Greetings and salutations to you all and welcome back to my little corner of the T4 website. This week, I’ve decided to grab yet another brand new game right off the shelf and dive back into Nathan Drake’s world in Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception. UC3 was just released yesterday for $59.99 and it’s been getting great reviews from various gaming websites. One in particular has called it a “masterpiece” and given it a final score of 10/10. Do I agree? Well if you clicked on the link from the main page, you obviously know that I don’t. While I find UC3 to be a beautiful game, I don’t think it’s as great as everyone is saying it is, which really bums me out as I love this exclusive PS3 franchise.
For those unfamiliar with the basis of the Uncharted series, the game is pretty much National Treasure meets Indiana Jones in the basic storyline way of action meets treasure hunting/archaeology and then there are puzzles you have to solve, lots of jumping and climbing up walls, and a whole lot of shooting bad guys with a wide range of weapons and blowing them up with grenades. So pretty much your normal Summer blockbuster action movie with a good plot wrapped up into a video game for Sony’s Playstation 3. With a journal from an ancestor in hand and a few of his friends, this chapter of the Uncharted series has us take Nathan Drake all across the world to various locations like England, Colombia, France, Syria, Yemen, and a few others in a treasure hunt to find a 16th century treasure in the lost city of “Iram of the Pillars”, buried deep in the deserts of what was then known as Arabia.
It’s time for the trophy rundown. There are 55 trophies to collect and about 75 – 80% of them are weapon related and repeats from the past Uncharted games. You’ve got the usual “Find X treasures”, “Kill X enemies using this certain gun”, “Finish game on Easy/Medium/Hard/Crushing difficulty”. If you’ve played an Uncharted game in the past, you know exactly what to do and how to do it to get the trophies that you want/need. Pretty short and sweet rundown, yeah?
Getting into the criteria…..
The Good: As always with the Uncharted series, graphics are top notch. Storyline/writing kinda took a hit this time, but not enough that I wanted to list it under bad. While the interactions between the characters is as good as it’s always been, for some reason, I just can’t get into the storyline for Uncharted 3. It’s not keeping my attention and making me feel like I just need to do that one more chapter and then call it a night, just to wind up doing 5 more chapters and getting no sleep. I don’t know if it is because I just finished up Batman: Arkham City earlier this week and am burnt out of the action genre for the time being or because of real life stuff, but I’m about half way through with the game and it’s been kind of a chore instead of enjoyable to get this far. I’ll edit this review when I’m done with the full story and tell you if the second half picks up the slack.
The Bad: Action wise I think they went a little too over the top in certain areas like the burning chateau in France. Granted, I’ve never been inside of a burning chateau so I’m not the person to talk to when it comes to the physics of jumping off walls and falling through flaming floors, but after a while, it just seems too overdone and gets repetitive. Another thing I didn’t quite care for is the new motion system that they put into effect with Nathan Drake’s model. If you pass against something, you move your arms like you brush it off or push off of it. Problem is that it happens all the time, even in combat situations. While you are trying to get into cover or come up on an enemy from behind, you gotta avoid walls, anything knee high, cause you’ll trip, stumble, push off, or brush past them and the enemy might be alerted to you presence and get some costly shots in at you. It has also lead to some glitches/clipping issues with both Drake and the enemies around him. For example, I just shot an enemy that was across the plaza from me. He starts to fall down to the right and mid fall, he goes into a “seizure” and falls to the left. Yes, the motion for Nathan’s running and walking by objects is realism based, but Naughty Dog has gotta play around with the internal settings so you aren’t doing it with every single little thing you come across. Another issue would have to be aiming. Not sure what happened to it, but I can’t aim straight to save my life in this game. I’ll have my shots all lined up and ready to shoot the target and while it appears I’m shooting center mass/chest shots, it’s not hitting the enemy at all. I don’t have an answer for it and it makes no sense what so ever. If I was missing head shots, maybe he moved and I was a bit off, but I’m aiming for the biggest area on the person’s body. Maybe they’ll fix these bugs/problems in a future patch. Who knows? We will just have to play the waiting game…
If you haven’t played the Uncharted series before, please check out my review and Katie’s review of Uncharted 2 here on the T4 website.
My review: http://t4show.com/reviews/uncharted-2-among-thieves/
Katie’s review: http://t4show.com/reviews/uncharted-2-review-by-katie/
With all that being said, thank you for reading my review. If anything in this review caught your interest, please check out this game. Feel free to leave comments and feedback. They are greatly appreciated. If you agree with what I have written, say so. If you don’t like the game or my review, say so. If there is a certain game you’d like to see me review out of my collection, once again, just say so, and I will do the best that I can to write one up for you.
My personal video game collection: http://www.icollectmedia.com/collection/game/wboyd31/?display=
My Xbox Live Gamertag: WBoyd31
My PSN Gamertag: LonesomeRaven
