Currently reading The Path of Daggers, which I’m almost finished with, and I like it a lot better than I remember. And this weekend I’ll get to play a bit more The Witcher 3: Blood & Wine, which means I’ll be killing some vampires, WOOT!
I finished the story of Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End! Anyway let’s talk about it.
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Uncharted 4 Review
This is both a technically and narratively ambitious game and it mostly succeeds in what it sets out to do. That’s the gist of this review.
Some slight spoilers ahead.
I was told that this game was pretty good, and I was not disappointed. See, when I played Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception, I was frustrated and annoyed (though not too annoyed, because I had gotten this game for free when the Playstation Store gave it away). I had seen this game win a bunch of awards and I wasn’t having that much fun playing it. It felt like it really wanted to be a movie, which made it fun to watch and see the story play out, but not that much fun to actually play, which made it not that great of a game. At a certain point it felt as if almost every chapter of the story came with some sort of gimmick, like a chase scene with cars, or with boats, or a cruise ship that’s about to sink, or Nate is drugged or dying of thirst or something. It was dramatic, but it made playing a pain in the butt when the camera keeps shaking, or things are fuzzy, or you’re fighting hallucinations that don’t die while both of the above are going on.
The plane scene was one of the most annoying sequences I’ve ever played.
And those weren’t new to that game, but that one just amped them up to eleven.
Uncharted 4 doesn’t do away with big set pieces, but it’s nowhere near as intrusive to the experience. I felt like it managed to both tell a cinematic story and be a game that’s fun to play in almost every sequence, which is a pretty darn impressive thing to do in my opinion. It does have some pitfalls that stuck out to me though.
For starters, this game is big, and I don’t know that it needs to be. There are certain chapters that have you exploring wide open areas, and that sounds great, the kind of thing that every game is aiming to be these days. But given the way Uncharted plays, it feels a bit wasteful. There are wide open spaces to explore, and very often most of that space is filled with nothing but beautiful scenery. Yeah, that sounds nice, but in practice this means I’m wandering around aimlessly expecting everywhere to be something important or find a collectible, and most of this space has nothing there. So I’m just wasting a bunch of time.
I appreciate there being some space to explore, but too much of it, I start getting tired, and basically give up because most of it is useless. There should not be this much useless space in a game, I think.
The combat’s also been reworked a bit from past games. For starters, there’s no way to block. There’s a hit button, a dodge button, and a button to get out of holds. But if someone swings at you, you just get out of there. And since this isn’t really a close combat game, the camera doesn’t always cooperate in a way that lets you move out of the way. Thankfully, you aren’t in a lot of melee combat situations, but the few that the game forces you into are frustrating because of how the combat isn’t particularly smooth.
One of those situations is the final battle, the last boss fight, in which you are dueling… with swords. Nowhere before have swords been a part of the game’s combat, and now you have a sword, he has a sword, and you’re hastily given directions on how to use them. This made no sense to me from a gameplay perspective, and while it was dramatically very cool, and made sense for a movie, for a game to throw that at you in the last few minutes was silly and not as clever as I think the developers hoped it would be.
The game has plenty of good additions to its gameplay though. The grappling hook took some getting used to, but I like it quite a bit. Stealth has been reworked and though it’s nowhere near as good as one of the Arkham or Assassin’s Creed games, it’s a very good step from where we were in the last two games. There are encounters you can complete without open combat, and I love that, even if I’m not very good at it.
Narratively the game is pretty brilliant--I will admit that I am still kind of a sucker for stories about siblings though, and this one focuses very heavily on Nate and his never-before-mentioned brother Sam. Sam’s lack of mention before now doesn’t really jive that well with what we’ve already seen, though they do at least try to explain in-story why that is, in that Nate thought he was dead and is only just now revealed not to be. It’s a retcon, but at least the writers seem to know it and do their best to try to make it less awkward.
I appreciate that.
The gist of the story is that Nate has given up the adventuring/treasure hunting/thieving life, and then his brother appears again and pulls him back into it to help him save his own life by finding Henry Avery’s lost treasure. Nate, of course, lies to his wife about it, because he doesn’t want to get her into trouble, or get into trouble with her. And of course, Rafe, this acquaintance of theirs has been after Avery’s treasure for over a decade and is coming close to finding it, now that he’s got an army of mercenaries led by Nadine.
YMMV on whether or not Sam is a good character. I can almost go either way with him, because I can definitely see why, by the end of the game, players might not like him very much. I liked him mostly because Nate liked him, and I get how siblings are. But there are times when I could totally imagine why someone who wasn’t his sibling wouldn’t feel too kindly towards him--he kind of takes way too many unnecessary risks for this treasure.
Nate lying to his wife is dumb, but not out of character. And in the end, a thing that I really liked about this game is that it showed that going out and having adventures isn’t a bad thing--in the end, Nate and Elena decide that they do enjoy this life, and avoiding it isn’t good for them. But they need to handle it more responsibly. Searching for the unknown is fine, when you’re not unnecessarily risking your life for thrills.
Also Nate and Elena are kind of an awesome couple? And at no point in the series is their relationship really overly sexualized, like you’d expect in an action story of this kind if it ever hit theaters or television?
Just food for thought.
She has something to do in this game, which is much more than she did in the previous entry, in which she had a couple of sequences before just… not being in the story. Which kind of made sense, but also was a bummer because she’s a good character.
And speaking of old characters coming back and being treated well, Sully’s back of course, and despite being ancient and smoking he’s in great shape. And the voice of reason--telling Nate when he’s being stupid, but sticking around to support him and make sure he doesn’t die.
There’s this running thing with Henry Avery constantly using the imagery of Saint Dismas, the Good Thief, the one who repented at the Crucifixion, and Nate wonders in his journal, “What is Avery’s deal with Saint Dismas?” and I practically shouted, “It’s thematic! The thief who gave up his sin!” And I’m sure that’s intentional, but it’s also because of the whole “Today you will join me in Paradise” thing, and Avery’s own pirate paradise and how that turned out.
In some ways, this feels like the darkest of the Uncharted games, with a sense of finality and the darkness and also there are skeletons all over. This game really gets into just how terrible people can be. But it’s also in some ways one of the most optimistic games in the series? Because despite the darkness that exists in people, they can overcome it, and become better. This game serves as a grand finale to the saga, and shows our characters leaving it much better than when they started.
And I like that.
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