Uncharted: Drake's Fortune review

User Rating: 8 | Uncharted: Drake's Fortune PS3
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So yea I'm 6 years late, deal with it, there was no reason to buy a PS3 until this year. I guess in comparison there's still none, there are so far only like 7 PS3 exclusives worth buying.

Anyway I like Drake's Fortune. I had played the demo back in the before times and couldn't figure out what to do, but that was a matter of time.

The graphics I am not terribly impressed with. It has some good looking landscapes and the graphics could definitely be worse, but I guess for some reason I had been tricked into thinking the skin textures for the people looked much better than they do (like, render quality like you see in the art reels in bonus features.) Even so that's ok. Though I'm confused why the Elena final render has black hair and they changed it to blonde.

I like the story. Admittedly I'm an Indiana Jones-type fan. I used to be an archaeology student and so this thing has a direct line to my interests, historical liberties or not. I love all 4 Indiana Jones, Temple of Doom least of all. I like Matt Reilly's "Jack West" books which are basically indiana jones on steroids and way better - as well as his other books like Temple and Contest and the Scarecrow series (though Jack West is the relevant one here). I even like Noah Wyle in the Librarian.

Speaking of Noah Wyle, I like him too. I think that he would be a good choice for Nathan Drake if this was ever a movie - a much better choice than people probably would want, they'll choose something shitty like Wentworth Miller or some other terrible person. Nathan is a good protagonist I think. He has some cheesy dialogue, but oh god it's no where near as bad as most games. He has a little attitude and he has personality.

Some of the gameplay I could do without. I've heard from people and so far it seems to be true, that Uncharted 1 was the hardest. The entire game after the first few chapters devolved into a rinse/repeat of "Here's a bunch of guns close togehter in a giant room, you're gonna fight 100 bad guys." "Here's an empty room, there are no bad guys here" over and over and over for the next 19 chapters. That wouldn't be too terrible, if it wasn't a matter of "1 hit you're dead" at the end of the game - but it was. So, I died about a shit-ton-finity of times altogether, mostly in the same areas where there are 100 guys. The guys with grenade launchers especially, ooohhh they are annoying.

I did like the story a lot. You would think Sir Francis Drake, anyone who doesn't study history wouldn't know who he is and probably must Sony fan-boys didn't, but it was a nice break from all the holy grail and life-threatening arks and aliens in these types of games.

Compared to the subsequent games in the franchise, this was much harder. Most of my frustration with the game is just typical platformer nonsense where you jump wrong and fall to your death and then have to go all the way through a room again, and I don't blame it for that, every platformer fails at camera angles.

I don't really remember any music, so as far as sound goes it wasn't a major component of the game - maybe if I had a surround system on my tv. The voice acting was pretty good I'd say, of course Nolan North does a good job. If I had to score the game on its sound aspects I really couldn't do it.