Uncharted: Drake's Fortune (PS3) Review

Posted by Armando Rodriguez on 12.04.2007

Amazing production values and a superb story highlight a pretty good game.

It’s finally here! Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune has been hyped as the killer Playstation 3 exclusive this Christmas. Long before the game came out, many gaming websites where comparing the game to Tomb Raider, Prince of Persia and even Gears of War. That is good company to be in. Does the game stand up to the hype? Yes and no.


Gameplay:

Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune plays like an interactive movie. You play as an explorer named Nathan Drake who is supposedly a descendant of Sir Francis Drake. He is also very obsessed with Sir Francis and how he died, but more specifically, the location of the lost city of El Dorado, a city that Sir Francis apparently found in his travels. Without spoiling too much of the story, your adventures take you to exotic locales in the jungle, ancient ruins and an abandoned German U-Boat among others, in the company of a reporter named Elena and Drake’s friend Sully.

It is easy to see why this game was compared to Prince of Persia, Tomb Raider and Gears of War, as it takes elements from all three games and puts them in one single package. Like in Prince of Persia, the primary method of transportation is hopping across chasms, jumping and shimming from ledge to ledge and making impossible feats of athleticism until you get both feet back in solid ground. The controls are very responsive during this sections and the game allows a certain margin of error when aiming your jump, so you will rarely fall to your death. The Tomb Raider flavor comes in the way the puzzles are presented. They are usually very simple; just push a couple of boxes or shoot some conveniently placed explosive barrels to open up new sections. Some of the puzzles later in the game are more clever and require you to study them carefully and use Drake’s Journal as reference, but they are not that hard and wont take more than a couple of minutes to figure out. The combat system is straight out of Gears of War. You can carry two weapons at a time, a small weapon like a 9mm or an Uzi and a large weapon like an AK-47, Shotgun or Dagun Sniper. You go from cover to cover and pop out to shoot the enemies. You can also shoot blindly, but this is nothing more than a waste of ammo and is not as useful as it sounds. Drake sticks to the surface you are taking cover at and you can also roll to new cover with ease. The only blemish against this system is that aiming is really slow. Sometimes you feel like you are turning a truck instead of Drake’s gun and this leads to Drake taking more damage than necessary. Thankfully, Uncharted takes a page out of Halo’s book and Drake can recover health just by standing safely behind cover for several seconds. Another complaint is that enemies seem to take way too many shots before dying. A common enemy might take anywhere from five to seven shots before he drops. Head shots also seem to suffer from this problem as sometimes you will get a clean headshot, but somehow the enemy will survive. Sometimes it takes two headshots to drop someone. The sluggishness of the gunplay continues with the Dagun Sniper, who is incredibly overpowered, to the point that it usually drops enemies with only one shot, no matter where you hit them. Seeing an enemy die because you shoot it in the foot with the Sniper is pretty frustrating, especially since that same enemy could have taken an entire clip of the Uzi and still be left standing. The game compensates for this by making the Sniper an extremely rare weapon which carries five bullets at must. Another complaint is that the small hand guns, like the 9mm, are way more useful than the AK-47 or Uzi simply because they are easier to aim and seem to hit more consistently, even at extremely long distances.



Even with all this faults the combat is an interesting game of cat and mouse, as you go from cover to cover looking for the best spot to shoot the enemy from. Since you will face more than one or two enemies at a time, battles can get chaotic in no time. When you have six or seven enemies coming at you from different directions, you need to make some quick decisions. Who do I shoot first? The guy coming in close with the shotgun or the guy firing a grenade launcher from behind cover? Sometimes you will need to repeat a battle two or three times until you figure out which guys you need to shoot first and where the best cover is.

Drake can also defend himself in hand to hand combat. You only have two different combos, but the animations and sounds are so convincing that they are very satisfying to use. Too bad then, than 95% of the time the enemies are far away and safely behind cover, forcing you to use guns. Drake also has stealth kill: If you catch an enemy from behind, you will lock him in a sleeper hold and put him out quietly. Opportunities for using the stealth kill, however, are almost non-existent. I found an opportunity to use it a grand total of two times in the entire game. Every enemy seems to be expecting you before you get there. The only other mechanic you need to be aware off is that in certain cut-scenes you will need to make a button press, or a series of presses, to see an action executed on screen, like in another Sony published title, Heavenly Sword. I am a big fan of interactive cut scenes and the results are always satisfying.

The game also features achievements and hidden treasures to extend the replay value. Achievements range from killing a certain amount of enemies with a specific weapon, to finding a certain amount of treasures. You also get an achievement for beating the game at every difficulty. Achievements are a proven method of extending replay value and it works here as well. Let’s hope that these achievements can be somehow displayed online when Home comes out.



But even with achievements, Uncharted is a pretty short game for genre standards. At the default difficulty, it took me 9 hours to complete with half the treasures found and almost every weapon-based achievement unlocked. The total time could be extended to maybe 12 hours if you look for every hidden treasure. The game is very linear and even if you get lost, the game will start dropping hints as of where you need to go. Also most of the hidden treasures are not so hidden and they don’t even require you to venture off the main path, just run in circles around a room touching every corner and you are likely to find one.

Even with all this said, Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune is a fun game that feels a lot like an interactive movie. The cut scenes are absolutely fantastic and the story is very interesting and throws enough hooks to keep you playing just to find out what happens next.

Graphics:

The graphics are absolutely fantastic. The environments are well designed, from the lush jungle environments with lots of green vegetation, to the rust inside the German U-Boat and the many broken pieces of scenery in the ruins. The character models are all very good looking, but Drake takes the cake. His model is simply phenomenal! His animations are surreal. The way he reloads his weapon is incredibly realistic, his clothes get wet and dry over time when you touch the water and the hand to hand combat motions look very crisp, like they actually hurt. You will also catch little details like the way Drake covers his ears when he tosses a grenade or how his face reacts when a bullet zips in particularly close. The most amazing thing is that even when he is pulling death defying leaps and impossible acrobatic feats, he feels and acts like he is vulnerable. The cut-scenes have incredible detail as well with accurate lip synching and facial animations. The enemy models are a bit more generic than the main characters, but they have realistic animations as well, when they reload their weapons, move from cover to cover with their heads down and even blindly fire at you. Also they have good death animations and react differently depending on where you hit them. Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune is a great graphical showcase for the capabilities of the Playstation 3 system.



Sound:

Another big plus for this game is the sound. The voice acting is top notch, everybody sounds just like you would expect them to sound and this contributes even more to the game’s immersive experience. I swear, the guy who plays Drake and the woman who plays Elena where born to play those roles. Also the guy who voices Eddy, one of Drake’s main rivals, is so annoying and fits his character so well that you will want to kill him just by listening to him. The sound effects are very crisp too. Gunfire sounds realistic and every weapon sounds different. The environments are full of small touches, like the sound of torches burning and creaking or the sound of birds and other fauna in the jungle environments. The different surfaces Drake steps in sound like they would in real life, with notable differences between stepping in wood, solid rock or mud. If there is one thing that can be said about Uncharted is that it has very high production values.

Lasting Appeal:

The addition of achievements goes a long way to give Uncharted some replay value. Still, this is one game you won’t want to beat more than twice, which gives you enough time to get all the achievements.

Fun Factor:

Some of the later battles might get frustrating and some will be annoyed at the simplicity of the puzzles (especially at the explosive barrels that are conveniently placed next to the place you need to blow up) but Uncharted serves more than enough thrills to be worth playing. The game is fun and captivating enough to upset its dull moments.



The 411:

Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune is not the killer game Sony needed to sell more PS3’s, but it is one heck of a good game. The hype might hurt the game more than it helps since people will buy the game thinking they are getting the Halo-killer or the Mario-killer. Instead, they are getting a game that has amazing production values and solid gameplay, but not much lasting appeal. Is it worth playing? If you have a Playstation 3, yes. Or if you already had plans to buy a PS3 and want a good game, once more, the answer is yes. But this is not a game worth buying the system for.

Graphics	10.0	The animations, character models and enviroments look realistic. An amazing showcase of what the PS3 is capable off.
Gameplay	8.0	Simple puzzles and somewhat frustrating battle sequences hurt the game. Yet, the story is amazing and needs to be experienced. The game is very linear, but fun.
Sound	9.5	Some of the best voice acting you will ever hear in a game. Weapon sounds are realistic, the enviroments are full of little details like animal sounds.
Lasting Appeal	7.5	Once you beat the game once, you might want to play it again one more time to complete the achievements.
Fun Factor	8.0	The game is fun and thrilling, which upsets the dull and frustrating moments. Worth a purchase if you are a PS3 owner.
Overall	8.0   [ Very Good ]

Screenshots
All 10 Uncharted: Drake's Fortune Screenshots