Uncharted: Drake's Fortune

The Short


Pros
- Fantastic voice acting and script
- Game is a hybrid of third person shooting and Prince of Persia/Tomb Raider platforming
- For a 2007 game, it looks pretty decent
- Swashbuckling adventure in the vein of Indiana Jones
- Vistas and landscapes are impressive and have a tremendous amount of scope

Cons
- Shooting is tedious, with bullet-sponge enemies and weird controls killing the pacing
- Forced Six-Axis controller moments (tipping controller to stay balanced) are awful
- While I like Drake, the fact that he kills so many people in cold-blood kind of...disturbs me
- Story takes a stupid supernatural twist at the end
- Platforming is decent but far from difficult or even slightly challenging
- "Puzzles" are extremely easy

The game looks great in stills, but in action plants look really "plasticy"

The Long

The Uncharted games, made by blockbuster developer Naughty Dog (who also made the fantastic Jak series on the PS2) are easily Sony's biggest franchise. The only game series I can even think that comes close to moving similar numbers is the God of War games, a series that gained momentum by being one of the last great PS2 games. The first Uncharted: Drake's Fortune came out back in 2007, when the PS3 was struggling to gain a foothold against the momentum-hogging Xbox 360. Advertised as a sort of "Tomb Raider" meets "Indiana Jones" meets "Gears of War," Uncharted was one of the games that pushed the PS3's popularity, providing a "killer-app" for many who wanted to embark on Nathan Drake's first adventure into the jungle to find Sir. Francis Drake's hidden stash of treasure.

I didn't play this game until 2010, and it was one of the first games I got on my PS3. I also had already played a bit of Uncharted 2: Among Thieves first, but I abandoned it because I wanted to play through this (the first game) just in case I missed some story elements or something of the sort. Note this was also after the absolutely killer third-person cover-based shooter Gears of War 2 had curb-stomped its way onto the market, a game I'd spent hours upon hours of time with. I also absolutely love the modern Prince of Persia games, so I figured this would be a match made in heaven.

Was it? Well...no. Not this first iteration of the Uncharted series, anyway. 

Despite having that "early HD" look with its textures, the shadows and backdrops were top notch, if a bit repetitive 

First off, let me cover what Uncharted does right. It would be safe to say that Naughty Dog probably has some of the best script writers in the business (even if their stories aren't that great to back them up), paired up with some absolutely incredible voice talent. Nolan North (now video game famous for providing his voice in every game ever made) voices our star Nathan Drake, a literal descendent of Sir Francis Drake, who find out his great-great-whatever-grandfather left a stash of buried treasure way off on some hidden island. After crash landing the plane and getting separated from the reporter slash love interest he brought along, Nathan embarks on a quest to outrace the bad guys in order to make sweet, sweet cash.

Sounds a lost like an Indian Jones movie, doesn't it? Well, it's close.

Nathan Drake is a very charismatic character, as is Elena, the girl he brought along. Drake's old mentor, Sully, is also an extremely interesting and well-realized character. Drake has a nasty habit of talking to himself constantly (as well as as saying "oh crap" every single time something goes wrong, which is often), but the dialogue is so well written I'm willing to forgive it. I'm reminded of the Prince's narration in The Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, which is what I consider to be one of the best written scripts in any video game ever, so that's a lofty comparison. When the characters are together and playing off each other the banter is entertaining and realistic, making their witty exchanges an absolute joy to listen to. While it's true the story is a bit...weak (get money before other guy does) I'm willing to forgive because the ride it took me on (at least with the dialogue) was so great.

The architecture in this game is astounding. Bonus points since you can climb it. 

Another big perk is the fact that the game looks incredible. If you put it alongside most modern games you would notice that some things look a little...off. The whole thing has that "shiny plastic" element going about it that you saw in a lot of first and second generation games this round of consoles, and they tend to like to overlight everything in an attempt to show everything off. The areas also get really repetitive, with 90% of the game you switching between being outside in a jungle, climbing across ruins, or exploring ruins in the jungle. You do get some bits where you are underground at the end, which is a decent change of pace (though not as pretty). All these complants are really minor, though, especially considering this game came out in 2007. They wanted something that showed the power of the PS3, and boy did they get it. This pedigree of incredible-looking-ness carried over to both Uncharted 2 & 3, which are easily some of the prettiest games I've ever played.

So far this review has been very positive, which is good. The aesthetics of Uncharted (both this game and the whole series) have always been their biggest selling point, with Naughty Dog and Sony sparing no expense with production values. The problem with Uncharted: Drake's Fortune, however, comes when you start playing the game.

Drake is mad because it takes a full clip from an AK-47 just to kill one dude

As stated, Uncharted: Drake's Fortune is a hybrid between the cover-based shooting of Gears of War and the platforming puzzles of Tomb Raider or Prince of Persia. The problem is that Uncharted (like it's main character) is a jack-of-all-trades it is a master of few. Shooting in Uncharted feels really clunky, with aiming never clicking with me and cover controls annoying. Simple commands like swapping weapons or picking up ammo also seemed weirdly disconnected, like I'd be standing over a gun a certain way and the prompt wouldn't appear, or I'd press the Triangle button to swap guns and nothing would happen. These poor controls are only exacerbated by the fact that Uncharted apparently really wanted to be a third person shooter: there are tons of enemies in this game. Normally I'd be fine with this, but another massive issue is all enemies are bullet-sponges. It can take literally minutes to take down just one or two guys, waiting for them to come out of cover and then taking a few daring pot-shots as they relocate. Skirmishes drag on and on, with the game rarely giving you a break between them. This tedium made me put the game down several times out of sheer frustration and bordom, because whenever I saw another fight coming up I really, really didn't want to do it. Perhaps one of these two things (bad controls and immortal/hordes of enemies) broken on its own wouldn't be that big of a deal, but the pairing of them make Uncharted: Drake's Fortune unbearably frustrating.

Your adventure takes some weird, swashbuckling turns throughout

The other issue is the climbing and puzzles. While interesting, Uncharted is very clear on where you need to go, mostly. Let me backtrack a second and explain why I think this is. In Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time they introduce a ton of really difficult platforming puzzles that challenge your response time and button dexterity. In any other game, these feats of platforming would be infuriating: you'd die constantly and have to start over. But PoP introduced a new mechanic: time reversal. Basically a "rewind" that you can activate and deactivate at your leisure (though you have a limited number of charges), this meant the developers could make their insanely difficult platforming segments, because it was less of "dying a lot" and more of "learning it through easily-fixed mistakes." It was brilliant and I wish more games stole it.

Skip forward to Uncharted. There is no time-reversal mechanic; it relies on normal checkpointing systems. This means every platforming segment is one of two things: really easy because Naughty Dog didn't want you pulling your hair out in frustration all the time, or designed to make you pull your hair out in frustration every time. Granted, there's lots more of the former than the latter (thankfully) but if I knew I was just getting vanilla "easy" platforming I'd have gone back to Prince of Persia. Again, it's that whole "jack of all trades but master of none" problem: Uncharted wanted to marry two genres together, but didn't do it particularly well. Which would have been fine if I hadn't already played both Gears of War 2 and Prince of Persia before. Because I had, Uncharted: Drake's Fortune felt clunky, cheap, unfun, and boring in comparison.

The animations are great, but the melee attack is total garbage

It's worth noting that the sequels to Uncharted do a much better job at being both a shooter and a platformer. While still not on par with the previously-mentioned greats, they also bumped up the formula by increasing the number of places you visit, the set-pieces you encounter, and just knocking the "crazy" out of the park. You don't care if climbing is boring or simple if you are climbing up a train that's dangling off the edge of a cliff in a blizzard and slowly falling apart as you try to get to the top (Uncharted 2 starts with a bang, we'll just leave it at that). But if it's just around some ruines that looked exactly like the last batch...might start to notice that the game really isn't doing much for you.

I also have to get this off my chest: as much as I think Nathan Drake is a charming, witty, roguish protagonist, I can't also help but think he's a huge psychopath. You kill hundreds of guys in this game, probably more in the first couple hours than every person Indian Jones killed across all four of his movies. And at least in Indiana Jones he was killing Nazies (or at least people we knew were totally evil); in Uncharted Drake offs guys that were just hired by another guy to recover the treasure before Drake. I see no reason to believe the antagonists in these games are particularly evil, or if they are they certainly don't deserve to die for it, and their poor, underpaid henchmen with no health insurance really don't deserve to have their heads popped just because Drake wanted some gold before them. Which reminds me of another thing: he's making snarky remarks constantly, even when killing dudes. How sadistic is that? He's killing just some regular guys, and joking about it? This guy should have post-traumatic stress disorder in spades! He's killed more people across these games than probably the total death count in Operation: Desert Storm!

At least I'm not the only one who thought this; Penny Arcade knows. 

As it stands, Uncharted: Drake's Fortune is just...not fun. I didn't enjoy it. Yeah I loved looking at it and hearing it, but anything that involved ducking into cover or shooting (and a good 80% of the game seemed to be that) was just a tedious, obnoxious drag. As I've said: the later games fix a lot of this one's problems, and this was the first in a series and the first attempt to merge these genres by Naughty Dog. But just because a game is pretty or tries hard doesn't mean it's worth playing, and I only really suggest playing Uncharted: Drake's Fortune if you really don't mind some awful shooting.

Then again, everybody else gave this game insane amounts of praise (as evidenced by its metacritic) so I'm pretty sure I'm the minority here. I finished it mostly to see if there was anything I needed to know before playing Uncharted 2. There wasn't really, so you could probably just start on the second game and it would work out just fine.

If you still want to attempt it, I'd say it's worth $5-10. It's pretty and well-written (minus a weird supernatural thing at the end that is mega-lame) and tries really hard. But know you might throw your controller against the wall in frustration at times. 

Two out of five stars.