Uncharted: Drake's Fortune

The Uncharted series falls in with the Halo series, the Gears of War series, and other games from the past generation of systems that aren't likely to die any time soon.  Each game has received mountains of accolades, and multiple sources have named various entries in the series as the "Game of the Year" for that year.  However, as we all know, I'm terribly behind when it comes to "big" titles, but having played more recent games from Naughty Dog studios, will these hold up to my eye?  Can they tolerate being overthought about?  Was that last sentence even grammatically correct?  At least two of these questions will hopefully be answered in the upcoming weeks.

So let's start out with the first game of the series, the rookie entry that managed to be picked as Ign's game of the year of 2007 for the PS3 and maintains a score on Metacritic in the high 80s.

Uncharted: Drake's Fortune is a spiritual successor to Tomb Raider during a time when nobody thought there would ever be a truly great Tomb Raider game again.  The game does strive to differ itself from its heritage by mixing in some wall cover and better voice acting, as well as turning a female British lead character into a male American with bad hair.  The story is that a long lost treasure is being sought after by Nathan Drake, supposed descendant of Sir Francis Drake, but that plot thread is all but forgotten lest someone realize how many plot holes leaving the question open would create.

The game has some pretty remarkable things about it.  The soundtrack is extremely well crafted, with the music doing well building tension and letting you know when combat comes to an end (sometimes).  This can be a little frustrating when you think you killed all of the enemies and the soundtrack is still blaring on as you search for that one missing person.

There is a very impressive water mechanic in the game, with water moving and shining with a realism I hadn't seen since Hydrophobia.  The clothing on the characters will get wet depending on how much contact there is with moisture, and it's a neat little detail to catch while playing.

The combat controls are also pretty well built, with a nice adjustable sensitivity to the cursor that allows me to make it more responsive when I'm in a huge firefight and easier to slide around slowly when I'm trying to pick people off without taking a bullet to the face.

Oh, and the captions worked on my non-HD television, so bonus points for that.

Now let's get to everything else.

This game infuriated me like no other game since F-Zero for the GameCube, and that's a game I went through four controllers trying to play.  The characters, the story, and the game play style bothered me on every level, and major game decisions that were made bothered me to the point where I could barely focus on playing the game.

Let's start with the characters.

Nathan Drake and his potential love interest Elena, as well as sidekick Sully, are some of the most obnoxious characters I've ever had the misfortune of playing with.  All three are loathsome, but in their own unique ways, which I guess is something the studio can take pride in, since so many games have a cast I hate for the same reason across the board (see: Gears of War).  Sully is a rather blatant attempt to get an aging Bruce Campbell character from Burn Notice without having to pay any licensing fees, except they forgot that even Bruce Campbell can have an understanding of when a moment is supposed to be dramatic.  Instead, Sully is a misogynistic ass who feels like any time people question him about anything he can act like it's a personal insult.  There's a moment when Nathan is asking him how he's still alive after an important scene  earlier in the game, and Sully is quick to accuse Nathan of not sticking around to check for a pulse.

Yes, Sully, Nathan should certainly stick around to see if you're alive when he just saw you (spoiler alert) shot in the chest and then had people shooting at him.  How dare he not let himself actually get killed in order to learn that you weren't killed.  I know, why don't you tell more stories about women you used at bars around the world, I'm sure that'll endear me more to you.  Or better yet, why don't you deflate any moment the game's visual designers tried to take to let me admire the graphics by either being trite, insulting, or simply obnoxious.

Elena and Nathan suffer some of the same condition, which is that neither one really seems to care what happens to them or what happens to other people.  Elena's voice actress is Emily Rose, and I'm actually a pretty big fan of hers from seeing her perform on Haven.  However, apparently all of her notes in the script call for her to do her best like she learned to talk from all of the "funny" clips from episodes of Joss Whedon programs without anything to counteract it so we have a sense of her doing anything except be overly dramatic or completely snarky.  She also seems to go from "oh my god people are shooting at us" at the beginning of the game to "Nathan, you coward, man up so we can get shot at some more" at the drop of a hat, and I left the game feeling like she was more annoying than anything else.

Nathan, of course, went to the same school of "how to act like Joss Whedon is directing you" but dropped out before Elena did, because he's even worse.  I had to learn to block out all the times he'd go "oh great" when a squad of people would show up to shoot at him, and I get that they wanted a more "human" character who might "almost" miss an edge or panic a bit when sliding down a rocky slope, but it loses a bit of impact when it seems to happen all the time.  He's either just lucky, in which case I'm waiting to see him when he luck runs out and he swings on a vine face-first into a cliff face, or he's just showboating in which case he's a bit of a tool.

But I can't put all the blame on the characters, the storyline and writing are also mind-numbingly bad.  It's obvious the game wanted to be Tomb Raider with a more Indiana Jones/National Treasure feel to it, but what the writers forgot was that, at least in the Indiana Jones movies, they allow there to be some actual dramatic build-up before something like "Indy shoots the guy with the sword" happens and we all laugh.  Nathan and Elena bounce around from tomb to tomb to bunker to tomb all while trading witty banter and not really appreciating what's going on around them.  Then again, they seem to also realize how little sense the story makes, and even comment on it a few times.

There's a moment when Nathan has to cross a rather dangerous patch of ground, leaving Elena behind because she agrees that she'd never make it.  However, immediately upon arrival, Elena shows up at the other side and Nathan even comments "how did you get here?"  It's a valid question the game brushes aside, because I was shouting the exact same thing at the screen when Nathan asked it.  If there was an alternate means of getting there that didn't call for my risking having to restart the chapter I'm on if I fail, then it means all the game playing I just did was completely pointless.

The game also seems to intentionally act as if characters having actual "moments" are things to be avoided at all costs.  A great moment where Elena tells Nathan to "be careful" when the game seems determined to let the two actually have a moment to pause is ruined a second later by Nathan (predictably, and with my saying out loud "oh, no" as I predicted what was going to happen) banging his head on a low ledge.

Characters exist for no discernible reason, such as one of the final bosses who shows up and just happens to be a total expert on the mystical artifact that nobody knew existed until Nathan and Sully figured it out, to the point that he knows what the major plot twist is before anybody else.  There's a leader of a gang of mercenaries who I honestly couldn't tell if he was supposed to be connected to the pirates at the beginning of the game or if he just magically showed up halfway through to fill in some more of the missing token ethnicity representatives of the game.  The primary villain through the game seems to have the stupidest logic that ever existed in that he keeps instructing his men "hey, why don't you guys keep trying to kill the one guy who figures everything out before we do" instead of, oh, I don't know, trying to hire him or at least capture him alive to use as a resource?

Speaking of hiring people, apparently the soldiers he was able to hire are the entire graduating class from Hogwarts because "magic" is the only way I can think of that they keep showing up in areas that, as Nathan and others plainly explain, have "not been explored in centuries" that they solve puzzles to figure out the entrance to.  I'll be creeping along some underground passage that required an admittedly not-that-hard puzzle to solve, just to find a swarm of armed goons waiting for me past the first staircase, leading me to again wonder "why am I trying so hard when there's obviously easier ways to do this?"

Magic is also the only way I can think of explaining the game's favorite trick to pull that ticked me off, having bad guys spawn from directly behind you when you just came that way and didn't leave anybody alive who could shoot at you.  There were so many times I'd be on the side of a field that I entered from finishing off picking off the few remaining soldiers with my pistol when suddenly I'd be surrounded (and killed almost instantly) by new enemies that dropped down all around me, when I guess I was supposed to charge into battle and then charge back to kill all the newcomers.

This isn't even getting into how, in multiple locations that the game explicitly states have gone undisturbed for centuries, I can wind up in a shooting match against the game's feeble attempt to go "horror" on me surrounded by modern weapons carelessly littered across the ground.  The only way I can think of explaining it is that the magical troops tried to use their latent teleport abilities to send a crate of weapons from one squad to another and somehow missed.

On a side note, while I'm not quite sure I'd agree with Zero Punctuation's review that the game is racist for having you kill every ethnicity but "white," I can't help but think I must have waded through hundreds of people through the game, which leads to a major flaw in a game that wants you to spend time exploring and finding hidden treasures: why would I want to explore when all I'm going to find are more people to shoot at me?  The Tomb Raider series did a great job promoting exploration by not having every patch of ground contain a regiment of troops for you to slaughter, letting you take your time to poke into every nook and cranny, try climbing ledges and see if you can reach new heights to see what treats the game developers left you as a reward.  In Uncharted, I just kept running forward because I couldn't really tell sometimes if the music just got faint and the jungle sounds got louder or if the combat music actually stopped and I didn't need to worry about a random goon bulls-eyeing me in the head with a 9mm pistol from a football field's distance away.  But either way, by the time combat ended I had already been in every corner of the map trying to avoid being shot (or worse, instant-killed by soldiers who appeared out of nowhere right next to me with shotguns) and after having killed the thirtieth guy I was rather sick of the place and just wanted to move on with the grind.

That's the word I was looking for, game.  Playing you felt like a grind, only instead of earning experience points or better loot, all I got was snarky commentary and MORE GRINDING.

Looking at the guides online, there is also apparently a means of doing a "stealth kill" to people you can sneak up behind, but considering the game attempted to give me every other tutorial in the game several times (thank you game, I know how to fire a gun, stop telling me) and not once ever tried to explain how to "stealth kill" someone, I just assumed it didn't exist, and just got more furious every time Nathan would say "let's see if I can get by them silently."  Because he can't.  They have the peripheral vision of owls.

And often the game would plant you right next to a sniper rifle without a silencer on it, so what's the point of telling me to sneak around when you seem to be rewarding me for doing exactly the opposite?

Oh, and let's get to the vehicle sections.  Many of the vehicle sections I enjoyed.  A moment on a Jeep with a machine gun was rather entertaining, though I don't understand why I was suddenly forced to point the gun to the side instead of backwards when I could have just kept shooting the vehicles as they came instead of waiting for them to be right up alongside me.  However, if I never have to pilot another jet ski in the game series, I'll be happy.

Here's a hint, game.  Needing to pilot a jet ski with one character while being shot at, fine, I can live with that.  Needing to fire a gun with a character while someone else pilots the jet ski, I could manage with provided the AI wasn't as dense as a brick.  Needing to pilot a jet ski with one character while also handling firing weapons with a second character (using a mysteriously never-ending supply of grenades in a grenade launcher that the secondary character seems to just as suddenly lose when it would come in really handy later) is bad, but not terrible.  Making me pilot with one character and shoot with a second character while there are river rapids constantly pushing me backwards and having exploding barrels come around corners to dodge while I'm trying to line up a shot off in the distance is just being intentionally mean.  You can't steer forward and aim the gun off to the side, the controls just don't like that and my thumbs weren't meant to conflict that way since the pilot character can no longer see where he's going while I'm shooting sideways.

With a story line with plot holes so big that they disturb the orbit of passing planets, characters so shallow and unlikable that I'm silently hoping at least one of them dies during one of the following games (though I'm sure it'll have all the emotional impact of Nathan being served the wrong flavor of pie at a diner), and with ridiculous combat that seems determined to get cheaper instead of actually being challenging or fun, I can pretty much guarantee that we're not even halfway through the first month of the new year, and I've found something that will rank pretty high on my "worst of the year" list.

There's a moment early on when Nathan is determined to flee an island (after seeing Sully get shot) and Elena is provoking him to stick around and Nathan freely admits that he's not saying they should go for her benefit, but because he doesn't want to be there any more.  I couldn't help but mutter under my breath "I hear you, brother," because at that point I didn't want to play any more.