As of Saturday, Uncharted 4....Charted! I spent about four hours a day on this since Tuesday with the exception of Wednesday. As usual for this franchise, setting it to Easy difficulty is as tough as I'll ever play it. Here's the highlights:
GOOD:
- Probably the finest graphics of any game I have ever seen. The bar has absolutely been raised. Cut-scenes and in-game graphics are indistinguishable.
- The game is HUGE. You can explore much of King's Bay by truck, which is free roam for a large part. And wow, are those islands big!
- Melee combat was drastically scaled back. It's there, but it's very rarely necessary (unless it's the final battle)
- Nathan Drake finally grew up with this, his last adventure. It's nice to see where he and the other characters ended up. This part of the story was great.
BAD:
- The villains are a let-down. Rafe, the main villain, is a dweeb, and Nadine, his muscle, is just sort of there.
- Nate & Co. go against a huge crew of baddies, constantly playing catch-up despite knowing more or less what they're doing...like every other Uncharted game.
- The stealth portion could have been better. Sneaking around in tall grass is fine, but it got old quickly.
- Speaking of getting old, I will never have to worry about having a hankering for mountain climbing. That's most of what I did here.
UGLY
- I hate dark, confined places almost as much as I hate being in high places. So this game pushed all those buttons.
- Hitting one of the right triggers in the previous games reloaded your weapon. Here, it throws a grenade. Guess what I did a lot of?
- I can't believe this is the last Uncharted. But, given the epilogue, it may not be the last time we see a Drake on an adventure...
In the final analysis, this is a great game, and the entire reason I bought a PS4. Uncharted 2 is still the best of the series, but, despite being a bit tired and tedious, I enjoyed it better than 1 & 3, even if the story beats were more or less the same.
