Sony and their fans have had a tough year with lost exclusives, delayed blockbusters and a continuing stream of top flight games appearing on non-Sony platforms. Now, Naughty Dog, the developer responsible for the
Crash Bandicoot and
Jak and Daxter series' is giving those fans one last basket to place their remaining eggs of hope in in the form of
Uncharted: Drake's Fortune. Gamers want to feel like the $600 they spent on a PS3 was not wasted, and Sony needs to move consoles this holiday season. To say there is a lot riding on the success of
Uncharted would be a major understatement. Can it fulfill the vast promise of the beautiful screenshots we've been ogling for the last six months? Our metareview has the answer!
IGN (91/100) A lot of times we as an industry like to wax on and on about how videogames rival movies, but rarely do we have an example as well done as Uncharted. Nate is funny as he laments over yet another wall he needs to scale, Sullie is loveable as he tells the same traveler's tales over and over, and Elena's fire for her story and give-and-take with Nate is endearing. When these characters interact and you watch their relationships grow, you feel like you're part of their circle. You feel like they're your friends. Uncharted does what few titles manage -- it completely immerses you in its experience. From the moment the game begins with a sweeping camera move through the waters off Panama, a rich score and the words of Sir Francis Drake etched on screen, Uncharted will have you hooked. It'll maintain that hold with its story, style and gameplay.
Eurogamer (90/100) In a game where the split between combat and platforming is about 50-50, you don't want one aspect of the game to be any less fun than the other. Such imbalances nearly always cause you to resent the disparity, and it's evidently something that Naughty Dog has worked extremely hard to avoid. Rather than the game's ongoing narrative and action feeling like a sequence of vaguely connected set-pieces, most of the chapters in the game flow expertly into one another. It feels like a journey, albeit a particularly fraught and dangerous one where imminent death lurks around every crumbling corner. By starting with a great control and camera system, building on that with excellent combat and a wonderful spin on Ico's platform adventuring, and then topping it off with a decent storyline, Naughty Dog has cooked up one of the most relentlessly entertaining, fat-free games to emerge in ages. Topped off with the most stunning use of the PS3's underused technical prowess yet, Uncharted: Drake's Fortune is, for my money, the first must-have PlayStation 3 title.
Gametap (90/100) The game borrows platforming elements from the Prince of Persia games (minus the wall running), shooting mechanics from Epic's Gears of War, and the subject matter of a Tomb Raider game. Visually, it's a stunning game, with extraordinary textures. Drake's character is fascinating to watch, and he's full of gestures and quips motivated by context. When he walks the wrinkles of his shirt move and crease appropriately. When he swims, all the material gets wet, and eventually dries off. He even breathes heavily from the workout a swim gives him. And those are just the surface details--it's the nuanced features that make make you appreciate Drake as a human being. He curses and gets visibly irritated when he runs out of ammo in the middle of a firefight. When he's hiding behind cover, he flinches as bullets graze the wall he's hiding behind. And thanks to an innovative technique that blends various animations together at random, when Drake shoots and takes cover, the pose he comes back to tends to look a little different each time. When all of these details accumulate, it makes for a pretty rich experience. This game is one of the most immersive gaming experiences I've had this year, and it's definitely a great reason to own a PS3. The mix of platforming and gunplay worked really well and left me craving the next title in the series. Hear that, Naughty Dog? Get to work!
