...the story, while very nice in its better moments, felt a little slim. I think the main problem is that during the whole dockyard / cruise ship bit it completely goes missing. Drake's mostly silent, the other characters are absent, and the whole sequence is nothing more than a drawn out rescue scenario, which is contrived to begin with, and which culminates in nothing more than a "lol dead end". After which you go back to the main scenario and all is forgotten.
Don't get me wrong, I loved those sequences. From a pure gameplay and design perspective, they're some of the best in the game (the ship was <3 <3 <3). I only wish they had done a better job writing them into the story, as the way they shoehorned them in simply felt lazy, and was very much to the detriment of the game story-wise being that it meant less screen time for events that were both exciting and story-relevant, rather than just the former.