Uncharted 3

Let's talk difficulty curves.

Video games have a very delicate balance to walk when it comes to making a game just hard enough to be challenging while still making it fun.  For the most part, you get a difficulty curve along the lines of this:

The longer you play (the line going right) the harder the difficulty gets (the line going up).  Some games have a steeper difficulty curve than others, while some simply go flat once you reach a certain point because you've unlocked everything and the game can't make itself any harder and still either remain "realistic" or just become cheap.  This becomes especially difficult in open world games, where you can't always punish people by making a lynx in one part of the map a hundred times harder to kill than a lynx somewhere else on the map.

What does this have to do with Uncharted 3?  Well, either my game is glitchy, or the difficulty curve is so steep it should have a black diamond sign next to it for anybody trying to ski down it.

This is my review of Uncharted 3, a game I might not finish.

Uncharted 3 manages to be even more of a sequel to Uncharted than Uncharted 2 did.  Somehow, Nathan Drake's ring that he inherited from his ancestor (you know, the one he tried to get rid of in the first game) also unlocks an artifact that he wasn't able to steal during his youth.  What he did wind up doing was making a friend of Sully, and it's been a couple decades since then and Nathan and Sully want another crack at whatever the artifact was going to lead them to all those years before.

The game brings back everybody this time, with Chloe once again being part of the crew during the first part of the game, and also introducing a new character, Charlie Cutter, a British man who seems one part Jason Statham, one part archaeologist, and one part soccer hooligan stereotype.  Later on in the game, these characters get replaced by the return of Elena, who is now a foreign correspondent for...well, for some news organization, and has somehow managed to break up with Nathan Drake again between games.  Elena's actually tolerable this game, taking more of a leadership role as she leads Nathan and Sully around, and I found myself agreeing with her more and more as the game went on, especially when it came to the ridiculous lengths the game was having me go to just to get one more piece of the puzzle or when it came to how Nate tends to treat people.

(Here's a hint, guys...when you face the same freaky creatures in multiple tombs, maybe you really should tell someone who joins you for a later tomb "oh, by the way, we're likely to meet these really freaky creatures.")

There's a neat little mystery that gets laid out as well as to whether Nathan Drake has been honest to everybody about his identity, a puzzle I wish they spent more time on before simply tossing it aside to continue their treasure hunt.  There's also much more of an attempt to inject humanity into the secondary characters, with multiple people questioning what it is they're attempting to do and if it's for the right reasons.  Is it for the wealth?  For revenge?  To simply show up the people who are racing them to the treasure?

The graphics are as gorgeous as ever, but considering that Naughty Dog does graphics the way Mario does "jumping" I'm not really sure I should count that as much, especially considering one of my later points.  We get a good variety of locations for Nathan Drake to run, jump, break, and fall through, from a British tunnel system to a capsized ocean liner.

For the most part, I found myself enjoying the game...and then I started to notice a few issues.

The game continues its proud tradition of having bad guys spawn from every side of you, leading you to spending most of a fight hiding behind one wall to pick off enemies as they get closer, then suddenly having six guys with machine guns drop out of the sky behind you to fill your body full of lead.  Considering the game isn't an open world game, it really puzzles me as to why they insist on continuing this trend, since you'd think the goal would be to make a character move forward, not simply run back and forth over the same land killing people.

However, where I think my copy of the game must be glitching is in how unfair the game decides to be when it comes to the enemy placement.  The game makes a point to have melee combat be a huge part of the game play, with chances to dodge, grapple, and even switch between enemies.  It's not as smooth as Batman's fighting in the Arkham games, Nathan's method of handling every big guy he fights is "dodge and then kick him in the crotch."  There are also people who I swear are bulletproof beyond the armor they wear, because multiple times I'd empty four rounds of a shotgun, point blank, into a man's face when he rounded a corner to simply have him calmly raise his shotgun up and kill me in one blast.  Fighting them in melee can be just as tedious as you have to "break away" their armor, but the rest of the enemies on the map don't seem to believe in the one at a time attack rule and will happily shoot you with machine guns, sniper rifles, or even fire an RPG rocket or grenade launcher at the two of you.  I've also noticed that even if you manage to dodge said explosions, your opponent will wade through them completely unharmed.

I've also had difficulties with how the AI expects me to be able to survive fights.  Several times I'd be pinned down with machine gun fire to simply have someone holding an RPG launcher run right up to me and fire the rocket at their feet, killing me instantly.  I've had four different people throw grenades at me at once, leaving me nowhere to leap to, which is of course if Nathan Drake is willing to even dodge.

One of the biggest issues I've had with game play is Nathan Drake's fickle relationship with walls.  Many times my stealth attempts have been blown because I'd walk right up to the closed side of a pair of double doors with an enemy on the other side, press the "stick to the wall like glue" button, and simply have Nathan decide it's the perfect time to do a duck/roll into the room and promptly blow all my efforts.  Other times I'll have a grenade land near me as I'm moving towards cover, and when I press the "leap out of the way" button (hint: it's the same button), Nathan will instead develop an overpowering urge to lean up on a small piece of rubble directly in front of him and squat on the grenade like he's expecting it to hatch.the offspring of Mayzie.

There doesn't seem to be any correlation between what walls Nathan can or cannot crouch or hide behind, as a wall on one side of the room will look identical to a wall on the opposite side of the room, and yet one is immune to Nathan's charm and will rebuff him at every chance it gets.  The same happens with picket fences, piles of rocks, stone walls, and even stacks of shipping containers.

I can handle having to restart a section of a game, though, if I want to be methodical and get the stealth victory for a moral victory, if nothing else, except I would frequently find that Nathan, upon spawning back to the start of the stage, will have actually thrown away the weapons I had at the time.  Instead of a high powered pistol and a sniper rifle, I'd suddenly have a tiny little pistol and no secondary weapon whatsoever.  The enemy, meanwhile, still has shotguns, RPGs, and enough body armor to have seriously turned Custer's last stand into "White Bull's Folly."

However, the most frustrating part, and the key reason I'm not done with the game yet is that I had to restart several hours worth of play because the game decided that after I died, the best way to have me spawn was surrounded by five guys, with one guy with a shotgun standing directly behind me.  Before I could get the screen to even completely fade in, I'd suddenly find my innards flying off into the distance with a resounding "boom."

Perhaps this was a glitch, and not just poor programming.  I had one moment that completely puzzled me during the game, when I was involved in a heavy chase to catch one of the main lieutenants for the main villain (a scene that started with me escaping capture, chasing the man, and then promptly being captured again, meaning it was, when you get right down to it, a waste of time).  The lieutenant ran through a doorway, and when I followed, suddenly the world around me was gone.  I was surrounded by white, with no walls, no shadows, nothing else except Nathan Drake possibly moving forward or perhaps staying in place as his legs flailed in nothingness.

Considering I had just played through a chapter that had me stumbling around while drugged, I thought perhaps Nathan was having a relapse.  I stopped moving him for a moment to ponder the scene, but the game didn't progress.  There was no voice over, no helpful clues pointed out by the game.  I started swiveling the camera around, and finally saw, in the distance, a tiny pinprick of black.  I ran towards it, desperate to get back to some semblance of order, and soon saw the doorway ahead of me again.  Gratefully I plunged through it...to find myself in a crowd in a place I didn't recognize.  I wandered around, lost, until I spotted my target, tried to jump to a balcony that apparently wasn't designed to be grabbed, and plummeted to my death.

Upon reloading I once again headed through the door, but instead of existential horror, I realized that somehow I managed to pass between pixels the first time, as the doorway really did head into the square.

Story-wise, I can't help but notice that the game sure spends a lot of time trying to convince me that playing the game isn't worth it.  Characters insist that no treasure hunt is worth dying for, especially against the forces it appears we're facing.  Others plead with me to stop because they know secondary characters will likely die following me one day.  Each time that happens, I get the feeling that if I was really heroic, I'd simply have Nathan walk into an airport with everybody he knows, have him use those millions he got for treasure hunting in the first game to buy a private island, and have everybody move there.  Oh, and toss that ring out the window somewhere over the ocean and then change his name.

I had the same feeling when Nathan would frequently point out to the people that he was fighting that there were more important things happening than dealing with him.  When you have people rushing into a cargo hold of a cruise liner at the same time it's flooding with water and the ship is starting to capsize, you'd think they'd realize "maybe I should get to a life boat and just forget about this."

I can appreciate a game poking fun at itself by mentioning a few of the tropes and cliches the games are forced to follow, but when the game plays them completely serious like this, I'm left realizing just how ridiculous it is.

I also found myself once again suffering complete disbelief at Nathan Drake's superhuman capabilities.  I found myself actually expressing disbelief at the screen after Nathan gets stranded in a desert.  Without any supplies (even the ones that I knew he just left behind during a rather impressive falling scene from a plane), he goes several days without food and water in the desert.  He's hallucinating, stumbling, and collapsing.  When he finally finds water, all he needs to do in order to once again be jumping up walls like a monkey on caffeine pills is take two sips and splash some water on his face.  I call shenanigans.

So where am I now?  Currently, I'm stuck in a ghost town in the desert, playing through a combat scene that expects me to deal with an armored transport with a machine gun mounted on it while multiple grenades are thrown at me from all sides.  After my seventh attempt to even make it to cover without having the entire world around me explode or get myself perforated with bullets, I had to just set down the controller and walk away for a while.

Maybe I'll come back to it.  Maybe I won't.  But I can honestly say that the game somehow manages to impress me a lot more than the first one...but it also infuriates me more than the first one did as well.  Does that mean it's better?  Worse?  Is it just my copy that's acting this way?  I don't really know, all I know is that I'd want to hear from a few other people to see if they have the same problems I have before I recommend it to anybody.  If even one person says "yes," I think I'd sooner recommend doing a science experiment to see how many different types of  rabid animals you can give a zerbert to.