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This review originally appeared in E183, Christmas 2007.
If you expect Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune to begin with a cutscene, you’d be right. If you expect to negotiate beautiful environments and fight mercenaries, shoot explosive barrels and scale ruins, you’d be right. In fact, you’d be right with almost any informed prediction about Uncharted’s content. But the fact that you’re right doesn’t begin to explain why, despite everything about it being a little predictable, Uncharted manages to get it right.
The games it takes as its inspirations are the best examples of their type – the shooting from Gears Of War and Resident Evil 4, the adventuring from Tomb Raider and Prince Of Persia. Uncharted is brazen in its borrowings, but it is also selective and never ambitious to excess: the whole experience is carefully crafted and perhaps its greatest achievement is in its pacing, which alternates between combat and exploration (and occasionally a vehicle section) with a real consideration for the player. It is one of the great lessons it learns from Resident Evil 4 and, although Uncharted never quite manages to reach that level of breathless excitement, it makes the basic core of the game replayable rather than repetitious.
The combat exemplifies this: at heart it is little more than a very good example of the cover/fire school of gameplay, perhaps not quite as exaggerated as that of Gears Of War. But it is distinguished through variation in environmental layouts such that, even though you’re facing the same types of enemy for most of the game, each encounter demands something slightly different from the one before.
There’s a reasonable selection of weapons, all with their own quirks (although the pistol is your best friend), but the real pleasure – and the second factor that elevates Uncharted above the ranks of imitator – is to be found in the Indiana Jones close combat. This is incorporated into your fighting in several ways, whether as a five-punch combo to finish off a lone gunman or a flying dropkick when an enemy is blocking your hurried escape, and when used properly it’s an invaluable addition to your armory. The only disappointment lies in some problems with the cover system, with Drake occasionally refusing to respond to your urgent commands next to doors – a stumbling block within its free-flowing context.
The adventuring sections are more straightforward than the combat, alternating between the odd puzzle and many athletic sections where Drake has to clamber up, around, inside and out of various structures. Jumping and hanging from cracks and pillars is more reminiscent of Prince Of Persia: The Sands Of Time than the Tomb Raider series to which Uncharted has been compared, and gains in spectacle what it loses in scope.