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dkirschner's Uncharted: Drake's Fortune (PS3)
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| [April 1, 2014 01:29:01 PM]
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Gotta say, I was a bit underwhelmed by this first Uncharted game. I'm sure I would have been more impressed when it came out. I enjoyed it overall, but at times I found it boring and tedious.
Favorite stuff:
- the smartass characters bantering back and forth. I liked Drake's perpetual sarcasm. The writing is great, the Indiana Jones-ish story is cool, with a couple good twists. I especially enjoyed near the end when (dun dun dunnnnn) there is a real curse on El Dorado.
- the beautiful vistas, and exploring ruins and caverns was pretty cool too.
Stuff I didn't like:
- the environments did all start to look similar after a while, and you do some backtracking. This is compounded with the repetitive combat. In the first couple hours of playing, I spent 30 minutes hiding behind pillars and shooting bad guys, and 30 minutes hiding on fortress walls shooting bad guys and 30 minutes hiding behind trees in the jungle shooting bad guys. All these combat locations have very similar layouts. I would also like to see more puzzles and more exploration and less combat.
- combat is lame. There is nothing exceptional about it, and it becomes quickly tedious. The new enemies toward the end do spice it up a bit, but on the whole, I wish there were more weapons and strategies to utilize. Basic guns, basic grenades, and fight a few waves of enemies at each location and move on. Sit behind cover, pop out and shoot, go back behind cover, if enemies move too close, melee them. Most of the guns work fine from any range too. I learned this by dying from shotgun blasts 1000 feet away, which pissed me off every time. And I spent most of the game sniping with a pistol.
I think the overarching problem is that the dull combat and the interesting environments were mostly divorced from one another, so you have this game where exploring and platforming around is pretty cool, but fighting sucks you into a boredom void. I was thinking about this because I was watching behind the scenes footage of God of War 3’s development. The level designers were talking about the importance of integrating the combat and the puzzles so that you didn’t feel like you were playing two different games. Uncharted, so far, you explore, puzzle, explore, then fight, fight, fight. The combat doesn’t add to the exploration, doesn’t progress puzzles. I will point out one example where it did, but it’s one of the few I can think of. At some point, you’re platforming across some waterfall ruins, and a jeep pulls up to a cliff and enemies start shooting at you. You blow up a barrel on the jeep, killing the enemies and sending the jeep crashing down the waterfall. It gets stuck between two pillars and serves as a bridge for Drake to walk across and continue. That’s great integration of combat and platforming/puzzling/exploration.
Yep. Probably going to hit up a longer game, then play Uncharted 2.
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dkirschner's Uncharted: Drake's Fortune (PS3)
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Current Status: Finished playing
GameLog started on: Monday 24 March, 2014
GameLog closed on: Tuesday 1 April, 2014 |
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