Uncharted's been in a weird place for a while. They're fun games and an easy showcase of the Playstation 3's power for Sony, but calling these titles "art" was always a little bit silly. They're fun adventure games with tons of spectacle and that's totally fine! But after Naughty Dog put out The Last of Us, a landmark title that's become one of the most respected games EVER MADE partially due to its dark, emotional core, how could Nathan Drake survive with the prestige the studio earned?
The answer, it seems, was to create EASILY the best plot in the series. Uncharted 4 won't win any Oscars but its grounded, emotional story about two brothers, obsession, and betrayal elevates it so much further than the bang bang shooty type stories of the previous games. The actors' performances, the animations, the writing....it's all SO GOOD. So many games have incredibly lifeless or inhuman or robotic characters but Naughty Dog hits it out of the ballpark EVERY TIME MAN.
And the graphics?? This game is SEVEN YEARS OLD but i'm still over here taking screenshots every five minutes!! It's so smooth and so pretty! (Granted I played the PS5 remaster so that might account for it but still). Say what you will about "photorealism bad blah blah blah" IDC THIS GAME LOOKS INSANEEEE!! And it feels so smooth to play too! The climbing, the action, the shooting. The shear amount of location and gameplay variety is out of this world, I don't even want to think about how many man-hours this took to build. And how much crunch, because, ew. Yay.
Really my only major critique is I wish a lot of the gameplay had more...substance? I was pretty tired of the gunplay by the end, and I wish its stealth and combat options were deeper. But even if Uncharted doesn't have the best combat, or the best climbing, or the best stealth, or the best puzzles, it's its ability to pace everything together into one full-steam-ahead blast of an adventure that helps it stick the landing.
Triple-A video games might be in a bad situation with variety, visual styles, development time, and actually being fun these days. But Uncharted 4 is proof that sometimes, the big expensive games can be worth keeping around too.
The answer, it seems, was to create EASILY the best plot in the series. Uncharted 4 won't win any Oscars but its grounded, emotional story about two brothers, obsession, and betrayal elevates it so much further than the bang bang shooty type stories of the previous games. The actors' performances, the animations, the writing....it's all SO GOOD. So many games have incredibly lifeless or inhuman or robotic characters but Naughty Dog hits it out of the ballpark EVERY TIME MAN.
And the graphics?? This game is SEVEN YEARS OLD but i'm still over here taking screenshots every five minutes!! It's so smooth and so pretty! (Granted I played the PS5 remaster so that might account for it but still). Say what you will about "photorealism bad blah blah blah" IDC THIS GAME LOOKS INSANEEEE!! And it feels so smooth to play too! The climbing, the action, the shooting. The shear amount of location and gameplay variety is out of this world, I don't even want to think about how many man-hours this took to build. And how much crunch, because, ew. Yay.
Really my only major critique is I wish a lot of the gameplay had more...substance? I was pretty tired of the gunplay by the end, and I wish its stealth and combat options were deeper. But even if Uncharted doesn't have the best combat, or the best climbing, or the best stealth, or the best puzzles, it's its ability to pace everything together into one full-steam-ahead blast of an adventure that helps it stick the landing.
Triple-A video games might be in a bad situation with variety, visual styles, development time, and actually being fun these days. But Uncharted 4 is proof that sometimes, the big expensive games can be worth keeping around too.