An old trilogy game that I recently played on stream, remastered for the PlayStation 4. Even though it’s a remaster, the games still looks very dated, that didn’t stop me from enjoying the games. Although the mechanics is to be desired, I did enjoy the lore and the story of each games.
Dubbed as the love child of Tomb of Raider and Gears of War, the Uncharted series is one of the top rated action adventure video game franchise in recent gaming history.
The Lore
The Uncharted games follows the adventures of Nathan Drake and Victor Sullivan, explorers and treasure hunters. Throughtout the games, they made expeditions to find El Dorado, Shambhala, and The Lost City of Ubar.
It begins with Nathan Drake and Elena Fisher, who owns the production company that funded the expedition. It tells the story of their search for El Dorado and the tales of the spanish soldiers who where lost and remained lost along with the treasure. Nate and Sully continued on leaving Elena behind. They traveled to the Amazon Rainforest to find clues to where the city is located. This ultimately led to them uncovering that El Dorado was not a city.
After their adventures looking for El Dorado, Nate and Sully, continued on their search for another treasure. This time, for the mythological city Shambhala and the Cintamani Stone. Thanks to Chloe Frazer, they found out that the Cintamani Stone is still in Shambhala.
The third game, Drake’s Deception, is set one year later and tells the story of the search for the Atlantis of the Sands. Nate and Sully are ambushed in London by another interested party. It shows a short flashback on how Nate and Sully first met.
Graphics
I could say that the graphics is definitely better on PS4 than the PS3 version of the games. Even though it really shows that the game is dated, especially for the first game, the remaster was well done and looks really good for the PS4. The Nathan Drake Collection uses modern lighting techniques, rendered with high resolution textures, and resolution of up to 1080p — the highest for PS4. All three games’ FPS had been upgraded to 60 FPS coming from 30, resulting to finer and smoother motion details.
Gameplay
Even with the remaster, Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune is an awkward playthrough, the rest of the games are smoother and a lot more fun. Knowing that a lot of companies struggled to make games for the PS3, I think we can give it a pass. I didn’t really like Uncharted 1’s gameplay to be perfectly candid. This is mostly because of the gameplay than the lore.
There’s hordes of enemies that can easily be hundreds per phase, very limited movement, character “stiffness” while the enemies are very agile, mechanics that doesn’t seem to work like hiding behind objects. It feels like one of those arcade shooting games with only the purpose of eating your tokens.
The other games still has this “eating tokens” gameplay vibes but they are significantly better than the first game when it comes to mechanics and actual playthrough. Besides the hordes of enemies that doesn’t seem to wanna die even after blasting them with a full magazine of AK-47 or M4, the mechanics of hiding behind objects is smoother and definitely better in both the later games.
The title screen is one of the good addition in the collection. It is very easy to jump from one game to another. There’s also new difficulties based on what I read online, Explorer and an unlockable difficulty: Brutal. One only has to beat each game on Crushing difficulty mode.
We also got the Speed Run Mode which can also be run per chapter. It’s just essentially a playthrough with a timer added to the HUD, which shows the player how long they’ve spent on a playthrough or a particular chapter. I don’t really do speedruns nor do so for trophies but I’m sure other people are up for the challenge.
Conclusion
If you are looking to revisit the game or thinking of picking it up for the first time, then this is a worthwhile purchase. Playing all the games in a marathon results in a frustratingly but fulfilling endeavour. If you want an action packed shooting game heavy with secrets and stories, these games has aged well and they should be in your library.
