some annoying design choices are shielded by great atmosphere and characters.
While Uncharted is a visual marvel with clever level design rivaling that of the most recent Tomb Raider games, Naughty Dog did make some surprisingly bad/awkward design choices for most of the platforming and gunplay sequences. For example, why can i literally blow a hole in a wall, walk through, fire my gun to allow a rope to drop, climb said rope, jump to a ledge, climb over the other side, and as soon as my feet hit the ground 30 baddies run towards me? Did they not hear the excessive noise i so charmingly made entering their uber-secret base? While talking about the bad dudes in uncharted it has to be noted that during the process of playing through the main story mode, you will hear the same 5 lines of dialogue unmercifully every 15 seconds. My personal favorite is while during a massive gunfight you will hear a baddie scream, "There he is!". Here i am, pinned behind a randomly placed crate for the last half hour, killing your baddie friends; and now you see me. Along with the repetition in dialogue, i must admit it is an unnerving experience to kill a baddie only to see the exact same baddie, shirt, weapon and all directly behind him. i believe this is a problem due to the fact that there are apparantly 10,000 baddies on this island which most of the game takes place on. i was half expecting the camera to pan out at the end of the game to reveal the island is in the shape of a skull and is called Isle of the Baddies, where all the baddies are born, live, and subsiquently die by my lone hand.
At this point in the review it seems that i hated uncharted with a feveriously unsatisfied passion; this is not true. i was able to enjoy uncharted thanks to its main character: Nathan Drake. Nate is a hunky twenty-something that spends all his spare time looking for treasure with a creepy old guy named Sully. Oh, and apparantly doing greuling upper body strength training to be able to have his elite ledge hopping skills. The female character, a documentarian, is your run of the mill sassy woman with the "i can do anything" attitude up until she desides to stay behind in a room for no reason allowing you to perform some daunting task alone while she manages to get herself kidnapped. My personal favorite characters are of course, the baddies, which all have the same terrible philipino accent which annoys you when they taunt you after you die with a simple, "You're not so tough." then run off with their 45 other bad dude friends he needed to kill you.
As mentioned before, Uncharted is a banner game for the ps3. That is to say, it is a game that will make people say, "Hey! That game is for the Playstation 3! And its good!". The seemingly endless gunplay sequences are tedious, sometimes boring, and more often than not they appear to only be placed there to elongate the gameplay. Uncharted is lucky it came out on the ps3 due to the fact that i was so excited to turn my playstation on, the notion of an entertaining game was just a bonus. I say it was lucky to be on the playstation 3 because i would allow good characters to cover for bad design and other annoying quirks for any other reason than i want my ps3 to be something besides a dust magnet.