- Platform: PS4 (Part of The Nathan Drake Collection)
- Genre: Action-Adventure, Third-person shooter
Uncharted 4 came out, so I’m doing what everyone else is doing; not playing it! Admittedly I’ve always had a bit of a habit of picking up games, having more games come out, and never finishing games that I got sidetracked from. For as quick as they are, the Uncharted titles definitely fell into that category. Because of that, I decided to start at the top and work my way through, beginning with Drake’s Fortune. So then the question is, how has this one aged?
So I’ll start this off by immediately admitting I have a love/hate relationship with the gun play of this series. I absolutely adore that I can run through the entire game with a 9mm pistol, using it as an effective sniper rifle and getting the vast majority of my kills as headshots. That said, it absolutely bugs the game developer side of me that I can do this. Throughout this play through, I only really ended up using other weapons on a need-to-use basis. The shotgun and MP40 came into play in the zombie-ish end game segments when they had effectively infinite ammo. The AK47 and MP4 became relatively effective pray and spray weapons into walls of enemies. However, they never really felt more powerful on a per-hit basis than either of the main 9mm pistols, and the lack of ammunition available for other larger pistols meant that I really had no reason to use others.
On the other hand, I have a much less positive relationship with the actual environmental design when it comes to this. Going through the levels, it’s extremely obvious when you’re about to get into gunfights. In general, you’ll turn a corner, see a bunch of crates, concrete wall segments, etc in a flat area, and know that once you hit a trigger point, a bunch of dudes are going to come into the field to start attacking you. Sure by end game you get snipers in vertical nests, but by and large the combat areas are extremely obvious and scripted.
That said, mechanically I would tend to lean towards the gun play still being very fun, but not more than above average. At this point I feel like the Tomb Raider series has taken some of the strong points of this series, and with the addition of that game’s more defined stealth mechanics, there are definitely options out now that have vastly improved on the third-person tomb crawling.
So then the question I guess becomes, is this one still worth a play through if you’re new to the Sony world? Aging aside, I’d say yes. The story is a pretty solid Indiana Jones-style story, the characters are entertaining, there’s enough visual improvements for the game to still look pretty decent, and the craftsmanship of the experience is without question. Much like the Jak series, the first in the series showed the promise of Naughty Dog’s path, and new people to the series shouldn’t skip it for its age.
And yes, sniper 9mm is a lot of fun.
