ZarkSeven

Introduction

Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune is one of those games everyone said I should have played, but I never did.  I got my PlayStation 3 at roughly same time that Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune came out from developer Naughty Dog, but given that the console had been out for a year or more, I felt that there were plenty of games to choose from, and that I could probably pick up some things on sale rather than a brand new $60 game.  Plus, IMO it had the misfortune of having a lousy demo.

I had heard that it was a Tomb Raider-esque game, and downloaded the demo with those expectations.  But the demo starts you off just after the plane crash (Chapter 4), and aside from one or two platforms to jump across, all you do the entire demo is shoot at people.  No puzzle elements, very little platforming elements.  Just shoot, shoot, shoot.  My initial thoughts were “well, his pants do look wet when he walks through water, but aside from that, what’s the big deal?”

As the release of Uncharted 2: Among Thieves approached this month, I began to think more about the original.  High praise was starting to come in on the sequel.  Some people I talked to kept telling me that I was crazy not to have played the first game, and that the demo was not very representative of the whole game.  So I picked it up two weeks ago at the buy two get one free sale at Toys R Us, and finished it this week.  So was it worth it after all?

Story

Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune is the story of Nate Drake, supposed ancestor of renowned sea captain Sir Francis Drake, following coordinates on a ring passed down through the years to Nate.  The story begins with Nate salvaging the lead coffin of Sir Francis Drake, who was supposed to have been buried at sea off of Panama.  Inside was not Drake’s body, but instead Sir Francis’ diary book, which may lead to the famed golden city of El Dorado.  After escaping pirates, Nate, with partner Victor “Sully” Sullivan, ditch a reporter named Elana Fisher who was filming the salvage expedition and head off into the Amazon in search of the city.

What they find is that the treasure might not be a city, but rather a large golden statue that appears to have been removed to an island, according to a missing page from the diary.  They also find a German u-boat, and remains of Spaniards, and a rival for the treasure named Gabriel Roman, who along with a mercenary named Atoq Navarro, shoot Sully and almost kill Nate.

Nate is rescued by Elana and together they head off to the island on the map Nate discovered to solve the mystery.  But Roman, Navarro, and the pirate leader Eddy have other ideas, and Nate’s friend Sully may still have a part to play in the action-filled adventure.  You explore through old ruins and hidden crypts, fight pirate and mercenaries and mutants(!), and puzzle your way through monaster’s as you try to uncover what really happened to Sir Francis Drake and the lost treasure of El Dorado.

Gameplay

The gameplay reminds me a little of a cross between Gears of War and Tomb Raider.  One one hand, you spend a lot of time shooting enemies from a cover system.  A lot of time.  Thankfully, the shooting side of things is very solid.  The cover system works as well as if not better than Gears of War.  There is a variety of weapons and ammo you find and/or recover off of dead bodies, and you can hold two types at a time.  I was less impressed with the weapon mechanics, in that many of them just felt the same.  There were differences, to be sure, but there often just wasn’t a compelling reason to use one type over another.

The Tomb Raider nature of the game comes from the climbing, swinging and jumping mechanics of your character, as well as from the exploration and puzzle components.  No one has moved around the environment as well since Lara Croft.  The movement all seems very natural.  I occasionally misjumped, but the camera was usually where it should have been, so I chalk it up to bad reflexes.  There is a fair number of puzzles to solve, to open secret passages or whatnot, but not as many as I’d have liked and not very complicated at all.  In fact, most of the time the game makes them a bit too simple.

In terms of visuals and audio, the game looks and sounds gorgeous.  Much ado was made over the water, and how if Nate walked through water up to his knees, his pants would look wet up to the knees, and slowly dry off.  It all looked very slick.  My only complaint was that at times the visuals looks a little too shiny.  But really there is nothing to complain about, because the game looks great.  It sounds great too, with a very good score that complimented the action well.

Extras

There are not a whole lot of extras, but there are some.  There are 4 levels of difficulty (3 to start off with, 1 to unlock).  As you progress through the game there, are 60 hidden treasures to find, which unlock videos, concept art, and the like. (I didn’t search too vigorously for them and found only 24.)  Also, there is an in-game medal/achievement system with 47 medals that you can receive for finding items, popping headshots, killing enemies with different types of weapons, and so on.  These medals translate into points which you can use to unlock in-game treats like unlimited ammo, costumes, and so on.  The medal system also got converted to the PlayStation trophy system via patch after the game was released.

Nitpicks

I don’t normally have a section like this in a Game Impressions post, having spread my thoughts out among the other sections.  But there are a whole lot of things that bugged me in this game.  Keep in mind that I finished it, which I generally don’t do with games I don’t like.  But maybe my expectations were too high, given the number of people I know that rave about the game.  I’ll wrap things up with a conclusion section, but here’s a list of specific things that bugged me in Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune (SPOILER WARNING!!):

• I complained that the demo had no puzzles in it.  Well in the story as a whole, after you give Drake’s book to Sully, you pretty much do no puzzles until you get the book back.  Which includes the whole section shown in the demo.  But later on, you use the map to help solve a puzzle.  Why couldn’t this be implemented earlier?

• Speaking of puzzles, in the beginning, I guess they implemented a sort of training mode when you are exploring with Sully, but it was a little too much hand holding for me.  I think maybe they should have implemented that for easy mode and turned it off for other difficulties.  For instance, you walk into a cave area that is blocked by wood debris.  You look around and there are some hanging braziers in the room.  Before you have a chance to do anything more, Sully suggests that you light the braziers.  You do that, and as you’re still exploring the room and looking around, he then suggests you shoot the braziers so they’ll fall down and light the wood on fire.  Gee, thanks.  Maybe Sully should just do it himself, since he’s so helpful.

• Some enemies in later levels use Desert Eagle Pistols with laser sights.  But if you kill a guy using one, and pick it up, yours doesn’t have a laser sight.  Why?

• Every time you see a room with half walls or columns, you pretty much know you’ll be jumping across them.  Same with climbing elements.  To me, treasure hunting in some remote part of the world means climbing to get to areas unreachable any other way.  This can lead to a sense of isolation, as if no one had been to where you are in hundreds of years.  You never get that feeling in Uncharted, which has you climbing so you can get a keyring, so you can climb back down and open a door.

• You work your way across the upper area of the monastery so you can get behind the stained glass window, to get to a hidden room, only so you can see the roof of another building.  There’s a hidden room just to look out a window at a roof that can be seen from any number of buildings?

• You solve the puzzle element in the Library at the Sanctuary, and open up access to some underground crypts.  You leave your companions behind in a secret room, because no one will know they are there.  And then 2 minutes later enemies are shooting at you in the hidden crypt!  Huh, what?  If the enemy is all over the underground crypt area, how is it that they didn’t discover the secret room?

• You go through the lower level of the monastery, solving a puzzle with 2 bells in order to move on.  Then later you make your way across the aforementioned upper area of the monastery.  Finally, near the end, you go back to the monastery, where you suddenly make the proclamation that there is a hidden passage under the altar.  How did you come to know that when you didn’t know it before?

• As I mentioned earlier, at the beginning of the game you light some hanging braziers on fire and shoot them down to clear some wooden debris.  But later in the game, there are some swinging braziers that you can’t shoot down.  Not only that, but they are already lit.  Did the enemy light them just in case you came along?

• The treasure you’ve been seeking the whole game is found in an underground room, with a big hole in the ceiling perfect for lifting out the treasure with a helicopter.  Seems like it would have been much simpler to just go straight to the hole, instead of secret passageways, hidden rooms, and so on.  How could no one have seen this?  Perhaps the enemy did, which is why they always seemed to be in the next place you just discovered through much more complicated means.  Maybe you should have been following them instead of Drake’s book.

• You are almost conditioned in the game to take out the laser sighted enemies first, since they can kill you with one shot pretty easily.  Then when you get to the final level, there is a laser sighted enemy with some normal enemies.  If you blow away his cover, or kill the other enemies around him, he will run away.  What I didn’t understand until the very end was that he was the final boss!  So I was trying to kill him first, as I did every time I came across a laser sighted enemy, and not having any success.  Because he’s the final boss.  You can’t kill him until the end!  I can’t tell you how many times I died on the final level trying to kill that guy, in any number of ways.  You shouldn’t be able to even shoot at a character that is not killable!

• In order to defeat the final boss, you have to initiate an interactive cutscene with him by pressing the square button.  The game doesn’t tell you to do this.  You just have to know.  Once it’s initiated, then the interactive cutscene tells you what to press next, which is a combo you already should have used many times in the game.  But the whole thing is just awkward, because it’s the only time in the whole game where you initiate a cutscene by pressing a button, and where you do this combo as an interactive cutscene, and not in “real time.”   Naughty Dog should have made you do that elsewhere, so it didn’t seem so unnatural at the end.

Conclusion

So, having gone through all of that, did I like the game?  Yes.  I think my expectations on this game were very high, maybe too high.  The metacritic score for this game is an 88, which is probably a fair representation. My general impression is that it made quite a splash when it was released partly because it was a good game with awesome graphics that was exclusive to the PlayStation 3, which hadn’t seen many good or exclusive titles at the time.  It set the bar pretty high at the time, but the bar has since been raised, and I think that if it was released new now, it would not score quite as favorably.

If I were making the game, I’d have streamlined it a little bit, leaving out some of the things like the awkward sixaxis control for walking over logs, or the jetski where you have to stop to shoot, or the waves and waves of enemies, and ramped up the puzzle difficulty a little more without the hand-holding.  And straightened out the nonsensical issues in the plot.  But the game is very polished, and looks gorgeous.  The voice acting is great, the jumping and climbing works really well, and the shooting mechanic is very smooth.  It’s not a long game, at 6-8 hours, but it’s $30 now as a Greatest Hits title, and at that price it’s well worth it.  If you haven’t delved into Uncharted territory before, and want to see where it all began (or aren’t ready to spend $60 on Uncharted 2), pick up Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune.