Uncharted Series Video Games Review.

The Uncharted series is a series of action-adventure games developed exclusively for the PlayStation by the legendary game developers Naughty Dog, known for being masters at their craft and developing generation-defining games such as the Crash Bandicoot games and the Jak and Daxter series and more recently The Last Of Us, All games which I have not only completed but played and played until there was nothing else to do. Naughty Dog is as I said ‘Masters of their craft’ and the Uncharted series is one of the best series of games I have ever played and it’s strange because they are all pretty similar and don’t really do much to reinvent itself over the previous entry, however, they don’t become tedious or repetitive I actually enjoyed myself the more I played and even played through each campaign twice and platinumed the game before I moved on to the next one. So having played these games quite a lot one after the other I thought I would make this review a little different and review these games as a whole series and just round up each game to a general consensus but point out major differences and faults for each game individually where I feel it’s needed so I don’t keep repeating myself for each game because as I said they are all pretty similar to one another.

From a gameplay perspective, the games are all played from a 3rd person perspective and you take control of the protagonist and famous fortune hunter Nathan Drake each game uses a cover and shoot system and run and gun option, and with some optional stealth segments, it lets the gamer choose their game approach and play style. You can go in guns blazing running around like a madman or you can be more sensible and take cover and shoot enemies as they give you chance or thirdly you can try to be stealthy in certain segments if you’re tired of the aplenty gunfights you’re going to have it just give you an optional break. The Gameplay throughout the series is pretty flawless in every aspect with the aforementioned gunplay mixed in with satisfying platforming and fun puzzles mixed in. The games are a blast to play from start to finish with very little changes to the formula throughout (because why fix something when it isn’t broken) however Uncharted 4 adds in a worthy gameplay addition of the grapple hook and this is so much fun to use. swinging through the much larger levels and Indiana Jonesing yourself toward an unsuspecting or suspecting enemy is a delight and just makes me wish that it was implemented into earlier titles.

I played the Remastered versions of the original 3 games on the PS4 and had no issues with the performance of the games the frame rate never dipped to an unplayable rate, the textures and edges were crisp, animations were smooth and the gameplay input was quickly responsive across all titles with visuals and performance ever so slightly improving as I progressed through the titles with a huge graphical upgrade in the fourth entry and it blew my mind that I was able to control someone with the look and feel of a live-action movie. Honestly, the cutscenes in the fourth entry look incredible and the gameplay matches them no CGI cutscenes here and sub-par gameplay graphics. What you watch is what you play.

All the games story follow a similar premise with a slight detour in the fourth game but here is the timeline on how the first 3 games played out

Intro
Plot Introduced and problems are prominent.
Hero’s travel to find some treasure that’s going to help in some way
They have a Revelation that usually involves the supernatural
Problem is solved and they save the world

And here is the fourth game timeline

Intro
Plot Introduced and problems are prominent
Heros travel the find some treasure that’s going to help them.
They have a Revelation
Problem is solved

Now even though the games follow a basic/ similar premise to one another each entry tells a compelling and interesting story of its own without relying to much on what previous entries have laid out and were full of emotion, laughs and some great moments of spelunking, adventure and action. My only flaw is I missed the supernatural element to the fourth game as they didn’t have any of the ‘Monster’ enemies seen in the previous three titles and it would have been something I would have liked to have seen especially with how beautiful this game looks in terms of design. They could have done something great.

As I mentioned I played through these multiple times and did not get bored and would probably replay these again one day, as they are just so much fun even just playing the single player gave me enough to keep wanting to play and yeah I had a few multiplayer games just to earn the trophies. And for the short time, I played it I really enjoyed it…which was a surprise as I usually find playing multiplayer games in video games tedious and boring as I am mostly a single-player story-driven kind of gamer.

I didn’t play these games when they first released but lets just pretend I picked these up at their first retail price, the Nathan Drake collection would have cost me £30 and UC4 £50 totalling up to £80 and these games are worth that price and more they deliver some of the best games I have played in a while and in a nutshell are just a blast to play. If you are wondering, I picked all four of these games up for £35…absolute bargain!

So even though I grouped the games into one review I am going to give each game a score as normal then round up all four overall scores to give the series an overall score.

Uncharted Drakes Fortune