Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception review

You can read this review in full in our print edition.

In our December 2011 issue, which is with subscribers now and in UK newsagents from October 25, our review includes a Post Script article specifically examining Drake's Deception's monumental set piece design.

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The appeal of the Uncharted series hinges on a seductive premise. With modern life tempting us to believe our world has been strip-mined of all its mysteries, imagine if there were still priceless artefacts buried like acorns beneath the topsoil. Potentially in our own back garden, or under the pavement. Imagine if the planet we’ve spent our lives married to was still capable of surrendering anecdotes we’d never heard. What if you didn’t need any special credentials to chase these ancient heirlooms, just bull-headed curiosity, a penchant for throwaway one-liners, and a handful of friends who didn’t mind helping you out every time you tumble over a ledge, painfully dislocating a shoulder in the process?

The latest chapter in Naughty Dog’s adventure saga has a lofty pedigree to live up to. Its predecessor Uncharted 2 has sold nearly five million copies and boasts the second-highest aggregated review score of any PS3 title in the console’s history behind GTAIV. How do you follow up a success of that magnitude? The design logic guiding action sequels would appear to be straightforward: double the size of the explosions, then double them again. And once more just to be safe. But this approach gets problematic when applied to Naughty Dog’s storytelling framework. Creative director and writer Amy Hennig has taken great pains to keep Uncharted a character-driven epic. How do you appease fans with action set-pieces that feel sufficiently upgraded, without losing the intimacy of characters’ personal journeys amidst the resulting spectacle?

One of the great coups of Uncharted 3 is that Naughty Dog manages to push its action to broader places while illuminating aspects of its hero Nathan Drake that previously felt opaque. The Drake of previous instalments was a likable everyman, historically conversant but inescapably shallow. Sure, he could save the day, get the girl (correction: girls) and crack a joke as deftly as Indiana Jones did a whip. But he could just as often feel like a vacuous narcissist with a taste for looting and third-world killing sprees. The studio’s approach to developing its protagonist this time amounts to a quest for a buried treasure that nobody is entirely certain exists to begin with.

Each game’s plot has orbited a signature relic, which both figured into the narrative and spun hypnotically in the corner of the screen during loading intervals. It’s a telling detail that the third game’s equivalent of Uncharted 2’s dagger turns out to be a ring that once belonged to Sir Francis Drake. Uncharted 3 hosts its fair share of gun battles and bloodshed, yet themes of fidelity and commitment muscle their way to the fore repeatedly. The backdrop of violence merely serves as a furnace which repeatedly tests the relationships between Drake and his comrades, most notably his mentor and father figure Victor ‘Sully’ Sullivan.

In pursuit of a legendary Arabian city that Sir Francis Drake allegedly discovered and kept secret from his expedition’s sponsor, Queen Elizabeth, Uncharted 3 upholds the series’ tradition of blurring the line between history and fiction while whisking players around the globe. From mansion ruins nestled in France’s emerald-green countryside or a moonlit stone fortress in Syria, to a ghostly cruise liner that threatens to drag our hero into the ocean depths, Uncharted 3 refreshes its backdrop with the clockwork dependability of a Nintendo title. Because Naughty Dog’s artists invest each setting with such exhaustive detail, you may not even realise you’re being treated to the most exquisite fire, desert and sky levels since Super Mario Bros 3. The water level delivers the campaign’s set-pièce de résistance by floating its cruise ship atop a procedurally generated ocean before tilting 90 degrees in an echo of Uncharted 2’s prologue.

As thrilling as the action segments prove, if you’re looking for Uncharted 3 to keep a nonstop dosage of adrenaline flowing into your IV drip, you may grow fidgety at times. Several key sequences in the game, including an early flashback that finds Drake poking around a Colombian museum and trailing a slow-moving target, slacken the game’s pace deliberately. Uncharted 3 builds resonance into these pauses for breath. A late-game meander across sprawling sand dunes takes its precious time resolving, which allows Drake’s sense of dislocation to fully take root. Naughty Dog understands the power of dynamic contrast. These artfully sculpted doldrums add emotional depth and render the game’s high-flying action moments that much more transcendent. You can’t have a line of poetry without some unstressed syllables, after all, and there is indeed poetry in Uncharted 3. Actual poetry, in fact: one scene weaves a narrated stanza of TS Eliot’s The Waste Land into your gameplay objective onscreen.