A slew of bad design decisions hinder the good times to be had in Naughty Dog's action-adventure title.
Uncharted eschews the more stylized tone of Naughty Dog's previous games, instead setting its sights heavily on a more realistic approach, one influenced heavily by the likes of Indiana Jones, National Treasure, Tomb Raider, and Gears of War, and while Uncharted heavily borrows from all of these other franchises, it does so fairly well.
You play the role of Nathan Drake, a wise-cracking treasure hunter on the trail of a lost fortune that was supposedly discovered by Sir Francis Drake, who Nate claims to be descended from. He's joined on the hunt by his old friend Sully, a likable, older man with a taste for wine, women, and riches, and a young reporter named Elena who's hoping that tagging along will result in a good story for her TV show. Of course, no good adventure story is complete without a good bad guy, and Drake's Fortune has plenty of them to go around, and like they game's heroes, they fit firmly within archtypes already established by the genre. While the story starts rather slowly with the discovery of Sir Francis' notebook, but it really picks up when the team follows the clues the old Englishman left behind to a lush tropical island that they believe to be the resting place of a lost relic that Drake was believed to have found. It's pretty standard fare as far as adventure stories go, and you'll likely see the twists and turns coming, but a decent script, likeable characters, great voice acting, and beautifully rendered cutscenes go a long way in selling Drake's tale.
The cutscenes aren't the only beautiful thing about the game, either. The environments are gorgeous, colorful, and varied, and the game delights just as much in showing off the astonishing level of detail present in its lush jungles as it does in its decaying, but magnificent ruins. Particular care was paid to the character models as well, but the real star of the show here is in the animations. The little touches, such as the way Nate's shirt shifts as he walks, the way he barely manages to hang on to ledges after a particularly long jump really adds to the immersion. Despite all of the splendor on-screen, loading times and frame rate dips are nearly non-existent, though the game does suffer from the occasional bout of texture pop-in.
Uncharted sounds just as good as it looks. Weapon fire sounds appropriately threatening, explosions are loud and distracting, and as mentioned earlier the in-game dialogue is always crisp, clear, and well delivered. The game's score, while a bit understated, works well, and is always ready to deliver the thing that will fit the actions on-screen.
Unfortunately, Uncharted's core gameplay is nowhere near as impressive as the production values that surround it. Gameplay revolves around three main facets: combat, platforming, and puzzles.
Combat is the most impressive. The game provides you with a slew of pistols, shotguns, assault rifles, and even the odd grenade launcher or two to get the job done, and with the exception of grenades the foundation that the game's gunplay is built on is a fairly solid one. The game makes use of the Sixaxis motion controls to determine the arc of grenades, which means that throwing grenades on the fly and expecting anything resembling an accurate toss is out of the question. Fortunately, most of the time you spend shooting will be spent behind cover, because Nate can't take much damage, so this mitigates the issue somewhat. However, you will likely find yourself struggling with the system more often than not.
When Nate does take damage, the screen goes white, making enemies more difficult to see, and death a much more common occurrence. On the other hand, the enemies you'll fight can more than to half a clip to put down, so aiming for the head is a necessity. Unfortunately, the hit detection is a little wonky, and there are times when it seems that the game is cheating you out of headshots.
In addition to their unnatural resistance to bullets, enemies are fairly intelligent, and will toss grenades, use flanking tactics, and take cover themselves to make firefights more interesting. Unfortunately, all of these things put together can be problematic, and the game can go from very easy to frustratingly difficult quite suddenly when it decides to throw wave after wave of baddies at you in spaces where your movement or cover options are limited. While Nate does posses some skills in close combat, getting close to enemies in most situations is nearly impossible, so most of the time you'll find yourself relying on your guns.
In comparison, the game's environmental puzzles and platforming are significantly easier, though they suffer from their own set of issues. You'll find yourself swinging on vines, clambering up ledges, and making great leaps to guide Nate throughout the game, and while the platforming itself is almost pathetically easy, the platforming sections are linear to the point of being restrictive. Nate can only jump on certain objects in the environment, so while it may seem like you can climb on a slab of stone that is exactly your height, you often can't. On the other hand, Nate will suddenly be able to jump far higher and longer than he usually is should the designers have engineered whatever you're jumping to or on be a part of that linear path. This also means that while it may appear that you can skip certain parts of certain sections entirely, Nate will be unable to grab things that are literally a foot above his head. In the end, these arbitrary limitations break the immersion that the game works so hard to build, and makes certain platforming sections unnecessarily frustrating, because you must determine the precise path the game wants you to take, rather than the path that it looks like you should be able to take.
This kind of design permeates the levels you'll be traveling through, as well, and because of this, levels often feel as though they are on-rails, and sometimes it seems the game is more concerned with offering the player an overly scripted, cinematic experience than something that is fun to play.
Environmental puzzles suffer a similar fate, largely because the game takes all the fun out of solving them by solving them for you. Every time you encounter a puzzle, the game will prompt Nate to open Drake's journal, which will lay out the entire solution to the puzzle, which is convenient, because the environment itself offers absolutely no clues to solving any of the puzzles whatsoever. So the puzzle design itself is not only poor, there's no sense of mystery or accomplishment in the act of solving any puzzle the game presents you with.
The game occasionally moves away from these core elements to add vehicle sections, one in which you man the gun on the back of a jeep, and another in which you pilot a jet ski upriver, and quick time events. Unfortunately, the vehicle sections suffer from an overabundance of scripting as well, especially in the turret section, in which the game will rip control of the gun away from you and force you to point it a certain way to manage the enemies that are coming after you from directions that would be far easier to manage if the game allowed you complete control over the turret. The quick time events, while rare, are often unexpected, and not implemented as well as in games such as God of War and Resident Evil. Unsurprisingly, the novelty they provide wears thin very quickly.
While Uncharted doesn't have a multiplayer mode to compliment its rather short campaign, the campaign does feature collectibles and an Achievemnet-esque system that allows you to unlock alternate costumes, a making-of featurette, concept art, and bonuses such as an in-game weapon select to add some replay value should you choose to complete the adventure again on the highest difficulty, which only unlocks after you've already beaten the game.
Ultimately, Uncharted is a game with great production values and fun combat that gets bogged down in its heavy use of scripting. It's as if Naughty Dog was afraid that giving the player too much control might break the elaborate illusion that the game works so hard to create. Unfortunately, arbitrarily restricting that control has the same effect, and to the game's detriment, and often, the developer comes across as a young child trying to show off, shoving a drawing made with crayon into your face, shouting, "Look, look, isn't this cool?"
No, Naughty Dog. No, it isn't.