Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune is one of those games that does pretty much everything right. It doesn’t take a lot of chances as far as its subject matter or game design go, but developer Naughty Dog nailed all of its elements so well that it’s nigh-impossible not to enjoy it as a whole. It’s one of the few video games in existence that absolutely nails its tone, writing, voice-acting, character interplay, and cut scenes. The core gameplay — the shooty-shooty and the general character movement — feel fantastic. Uncharted is also, as is necessary to say when talking about it, an incredibly impressive looking game that actually employs the full color spectrum (bright colors!) to display the gorgeous vistas the characters visit as they travel from venue to venue.
And, you know, sometimes it’s great to play a game where everything came together beautifully. That’s not to say it’s without faults, of course, as there is the dirty little secret the game harbors. There’s also the poorly-integrated final sequence leading up to a giant quick-time event against a final boss that was treated as an entirely secondary character for the game’s duration. Unfortunately, both of these blemishes occur near the end of Uncharted. And like any bad ending, it’s easy for these flaws to taint one’s thoughts on the game as a whole as they did with me after my first play-through of the game.
One of the design tenets I hold near and dear in all of my work is that every action a player engages in throughout the course of the game has to feel good and every risk needs to be coupled with a reward. The primary reason that I’ve come back to Uncharted again (hard mode play-through) and again (crushing mode play-through, currently underway) is, in large part, a result of how consistently enjoyable and rewarding the game’s core gameplay remains regardless of what context it’s experienced in.
The first component of Uncharted that’s immediately apparent is the quality of the writing, voice acting, and general character interplay. In the initial scene, the character personalities on display are energetic, charismatic, and constantly bantering back and forth both in the initial cut scene as well as the gameplay that follows. The chemistry shared between Uncharted’s two leads, Nathan Drake (voiced by game industry’s plucky voice actor of choice Nolan North) and Elena Fisher (voiced by the gorgeous Emily Rose), is a rarity in video games. The two carry the game’s script on their shoulders and make the cut scenes that fill the game actual rewards instead of an exercise in pain tolerance. Nolan North’s performance of Nathan Drake is especially notable, as Uncharted is constantly feeding one-liners throughout typical gameplay which provide feedback for head shots, the presence of an absurd amounts of enemies, general contextual flavor, and appropriate dismay and disbelief at the acknowledgment of the insane acrobats required of the player/character. None of the cut scenes or dialogue have any tangible effect on the actual gameplay, but their presence and execution enhance the experience and atmosphere and, therefore, enhance the player’s perception of what he/she is doing in-game.
Uncharted’s ability to capitalize on The Indiana Jones Factor is the next pillar of its success. Given that the Playstation 3’s primary demographic is an average of twenty-eight years old, the presence of Indiana Jones in Generation Y’s collective childhood should not be understated. There isn’t a single guy around my age that I’ve met that wasn’t able to wax lyrical about the role Indiana Jones had on male childhood development. Uncharted takes the criminally underused power fantasy of tomb exploration/archaeology and puts it front and center as it casts players as a plucky, energetic protagonist following his hereditary history through tombs, jungles, traps, and the ruins of forgotten civilizations. The game captures this entire setting and tone with ease in ways that Tomb Raider was never able to do by setting up the exploratory and puzzle-solving gameplay in a way that was fun to play through while rarely being a source of frustration. Much like Infamous (released a couple of years after Uncharted), Nathan Drake jumps from ledge to ledge and platform to platform using a contextually smart control scheme that “highlights” actions for the player and displays safe jumps/transitions naturally by utilizing Nathan Drake’s own body as a sign to the player that the character feels the action is safe. When Nathan Drake feels he can jump from a ledge he’s hanging on to a nearby cliff, he will put out his hand in that direction, and the player simply has to hit jump (while holding the stick in the appropriate direction). It’s a control technique that rarely fails and, as such, allows players to execute slick maneuvers through complicated levels easily and maintain the illusion that they are, basically, as badass like Indiana.
As additional testament to the thoroughness of Uncharted’s personality: Nathan never executes these maneuvers with complete confidence; there is always a “whoa!” or “you have got to be kidding me” or an animation that indicates that he’s struggling to hang on to something. This is both an endearing quality to players as well as further emulation of the Indiana Jones method of progression.
More than anything else, Uncharted is an action game. It utilizes exploration and cut scenes as a way of pacing progression through the game, but more often than not the player is tasked with eliminating bad guys. The heart of Uncharted’s combat is heavily inspired by by the Gears of War cover-heavy gameplay. Nathan can take a few hits, but unlike Batman, he can’t run up to a group of enemies and take them all on in simultaneous free-flowing melee combat. Engaging more than one enemy at a time in melee combat is suicide. Even engaging a single enemy in melee combat is a risky encounter unless Nathan has a tactical upper-hand on him.
As such, cover is the lifeblood of the Uncharted encounter system; gameplay spaces are composed of a mix of cover: crouching, standing, standing/crouching partial cover, and standing/crouching destructible cover. Players are, by design of the space alone, encouraged to be continuously moving through an encounter space as they work on taking out enemies. The game recognized that the typical player will find a single good cover spot and methodically take out enemies rather than utilize the entirety of a battlefield, so the game takes two approaches to managing this. The first is that Uncharted’s AI will aggressively roam the encounter space to attempt to gain the upper hand on the player (including the use of elevation for a height advantage on crouching cover). The second is that the maximum amount of ammunition that the player can keep is kept relatively low compared to the amount of possible damage that enemies can take. These factors work in tandem to make an encounter as dynamic as possible despite the presence of any truly battlefield-altering gameplay features aside from the destructible cover, but the majority of an encounter’s cover is static (though the destructible cover is generally the “ideal” cover).
Players generally don’t have a choice as to how they approach encounters; only about a dozen scenarios have active, unaware enemies as the player approaches. That’s okay, though, because the game’s weapon arsenal is surprisingly deep and balanced. Each weapon is powerful and generally allows players to use whatever weapons best suit their play style; however, players are limited to holding one primary weapon (assault rifles, shotguns, sniper rifles, etc.), one secondary weapon (pistols and sub-machine guns), and grenades. Something that continually impresses me about Uncharted is how each weapon feels enjoyable to use. They are powerful, have the right amount of controller vibration, and have hefty sound effects — once again going back to Uncharted’s all-around solid execution of all of its elements. The player also has three melee attacks to use: a five-hit combo that is fatal but requires a fair amount of time to fully execute, a three-hit “brutal combo” that is risky and timing-dependent, and a single-hit stealth kill (relies on enemies being in an unaware state). Melee combat is often a dangerous endeavor, though, so these attacks are used sparingly.
One of my favorite design flourishes in the game is that the proper execution of the “brutal combo” rewards the player with twice the normal amount of ammunition dropped by the deceased enemy. This is a completely great way of presenting additional situational risk with an appropriate reward.
Unlike the awkward juxtaposition between the narrative character and the gameplay character’s approach to violence in Grand Theft Auto, the violence in Uncharted is always a recognized factor in the story and in the gameplay, but that creates its own sets of problems. There are a few moments when the story takes a dark turn or Nathan Drake gets angry and serious about protecting Elena (this happens relatively early in the story), but for the most part the main three characters in Uncharted are a playfully snarky, energetic, and cheerful bunch. These are the same characters that are, quite literally, slaughtering hundreds upon hundreds of enemies and then joking about it in cut scenes. This is nothing new for video games, but there are occasions where it has struck me as odd.
Uncharted is just one of those rare games that is exceedingly well-executed across the board. Naughty Dog’s thoroughness in carrying the personality and character of Nathan Drake through every aspect of the game while always focusing on the player’s experience is evident throughout the game. It’s a game where every segment feels like it belongs (even my typically-loathed vehicle segments), every weapon feels like a weapon should, and the game as a whole comes across as a cohesive experience.