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Special thanks to Armando Rodriguez for the
following review:
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.
Overall 8.0 [ Very
Good ]
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