The game deserved the 8/10 score that Eurogamer gave it. In my opinion, anyways.
I'm going to start with what the game did right. The environments look and feel amazing. The Uncharted series has always been known for having some of the most gorgeous looking scenery in modern gaming, and they pull that off beautifully here. There are lots of times where I just walked passed a window and looked out just to admire how freaking beautifully everything was crafted. It really is pretty awe inspiring.
They focused more on puzzles with this game, with a couple that literally had me stumped for about five minutes before I finally figured out the clues that they had given me. In particular the one where you had to move the sliding emblems around to certain points on a giant hieroglyphic puzzle. That one took me a while to finally figure out, but I didn't feel like it was a completely bullshit, "oh my God this is so hard" kind of problem to solve. Everything was right there, I just had to explore and deduce how to use the information properly.
The combat feels a lot smoother -- Drake has more control over his weapons while aiming, and recoil feels a bit more natural with the higher powered weapons like the sniper pistol (I can't remember the name of the gun at the moment). You don't get a lot of chance to double-tap with the higher powered weapons, and it makes using them a little bit more entertaining. There are also a lot of environments where you can't just stand there and pick off enemies one by one by lining up your shots properly. In particular on the plane, in the ship and in the collapsing city, the environment is shaking and you're trying to battle against the environment as well as all of the enemies. It was very satisfying.
The addition of being able to throw back grenades was a nice touch. It isn't the same as in Call of Duty, where as soon as a grenade lands beside you, you can quickly tap the button and throw it back. There is a little scale, and when the slider gets to the "optimal zone" in the scale (which is different every time), you have to quickly tap the triangle button to toss the grenade back. It's also not a giant prompt on the screen -- you have to pay attention to what's around you, and there were lots of times that I died because I didn't notice the grenade land beside me. Felt a bit more... realistic that way. There were also lots of times that I died because I didn't manage to toss the grenade back until the slider was at the bottom of the scale, and it exploded in my face. Again, a lot more satisfying than your standard Call of Duty style "oh look, there's a grenade here, lets toss it back and seem to add an additional five seconds to the fuse."
The melee combat was a nice touch as well. It gets kind of repetitive after a while, but there are lots of ways for you to take down enemies, and they do focus a bit more on the hand-to-hand combat as being a necessity than being an accessory. The addition of new enemies like the Brutes (think stereotypical Russian mob muscle) make you actually have to think about how you're going to tackle certain situations. As well, the riot shield enemies can be quickly taken down by charging and attacking, where you will kick their shield into their face, leap over them and snap their necks from behind, saving you time and lots of ammo. Or you could flank them and take them out from the side. A nice touch to help showcase all of the different methods of combat you can employ.
The general story itself is very well told. I like that it explored Sully and Drake's relationship, how they met, and showcases the father/son relationship that they have. The game is fairly heavy with cutscenes, but as is typical with the Uncharted series, these are all nicely blended into the actual gameplay, and I don't recall too many lasting more than a couple of minutes. The majority of the story is told via conversation as you were walking from Point A to Point B.
Now, into the negatives. Because this game has them. Let's move backwards from everything that I just raved about.
The story is kind of meh. Sure, I like the content that they delved into, but it didn't feel embellished enough. There are large chunks of the general story that you're missing that I felt would have definitely helped to show Drake's faults. Apparently, between Uncharted 2 and Uncharted 3, Drake and Elena got married. And separated. There is a point later in the game where Drake and Sully need the help of Elena to continue to the adventure. She is working as a foreign correspondent in Yemen, and when the idea of asking her help is first brought up, Drake treats it more as asking an unsavoury accomplice for help rather than someone that he still has feelings for (more on that later). The general assumption is that they separated because Elena got tired of his obsession with searching for the treasure that Sir Francis Drake left in the desert, which is gathered from mannerisms and small tidbits of conversations during the course of the game. However, at the end, once Drake has lost Sir Francis' ring and Sully gives him his wedding band back, him and Elena embrace in open arms and everything is hunky-dory again. I would really like to have known why they split up. Was it Drake's obsession with Sir Francis Drake? Was it because she wanted to go to Yemen? Was it any plethora of other things? Drake didn't seem to be too upset about it, where as it seemed to really have hurt Elena, but she was more than willing to push it all aside once this adventure is over to give everything a happy ending. I felt the story fell really short in that aspect -- if you're going to make a game that showcases the personal relationship between Drake and his father figure, add in some stuff to embellish more of the man that he has become because of said father figure. He's a self obsessed treasure hunter who really only ever thinks of himself except for when he's put in a "protector" role so that no one gets hurt. Show more of his faults and less of his strengths, and make Drake human, please.
Moving on from that, the villains in this game didn't feel as daunting as they were in the last one. In the last game, you were on the trail of a general in the search for ultimate power. He was a scary motherfucker who didn't mind getting his hands dirty, and he was ruthless the entire way through. In this one, Marlowe and Talbot feel more like politicians who just want to be at the scene for the photo op. Marlowe really only deals with everything via fear and manipulation, but never gets her hands dirty, and dies in an entirely underwhelming fashion. Talbot isn't really that intimidating at all, and the few times that you really interact with him you're chasing him through some streets until the final boss fight. Which, speaking of... what the fuck was that? It's essentially an extended quick time event, and felt extremely anti-climatic.
I really don't have too many quips about the melee combat, 'cept for how repetitive it felt. It probably doesn't help that I moved onto this game shortly after playing Batman: Arkham Asylum, where they pulled off hand-to-hand combat almost flawlessly. In Uncharted 3, I felt like all I was doing was button-mashing, and even when I missed counter prompts, I wasn't punished for my mistakes -- most of the time I managed to land a punch before they could move anyways. The only real time I was ever punished for melee combat was when I got into fisticuffs with an enemy while in the middle of a gunfight. Most of the time that happened I was gunned down in the middle of it, even when the fight was unintentionally started from poor controls.
Which moves me onto the controls. I don't know if they used the same system as they did in Uncharted 2 or if they revamped the engine, but Drake did not feel like he moved fluidly at all. The platforming sections feel more reminiscent of the first Uncharted game, and don't feel as fluid as they were in U2. There were lots of times where I would leap to my doom because the game didn't understand what I wanted it to do. This is even more noticeable in the sections where I was trying to run quickly from cover to cover -- there were quite a few instances where I would jump off a platform and instead of going straight, I kind of drifted sideways and landed either somewhere I didn't want to be, or fell to my death. Or, alternatively, I would get to my cover but Drake wouldn't actually listen to me telling him to hide, and I would get shot to shit because a thousand and one enemies had their sights trained on me.
Overall, Drake felt clunky in this game.
And again, let's move onto the puzzles once more. I was saying that there were more of them, and that they were definitely more challenging. Some of these, like the four-emblem puzzle, were done quite well. Some of them... weren't. The globe puzzle had me stumped, and no matter what I did to try and figure it out, I couldn't do it. It took me almost twenty minutes to solve that puzzle, the first ten minutes because I didn't realize that the right control stick actually rotated the globe at all. Nowhere does it say exactly what you are supposed to do, or how to control the globe at all. That was the most frustration out of all of the puzzles, for me. The same thing happened with the puzzle where you had to line up five gears. The game does a terrible job of explaining how you are supposed to solve the puzzle. I'm still not entirely sure how I did it, all I remember is that all of the gears alternated designs. The notebook was pretty much useless for telling me this information, it just said "don't use these three, and... I have no idea how to figure out how to order these at all, guess you're on your own." Gee, thanks notebook.
I was raving earlier about how beautiful the environments were. And they are, these are some breathtaking levels that Naughty Dog has created. But they are so small. And I don't mean "we're underground in a cramped space" small, even though there was some of that. I mean restrictive... I remember being able to explore more of the world in U2 than I was able to in U3, and U3 pushes you forward a lot more than U2 did. When you look at places like the frozen city in U2, where you literally spent about twenty minutes of straight up platforming and simple puzzle solving, then compare that to pretty much any world in Uncharted 3, and Uncharted 3 comes up far short.
Which is another complaint I have for U3. The game itself is short. I would put it at around the same length as the first Uncharted. While I didn't expect to get 20+ hours out of this game on my first playthrough, I was hoping for a bit more than what was offered. There are 22 chapters in the game, and probably five of them (I didn't actually count, but that's a guess at the moment) didn't involve any combat at all. The scene where Drake is wandering through the desert after the plane crash just dragged on, but didn't really accomplish anything. I played most of that section while chatting here on EP, just holding up on my analog stick. The platforming sections don't offer as much as they have in previous titles -- even traversing the outside of the castle in the first Uncharted felt more involving than any platforming sections in U3, and they recycled a lot of previous ideas. Climbing up the netting hanging out of a plane? Feels like climbing up a train hanging off a cliff. Climbing up the tower in the underground city, you have to ride up on the gears, which was pretty much a rehash of the same concept in the frozen underground city in U2. Even right before the final boss battle, you are running out of a collapsing lost city... which was exactly the same as after the final boss battle in U2, where you are trying to escape the collapsing city. Even the very last playable scene in the game, where you have to shoot Talbot to save Sully, felt exactly the same as when you had to shoot the giant monster dude at the end of U2 to save Elena. (Was it Elena? I can't remember at the moment, but I think it was Elena).
Another thing that U3 seemed to fail at were boss battles. Because really... there weren't any. In U2, there was that huge battle with the tank, there was the battle with the guy with a Gatling gun on the train, there was getting away from the helicopter, and there was the final boss battle. There might have been more in there, but I can't really remember anything else at the moment. In U3, there was... the final boss battle. There was one guy earlier in the game who was basically a brute was a high powered assault rifle who would throw three grenades at once, but I seemed to have inadvertently taken him out while fighting against some of the normal enemies that came out later. Nothing else is really coming to mind.
And now, my biggest beef with U3. Forgot the tunnel vision storyline. Forget the smaller environments. Forget the general lack of "boss battles." They took away my ability to switch sides when aiming with my weapons. It was a huge help in U2, and I still can't wrap my head around why they took it out of U3. They added so many other things to the combat, why would they remove this...? It still bothers me, and there were lots of parts in the game where it felt like a huge hindrance not having that ability.
I know there are a few other, smaller things that somewhat bothered me, but really they aren't anything game breaking. I think I'm done ranting for now. My overall opinion? 8/10 is a fitting score for the game. It felt short as a whole against U2, which remains the best title in the series for me. It still plays better than a lot of games out there, and I really did enjoy every second that I played it. And I haven't done any of the online multiplayer stuff yet, which will add a huge amount of replay value to the game for a lot of people, although I probably won't play too much of it unless a bunch of us EPers get some matches together.
Anyways. I think that's enough of my ranting.
Final thoughts:
Great game? Yes.
Greatest game? Unfortunately, it falls short of this mark.
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Originally Posted by Inferno.
cute, fun, little game with good art designs, specially the level designs.
If I had something to complain about, though, it'd be that...
Leagues better than the first game, and not so much worse than the second that it's anything less than fabulous. <3
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