Much like Insomniac and their Ratchet & Clank and Resistance games Naughty Dog (of Crash Bandicoot fame) have been very hard at work on their own adventures of initial PS3 development, this time capturing the opposite end to current trends.
The first thing you'll notice about this game is the lush visuals, the abundance of colour and the vibrancy of the animations. It's a very pretty game and a definite showpiece if you've blow all your cash on sony's latest machine. Essentially the game is half Tomb Raider and half Gears of War with a small attempt at everything else out there.
Yep, like Resistance it's a mash-up of everything out there and again it works.. kind of.
Uncharted in all purpose is an update to Tomb Raider with more action and slightly fewer puzzles. The first third of the game pushes towards being a jack of all trades and in terms of pacing it delivers, unfortunately the game slowly loses momentum though none of its visual flair.
The story has plenty of twists and turns but fails to deliver the fast plot from earlier in the game with what can be a long amount of time of irrelevent in-between time where the plot just seems to be happy to take a backseat. A more progressive attempt for the sequel could help this franchise to the Killer-App level of gaming quite easily.
As you may be aware of with the timing of this review Uncharted now supports trophies, being the first full game to support and providing the premiere of the platinum trophy - something hopefully to be capitalised upon with the release of Home.
Trophies really push the replayability of the title beyond what it was when first launched and though it can be quite a doddle getting them all it's a time consuming hobby. As an early adopter of getting the gnome into space with Half Life 2: Episode 2 trophies can only help a game and it's encouraging that Naughty Dog have true to their word patched the game up.
If you hadn't already bought the game at it's release a year back it's likely you could be shopping around for the new 80GB PS3 model with this game. My opinion is that you'll find this to be a great game to start with and any bundle of either this or/and Metal Gear should be highly praised.
Uncharted features a comical, fallible cast with a rich audio score with almost optional Six-Axis controls and very responsive controls under an engine that rarely slows down despite the amount of detail. There is one quite visible flaw though, pop-in!
Mainly within the first few instances of a new chapter or from continuing your game and it's load up you can almost alway count on a model lacking its main textures and it's quite annoying. As the sort of game you'd expect to require an installation it's a surprising move an optional installation wasn't included to remove this hiccup.
It's doubtful that you'd notice any problems with playing the game straight through and load times are non-existant except the initial from the menu load. Which brings us to the second problem, it's just not long enough, clocking in on a first playthrough at around 8 hours it's almost as short as Call Of Duty 4, minus the multiplayer.
The trophies will add replay value but at the current state of gaming where every game features some kind of multiplayer this gem is likely to remain in hiding, unless you really want a great single player game this is an excellent choice!
Since no real reason for such gameplay has been addressed with this article I'll leave you with the following:
"I get into a church, suddenly infra-red sights are set upon me, I roll to the cover of the back benches as a shirtless mexican runs up the central aisle wielding a shotgun. Leaping into action I blast him with a pistol and he writhes in agony as the red dot sight sets on me again and I duck.
I blindly throw a grenade up a few aisles as more enemies line the benches midway down the church and shimmy across the back of the bench to get a russian sniper rifle conveniently left there.
I jump out to snipe one of the gunmen on the upper archs of the church and then roll to new cover as the ground fighters continue to flank my position. It's tense."
It'd be great if that was the best of the game but it isn't so make sure you at least rent this game.
Verdict:Great
