the game's environments. Another change that prompted debate was the mush lusher environments in the PS4 remake. The Forbidden Lands in the PS2 version feel very empty and dead, although it's up for debate how much of that was artistic intention versus the game being designed around weak hardware at the time that wouldn't have been able to render such lush foliage. Although technical limitation and artistic intent needn't necessarily be a dichotomy: even if it was motivated by the limitations of the PS1, for example, the original Silent Hill would feel like a different game altogether without the voluminous fog effects (as unfortunate purchasers of the ill-fated Silent Hill HD Collection on PS3 and Xbox 360 discovered when that game removed much of Silent Hill 2's ominous overworld fog). In the same way, it could be argued that, even if hardware has advanced to the point now where it can render large quantities of lush greenery, this doesn't mean that updating the sparse environments of the PS2/PS3 original wasn't still working against the artistic impact of the older versions of the game.

However one ends up feeling about the updated look, it's unquestionably gorgeous. SotC went from being a particularly ugly (if ambitious) PS2 game to possibly one of the prettiest games on the Playstation 4 (most of the time, anyway; explore the more untapped regions of the The Forbidden Lands where they didn't expect players to go, and you'll see textures that looked like they were pulled directly from the PS2 original; but the same is true of most games, I imagine). This applies to the colossi as well: while their look is very faithful to the original models, the increase in detail, realistic fur effects, etc. all serve to make these creatures feel new again, and help to re-capture some of the awe-inspiring qualities they possessed in the original PS2 release. Wander's face (what little you see of it) is also significantly more emotive in this version of the game.

More should probably have been done with the feel of the game, however. Bluepoint has slightly updated the button mapping in a way that makes it feel more natural on a modern controller (right trigger versus the shoulder button for grabbing, or putting jump on the cross button versus triangle), but the awkward, clumsy way you interact with stuff in this game feels almost identical to the original. So it's still often kind of hard to know if you're actually gripping something when holding the grip button because of a lack of feedback. You practically have to throw yourself onto your horse Agro in order to successfully mount her. And, especially when climbing the colossi, as I mentioned before, Wander still feels less like a human and more a life-sized doll made of sand who can be wildly flopped around if the creature he has latched on to moves even an inch.

You adapt, of course, even if the game quickly loses its charm in time trials when the difference between a successful or unsuccessful battle can be determined by how violently the colossus you're on happens to fidget around while you're stabbing it to death, because the core experience is really engaging, but there's no escaping that this is a 2018 release that still feels like a janky PS2 game mechanically.

Probably the biggest disappointment of this remake, however, is just how unstable it is. Console games crashing is a fortunate rarity for me, but this game crashed no fewer than 14 times across my entire time with it. That's... bad, and the problem kept up even after I deleted and re-installed the game, so I don't think it's down to issues that might have cropped up when it was downloading to my console initially.

I should also mention the really evocative orchestral score, which sells the game as well as any other aspect of it. This is an OST that'll stick with you long after you've finished the game.

I've probably griped a lot in this review, but there's a reason I kept playing hours after I probably should have quit, despite not being much of a trophy hunter: Shadow of the Colossus, in spite of its flaws, is a rock-solid classic of the medium, and one of the first games that really made a serious attempt at using the technology that hosted it to create a truly artistically satisfying experience (crucially, without making the game itself boring). The remake itself, while perhaps a little too faithful mechanically, still does a great job of updating the game in such a way that a new generation of players can experience its timeless bosses and get swept up in the melancholic fantasy inherent in its setting.

A cool 7.5/10 for me.

@Th3solution Yeah, I'm cool with artistic expression when the game itself is still compelling to play. IMO, that's the big difference between something like those Fumito Ueda classics and games like Journey and Abzu, where the "gameplay" barely consisted of anything more than going forward for hours. Everything I've heard about RiME puts it into the Ueda camp, since it's driven by puzzles and exploration.

Expand

After reading PushSquare for about a year now, I finally decided to check out the forums. Here's a review I wrote earlier this year.

Game: Uncharted: Drake's Fortune (Review)
Platform: PS4- remastered version

Uncharted: Drake's Fortune laid the stepping stones for Naughty Dog's penchant of creating narratively driven 3rd person action-adventure games. Nathan Drake's debut adventure is an expertly crafted and linear adventure that takes the player on a rich and realised journey in pursuit of hidden treasure. Coupled with explosive gunfights and light platforming that sadly always tries to be more than what it should be, Uncharted: Drake's Fortune is a great game that occasionally stumbles due to flawed design choices.

Uncharted: Drake's Fortune tells the story of adventurer, treasure hunter, and mass murderer Nathan Drake in his search for the fabled treasure of El Dorado along with journalist Elena Fisher and friend Victor Sullivan, more lovingly known as Sully. After discovering Sir Francis Drake's coffin that was buried at sea almost 400 years ago, Nate and Elena come across Sir Francis Drake's diary which leads them on a quest across Panama, the Amazon rainforest, and an undiscovered island in the Pacific Ocean to find the hidden treasure of El Dorado that Sir Francis Drake was after.

On the surface, this may seem like a classic and cliche tale of 3 adventures who sought treasure of enormous wealth, and it mostly is. Nathan Drake and Victor Sullivan are obsessed with uncovering this secret treasure, and their attempted treasure hunt puts their lives and even Elena's at enormous risk. Their minds become telescopes, zoomed in on a treasure that they can't even be sure actually exists. The tale of treasure is rather simple here, and sadly Naughty Dog wasn't able to craft a narrative in this adventure that made me want to find El Dorado and the treasure that Nathan Drake sought after.

Another point of complaint regarding the narrative in this game comes down to its villains. Frankly speaking, until the end of the game, I wasn't really sure who the main antagonist was. There is Gabriel Roman a British treasure collector, Atoq Navarro, an archaeologist with extensive knowledge of the region and the fabled treasure of El Dorado, and finally, Eddy Raja, the leader of the pirate gang hired by Gabriel Roman to hunt down Nathan Drake and his buddies, while also having an interior motive to obtain that shiny gold.

The mix and clash of these three characters creates an incoherent mess in which I had no clue as to who is who, and more importantly, why these characters are doing what they are doing. The game fails to lay out a simple and organized idea when it comes to its antagonists, which really hurts the game's pacing and flow. And while the later chapters put an end to this confusion and sort out the fakes from the reals, Uncharted: Drake's Fortune is plagued with a severe lack of clarity.

On the other hand, the protagonists of this tale are superbly written and voiced characters that I was invested in throughout my time with this game. Victor Sullivan is the old guard, the supporting pillar to Nate and Elena. He doesn't get a lot of screentime, but what he has is filled up with sarcastic dialogue and the flair of a man with a cigar that is a joy to listen to.

The standout characters in this game have to be our protagonist Nathan Drake and journalist Elena Fisher. Separated from each other, they are both fairly interesting characters and nothing that you haven't seen in a movie or videogame before. But combined together, their relationship and the way it develops over the course of the game is the most interesting aspect of this game's narrative.

When the game starts off, Nathan Drake seems annoyed to have to bring Elena along, while Elena wants to get a story for her producer to make into a documentary, documenting the search for El Dorado. This premise is great as Nathan and Elena only know as much about each other as the player does. This means that there are no secrets shared between the two, no past experiences to reference, only the present happenings that affect their relationship.

As the game progresses and the duo venture deep into uncharted lands, they begin to know more about each other, going as far as trusting one and other with their lives. This is best portrays during the part in the game where Nathan and Elena are along in deep caves without anyone else interrupting them. This leads to great character and in this case relationship development as the two can converse and interact with each other without outside interferences like a cutscene with the main villain or a radio message with Sully.

By the end of the game, Nate and Elena have been through so much with each other, it feels like their relationship arc has been fully maxed out, sowing the seeds for the Nate x Elena love story to continue its way throughout the rest of the series. This chapter of the relationship culminates in a beautiful ending and is something that everyone should experience and left me with a huge grin on my face.

There is another major flaw in the narrative of Uncharted: Drake's Fortune. Without spoiling too much, I will say that for the most part, Uncharted tries to be a realistic experience. Enemies are humans, you play as a human, the guns are guns that exist in real life, the locations are real-life places, and the treasures that you seek are loosely based on myths and mysteries that exist in the real world. So for the game to suddenly ditch this attempt to be grounded in realism and bring elements of the supernatural and paranormal into the forefront left me with a sour taste in my mouth.

There was no reason for this to take place and its introduction sorely lacked any kind of punch to compensate for its inclusion within the game's overarching narrative. In addition, it also ruins the cover-based shooter system that Uncharted is built upon because these enemies cant be handled in the same way that human enemies are. There was absolutely no need for this to be a part of the game, and to make matters even worse, it failed to deliver the spectacle it was brought in to do.

I don't want to go too deep into the concept of ludo-narrative dissonance because it's been talked about extensively and I'm sure that there are many articles or videos that will explain the concept if you are interested. But I will state that there is a lot of ludo-narrative dissonance in this game and any Uncharted game for that matter. This means that there is a conflict between the narrative told through gameplay and the narrative told through story. In short, Uncharted: Drake's Fortune tells the tale of an ordinary man who seems to care about life and humanity, as seen with his actions towards the end of the game, yet this is the same man that throughout 22 chapters, goes on a mass-murdering spree of anyone who dares stand in his way.

I understand and acknowledge that Naughty Dog was kind of forced into this situation by having to have some sort of action in their game, and it doesn't really affect one's enjoyment of the game, but once you understand the extent to which this conflict is present, you will keep on thinking about it, leaving the nagging thought in your head that this character that seems so ordinary, is technically committing genocide and walking away from it like nothing has happened.

The Uncharted series has a signature style of gameplay: a combination of 3rd person cover-based shooting, and some light 3rd person platforming, along with a few puzzles sprinkled somewhere in there. Uncharted: Drake's Fortune, being the first game in the series, shows us the origins of this formula and its humble beginnings.

First off is the shooting. The mechanics regarding this are fairly simple to understand and are centred around the concept of cover. The player can crouch or stand up against a wall or environmental object to take cover and be shielded from enemies and can attack by poking their head and gun out from behind cover. Enemies also move and act in the same way, using broken walls or upturned tables to shield from fire. This makes Uncharted's gameplay and shooting sections into somewhat of a stop-action sequence, with the player moving from cover to cover in between shooting.

Ammo is fairly abundant in the game and is done to facilitate the action-orientated gameplay which provides the player with a feeling of power. Uncharted isn't a survival horror game like Resident Evil, so ammo doesn't have to be scarce and in low amounts. Instead, ammo can be wholeheartedly smeared across rooms and pathways to provide the player with a constant stream of bullets to fight with.

The downside of providing the player with tons of ammo is that it becomes really obvious as to when an encounter is going to take place. While the classic tell-tale signs of conveniently placed cover are ever-present, if you come across a room with a lot of ammo and guns just lying around, you can be fairly sure that there is going to be a gunfight soon, either in this room or in the next one. This hinders the game's excellent cutscenes and music that try so hard and succeed in attempting to build up to a climax where everything is going to explode in bullets and screams, but instead, the player already knows what's coming. This actually ruined a few good surprises in the game as I already knew what to expect which ruined the tension that the game was building up.

This also makes the shooting feel really fun. While ammo is abundant, excellent shooting mechanics make the guns feel nice to use, and never too floaty like the gun is made out of thin air. It also helps that enemies in the game aren't bullet sponges. This ensures that the player's guns feel lethal enough while still creating enemy AI that makes sure that they remain challenging to face, but not so challenging that players will have to unload clips after clips of bullets to take down a single foe.

At the start of the game, gun variety is extremely low. There are only about 3 types of guns that you will find throughout the early sections of the game. This means that while locations and arenas constantly change, the weapons you use remain mostly the same. This is slightly helped by grenades that you can find and turrets in certain places, but gun variety is still lacking in the early hours of the game.

However, this does improve as the game progresses. By the end of the game, there are only about 5-10 guns that the player can and has used, but this number feels good for the type of game that Uncharted is trying to be. Since there is no progression in the game, apart from progression in the story, the game doesn't need an arsenal of guns for Nathan Drake to carry around since they always reset at the start of most chapters, leaving the player with a sole pistol. Guns are sprinkled around the levels so the player is always switching out weapons, even many times in a single chapter. And because enemies come at you from all ranges, all weapons like shotguns, assault rifles, and snipers have different uses in different situations.

The next major facet of Uncharted's gameplay loop is platforming. This mostly consists of climbing around obstacles that conveniently stand in your way. I feel that the climbing in this game serves its purpose of mixing up the flow of gameplay while not feeling like a tacked-on mechanic. Yet I can't help think about how much more this could have been.

The introduction of the vines was welcome but was sparingly used throughout the game. By having more unique and inventive platforming tools and equipment, the next climb could have actually been something I looked forward to, instead it was something that was just there, a simple "meh" before the next engrossing story moment or explosive firefight.

At times, it can also be hard to tell what you can or can't climb. Since Uncharted is a linear adventure, the developers couldn't just have the player roaming outside of the intended path. Thus, they had to make only select objects and environmental terrain climbable and scalable by the player. Apart from obvious boxes or steps that are meant to be simply walked or vaulted over, the actual walls and rock faces that are meant to be climbable are marked with a simple white highlight, something resembling the lines created by school kid rubbing white coloured chalk on a surface.

This indicates what is climbable and what isn't, but there were times where simple objects that even us normal people outside of a videogame and in real life would have been able to climb, and pieces of the environment that were naturally white and could be easily mistaken by the player for something that is supposed to be climbed over.

Furthermore, at times the climbing can be unresponsive and frustrating. Sometimes Nathan Drake would just not grab hold of the ledge or randomly decide to walk off the edge instead of jumping onto the next one. While this is fair and far apart, when it takes place, it can result in simple platforming sections being a pain to complete.

Some jumps look like they can be easily completed but actually can't be, although the game employs a smart animation of Nathan Drake reaching his hand out to indicate that a jump can be made. However, a clearer distinction regarding what gap can be crossed would have been appreciated, resulting in less time lost and less frustration vented at the game. I'm looking at you, the platforming section in the Monastery Church, what a pain in the ass you were.

The game also has puzzles. These mainly have to do with matching the environment around you to notes and drawings in Sir Francis Drake's diary. They provide a nice slow moment in between the adrenaline pumped combat sequences but fail to make a lasting impression. In addition, these puzzles are very oddly spaced with there being almost none in the first half of the game, and at least three in the latter half. Better spacing would have made them slightly more bearable, but just like the platforming sections, these were just minor obstructions as I made my way through the game's story.

Speaking of oddly spaced stuff, the checkpoints in this game are also poorly managed. In normal gameplay, the game usually autosaves after every room, gunfight, or cutscene, but during the action set-pieces, of which there are basically 2 major ones in the game, the checkpointing is basically not present at all. The first one can be easily completed in a single try, but the second one, which involved driving a jet ski and shooting at the same time, which trust me is a horrible experience due to the ski's horrible handling, there are no checkpoints in its entirety. This means that it will almost certainly take many frustrating attempts to get through this part. A simple checkpoint after each part of the set piece will ensure a more seamless and flowing experience through otherwise exciting sections of gameplay.

I have nothing but praise for this game in terms of its sound design. All characters are superbly voiced, especially the gruff Victor Sullivan. The limited gun variety works well in conjunction with audio and sound because each gun is able to sound different and unique to one another, which also helps compensate for the restricted pool of guns to use. Naughty Dog has also done well with creating the flash-bang effect that comes after a grenade explodes. If a grenade explodes near you during gameplay, the sounds will momentarily change pitch to sound high and loud, also creating a ringing after effect in your ears. This does well to immerse the player into the game world and create an auditory reaction to in-game happenings.

I played this game on PS4 as a part of Uncharted: The Nathan Drake Collection, which is a collection of remastered ports of the first three Uncharted games. The official website for the collection states that the games will run at 1080p with 60 frames per second. And while I don't have frame tracking software to confirm any of this, I can say that the ran smoothly without any noticeable frame rate drops to the naked eye. If you want a more detailed technical analysis, go check out Digital Foundry and their video on the Nathan Drake Collection, which is sure to go into detail about frame rate, resolution, anti-aliasing and all that mumbo jumbo that I'm too dumb to understand.

From the outside, however, Uncharted: Drake's Fortune looks extremely pretty in its remastered state. Facial animations aren't the greatest, but that is due to the game's age and the technology of its time. The same can be said about close up textures that look rather murky at times. On the contrary, the scenery from afar looks absolutely stunning. Whether it is the cold swept water of a fast-flowing river or the blushing sun rising setting over the horizon, Uncharted: Drake's Fortune has some gorgeous vistas that have stood tall and strong against the test of time. Although lighting is an issue at times, with rooms being too dark to really see what's going on and what can be interacted with, this remastered port of the PS3 original holds up incredibly well in today's landscape.

Uncharted: Drake's Fortune is a triumph in adventure storytelling and has been greatly influential in the narratively driven games of today. The story is rather simple but is held tight by a great cast of characters and a relationship that continues to develop. Beautiful vistas and immaculate sound design accompany a robust gameplay loop of shooting, climbing, and puzzle-ing, as the hunt for the treasure of El Dorado continues. By no means perfect due to some rather confusing design choices like tacky platforming and lacklustre villains, Uncharted: Drake's Fortune must be acknowledged and acclaimed, not only for spawning one of PlayStation's most beloved franchises but for being a hell of a solid game in itself.

Score: 4/5

Expand

@DominusPlatypus Wow, quite a thorough piece! It seems like you enjoyed the game in spite of finding the antagonists to be poorly written. IMO, subpar antagonists are a problem that plague the entire PS3 trilogy.

Yeah, the dissonance between Drake's characterization and the manner in which he murders his way through a small nation full of people by the end of any given Uncharted game is a real issue, especially given the focus these titles have on narrative. If you're going to treat your characters and world like important, consistent things, then you can't just brush aside the killing sprees between every cutscene. Although this might be an issue with action storytelling more broadly. There's probably an important conversation to be had about PG-13 (or T-rated) action hero epics and the way their narratives vastly devalue the worth of human life in favor of making their leads look cool and manly.

The issue of ammo placement signaling enemy ambushes is interesting, and crops up in other genres as well. Like, any seasoned JRPG player knows they're probably in for a wild ride if they're offered a save point right before accessing a new area. It's also easy to anticipate upcoming encounters based on level design, because if you're about to enter an area that's wide and designed like an arena, it's probably because you're going to be running around fighting something in it.

I'm guessing the lack of checkpoints during action setpieces is because they intend for the player to complete them in one go, which I understand. ND prides itself on the cinematic pacing of its action, so it makes sense they'd not want players to checkpoint-scum their way through difficult setpieces. Although, on the flipside, this indeed makes annoying setpieces vastly more annoying, and it's kind of on ND to ensure that their action and vehicle handling is polished enough that it doesn't aggravate the player. I can see both sides to this issue.

When I played the first Uncharted, it was via streaming the PS3 version on PS NOW (the Nathan Drake Collection wasn't a thing yet, and I never owned a PS3), so I can only imagine the PS4 remaster looks quite nice in comparison.

Excellent first post! Really happy you decided to share that with the community.

@RogerRoger Well, I knew I'd have to explain the premise of the game, so I decided to engage in a bit of creative writing after referencing the opening cutscene a few times to make sure I was getting my details right. It's basically the opening of SotC, although the only bits I actually fully lifted were the two lines of dialogue I directly. The references to Wander's state of mind were purely my own invention, although I tried to make sure they harmonized with what we knew about the character based on story details and explicit dialogue. That entire section would probably benefit from re-writing, of course, as creative prose is rarely fully decent in one take, but I figured it served its purpose for the review.

I think that's a pretty fair summation of why I kept on with my plat run. It's a game I have a lot of love for historically, and even though I don't think the trophies are worth getting on their own, I wanted to, at least once in my life, do everything in this game. Trophies incentivize and reward that sort of completionist mindset as well. I'd probably have a ton of trophies on Switch if Nintendo actually bothered to offer their own achievement system, although seeing as how some people go so far as to stop playing older games because of a lack of trophy support, it's probably a good thing I'm not fully married to that trophy hunter mindset.

Yeah, both functionally and aesthetically, the barren environment you explore in SotC makes perfect sense. It's not really a space meant for humans, and, gameplay-wise, there's nothing to it outside of finding and killing colossi (whereas it'd just be boring in TLG, since you don't have the whole boss rush element to it). While I do think it could have done with a little more side-content than what it has, the apparent lack of design bloat in Ueda's games is still satisfying. Especially for something like this that doesn't really guide the player through setpieces and instead allows them to play at their own pace.

I recall you mentioning you wouldn't play this game. If you don't mind my asking, is it because of an objection you have to the premise of the game in general, which involves slaying beasts who aren't posing any harm to anyone? Because I'd understand that. I think I've mentioned it here, but one of the reasons I won't play TLOU Part II is because of the excess of dog murder in that game. I just don't need that sort of thing in my life.

Thanks for reading!

@Octane Traveling to the fruit trees is tedious, but easy enough to actually accomplish. The lizards suck, though, even if you know where they're located. I used the in-game tool for locating the lizards (I believe it's one of the things you unlock via the time trials), and it took WAY longer trying to kill a few of them than it would just killing the colossi. The insanely meager boosts they offer, even compared to the fruit, were the cherry on top. Maximum effort for minimum reward.