Here I am again to catch you readers up on my journey through the Uncharted franchise. What a ride it has been! Playing these games for the first time, back to back, allows me to see how the numerous improvements Naughty Dog made for each of their games. Making leap of fate after leap of fate. I fought against what seemed like insurmountable odds, survived scenarios that no human beings could have imagined, flew to places prettier than they had the rights to be, and fell in love with an incredible cast of characters who really developed as their adventure grew even wilder. Uncharted may have just become one of my favorite video game franchises. It’s not perfect and there’s still a ton of others better than Uncharted, but it earned my respect and showed how change can occur overtime. To cap off my completion of this franchise I finally finished Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception. The third mainline entry in the series and another high point in Naughty Dog’s timeline. It aged like fine tasting wine. Although what was originally intended to be the end to this series ended up being outclassed by Uncharted 4 which ended it with an even bigger bang to this fantastic franchise. Some parts aren’t as good as Uncharted 2 or Uncharted 4, and some segments can get a little frustrating with how they were designed. It does attempt to make improvements from the second game, and to be honest I liked the story more.
Uncharted 3 began development straight after the massive success of Uncharted 2. Naughty Dog wanted to capitalize off of the Playstation 3 killer exclusive, and aimed to make a bigger more ambitious adventure than the last. They wanted to improve the animations, the detailing, the environments they could process, the cinematic set pieces, and basically push the hardware limitations of the Playstation 3 to it’s limit. They did just that and luckily Sony gave them the fundings to make it. Naughty Dog also aimed for Uncharted 3 to have a more realistic, down to earth storyline than the previous two games. I mean Uncharted is already crazily overtop enough, but when I say this what I mean is ditch the weird mythology stuff the past two games had and create a more realistic and believable storyline. The game would be more focused on Nathan as a character and his connection to his allies. Really ask the player if what they were doing was truly worth sacrificing their loved ones to. A theme that would carry onwards to Uncharted 4 and actually be done properly, because I do have to admit Uncharted 3 still hasn’t completely figured out how to do it. This was a clear signing of a down to earth plot and people liked it. Uncharted 3 was looking great all the way up until release, but one thing is concerning when you look at it today. It seems like a good chunk of the success for Uncharted 3 could be pointed towards how much effort was put towards the marketing department. You had a contest where players could be given access to Uncharted 3 early. How they made a literal business deal with Subway to advertise their game. There’s also how Naughty Dog wanted to make a more fleshed out multiplayer since online shooters were growing popular at the time. That’s how more time was directed towards the multiplayer of Uncharted 3 which should have created an uneven balance between the single player campaign and multiplayer whose servers are now shut down these days. Yet, Uncharted 3 shaped up beautifully.
Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception is a great game, although I do have to admit I can see the reason why Naughty Dog had to take a short break from the franchise and rethink their strategy with the fourth game. There isn’t all that much change between Uncharted 2 and Uncharted 3, the game doesn’t strive to introduce any innovative ideas or improvements to the overall design, and like I said it does struggle in areas that Uncharted always fumbles about in. It’s just more Uncharted, but something must be done right for me to continue loving the series. This review probably won’t be that long as the previous Uncharted reviews, but I’ll try to offer the most in-depth explanations as to why I like this game and what did or did not work. It’s still worth playing today and it's much better than a majority of shooters out there with copy pasted elements. Today I want to talk about why Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception is still pretty great and why it deserves your attention. We’re going to keep on drifting. Wooh!
Story
The story picks off two years after the events of Uncharted 2. Nathan Drake is still a traveling adventurer seeking lost tombs and ancient monuments, and alongside him is Victor Sullivan, his mentor and one his closest friends since childhood. Sully has always had Nathan’s back on each of their adventures, and their most current one deals yet again with Nathan’s 16th century ancestor. Francis Drake, explorer and hunter of forbidden secrets. How did these two meet? Well it started when Nathan was a mere little boy. Wandering the streets of Columbia until he came across a museum possessing relics that once belonged to Francis Drake. He snuck right in and managed to catch his eye on a ring. The ring gleems with silver and has peculiar writing on it, and next to the ring seems to be a device that can translate what it says. The young Nathan doesn’t have the tools to carefully open the glass case holding the ring and device, but a man walks in sneakily trying to open the case with a key. Nathan walks over to the case again, but a guard notices him and throws him out the building. Nathan then decides to follow the man who held the key and hopefully steal it. Turns out the man had the key manufactured and he is working with someone to retrieve the ring and artifact. Nathan manages to steal the man’s wallet, but shortly afterwards the man locates Nathan and asks for his wallet back. Nathan, noticing that the man hasn’t called the cops yet, gives him back his wallet, but he takes the key and sneaks back into the museum. Nathan grabs the ring and the device, but a group of agents walk in alongside the man and a mysterious woman. Her name is Marllowe and she is looking into what travels Francis Drake could have partaken in. The guards take the device from Nathan, but he manages to escape with the ring as he runs along the rooftops. He gets held at gunpoint, but the man from earlier shows up in time to save Nathan and take him somewhere safe. The two have a meal at a restaurant and the man asks Nathan who he is. Nathan explains that Francis Drake was his ancestor and he has been looking into an expedition that Francis never brought up. The man seems interested and decides to introduce himself to Nate. This was how Nathan got his longtime running friend. The man’s name was Victor Sullivan, and he would coach Nate into the adventuring life.
Flash forward to present times and we see Nathan Drake walking into a bar along with Sully. They seem to be ready for some sort of business deal, and at the top floor of the bar are other men in suits waiting. They are men who work for Marlowe and leading them is a British negotiator named Talbot. He wants Nate’s ring, the one with the scriptures on it, so Nate gives him the ring in exchange for a suitcase full of cash. However, upon further investigations the money turns out to be fake, so they take the ring back. Talbot gets angry as all he wants is the ring, so a bar fight breaks out until Nathan and Sully are shot dead in an alleyway. Marllowe shows up, takes the ring from Nate, and one of the many goons working for her shoots Nathan and Sully dead. Marllowe and Talbot then drive away leaving Nathan and Sully to rot in a pile of garbage. A twist of events then happens as it turns out the two of them aren’t actually dead. The man who shot the two of them is Charlie Cutter, someone working alongside them on their latest gamble, and he helped create the props to make it look like the two were shot. Charlie is also a friend of Chloe Frazer, who is also helping Nate and Sully on their adventure. The four of them follow Marllowe to a hideout where they discover an underground passageway leading to a laboratory. There they find Marllowe and Talbot working with the ancient device, and when they disappear they steal the device and transcribe the scriptures on the ring to unveil locations. This soon leads the group to Syria and France, where they split to find more clues. While searching for the clues they find Marllowe’s men and accidentally cross paths with them. Talbot finds out Nate and Sully aren’t actually dead and the stakes rise even higher as Marllowe tries even harder to stop them in their tracks. Chloe and Charlie decide the hunt isn’t worth it, which leads Nate to calling another friend of his to help out. Elena Fisher, traveling journalist who somehow gets wrapped up in Nathan’s crazy journeys. Nathan will explore lost tombs, discover secrets, and figure out why Francis Drake’s voyage was left abandoned. His friends will be put in dangerous scenarios and ask if this treasure is truly worth it. Nate will have to decide if putting his friends on the line is a risk worth taking.
Gameplay
It’s a cover based shooter. It’s a cover based third person f*cking shooter, so you should know how these work. You walk into an arena styled room, a bunch of enemies pop up to shoot at you, and if you don’t fight back you die obviously. The game will give you a sign of when you are close to death by turning the screen black and white, but you can recover health by avoiding gunfire for a short period of time. You can hide behind walls and cover to avoid enemy fire, but they will eventually enclose in on you and the cover you hide behind sometimes will break apart. You carry two guns at a time, a handgun and a rifle, and you can use them to fight back against the enemy swarms. Handguns will include the basic pistol, the semiautomatic pistol, a small machine gun, what is basically a short ranged shotgun, and even a revolver with a scope and range of a sniper rifle. The rifles will include the machine gun, an even better machine gun, a semi automatic machine, a pump action shotgun, a double barreled shotgun, rocket launcher, grenade launcher, sniper rifle, and much more. When a weapon clip is empty you have to reload, but if you are out of bullets then you have to loot it from weapons hanging around in the battlefield or off of enemy corpses. Occasionally you will be given the opportunity to take out enemies using stealth which helps break down the amount of boogers shooting at you when a gunfight does breakout, but half the time you can only take out two to three and the game forces you into a lot of fights. I am starting to reach that point where the gunfights in Uncharted are starting to get repetitive, but luckily they do have moments where they break up the monotony.
There are sections where you must navigate difficult terrain and light puzzles which must be solved. I personally like these moments. The climbing is basically just holding down on the forward button, but navigating just feels really smooth and it feels daring when you make huge jumps that seem impossible in real life. The puzzles are pretty fun to solve, while only needing to be gone through once, require some actual thinking at times and cleverly use the environment to provide some challenge to the player. There are also trinkets hidden throughout each level, while not mandatory, are fun to find as they reward the player for exploring and going off of the critical path. Then you have those cinematic moments where Naughty Dog flexes off what the hardware of the Playstation 3 can do, and you just hold down the forward button to outrun the disaster. Not cool from a design perspective, but still really awesome nonetheless because they are fun to go through and it helps break up gunfights. Besides that there really isn’t much else. It’s Uncharted, it’s always Uncharted, and it’s going to continue following this gameplay structure until all the major heads at Naughty Dog die of old age. It is fun, so I guess I should stop complaining. The final section will offer the most critical thoughts on the game, so be prepared for some of the polite and negative things about to be laid down. Anyways, hopefully Nathan will discover the secrets Francis Drake tried to tuck away and discover why it was in the first place.
Thoughts
Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception is still a great game and another fantastic entry in the series. I definitely recommend it as what it does right is done really well, but I did find more problems in this one compared to some of the other games. I just ended up being really critical with this one. Not major deal breakers, but enough to understand why not many fans talk about this one compared to Uncharted 2 or Uncharted 4. It’s a lengthy list of complaints, so do be prepared. The combat in Uncharted reached that point where it began to become more annoying than actually fun. Cover based shooters aren’t all that really fun to me, and the playstyle it conditions the player into isn’t fun itself. I hate having limited movement. It means I can’t navigate the battlefield easily or avoid enemy gunfire easily as well. There’s a dodge roll that offers a few invincibility frames, but half the time it doesn’t work. I hate having the two weapon restriction as it limits what I can do. I’m surprised Nathan didn’t decide to carry two handguns at once, or sacrifice the handgun to carry two beefy rifles. I hate having to scramble the battlefield for weapons and ammo, as it’s a waste of time and I want to be able to carry on immediately during a busy fight. I hate having to reload my weapons when the clip is empty, as it disrupts combat and just serves as another annoyance. I hate having to wait for my health to regenerate rather than have health pickups.
I especially hate when the screen turns black and white when your health is low. All that does is make combat more stressful as the enemies become harder to see in the environment. The reason why I love having health bars rather than the regenerating shield is that it displays how much damage you can take before death. If you can display the guns the player has and how much ammunition they have left in their pockets, then you can create a health bar which represents their damage points. One note is that the arena in Uncharted 3 isn't set up as well as other entries, especially when it comes to later levels in the game. The way you want to set up an arena is to make it as spacious as possible. Have enough cover and space to move around in, and tools to get the job done. Naughty Dog did get the aspect of having tools available done right, but the arena isn't balanced all that well. Sometimes they are linear corridors with not enough space, and you are trapped on one side as dozens of enemies rush down from the otherside. For any of you shooter fans complaining that I had to push forward during these scenarios I want to ask you something. How do I push forward when enemies can see me halfway across the hallway and they all have automatic weapons? I also think Uncharted 3 is the hardest amongst the franchise. I was playing on normal mode and whenever specific encounters started Nate would get killed within seconds. He takes damage quicker than usual, and somehow even though half the enemies wield automatic rifles they have pinpoint accuracy. Meanwhile I’m firing wildly with my automatic rifle and out of the eighteen bullets I fire less than half of them make contact even though I was aiming towards the head and chest. I think I just suck at shooters. I’m fine at every single other genre in gaming, but it’s shooters that I always struggle at. You could say it’s because I mainly play on a console, but piss off! PC gaming isn’t amazing at everything despite how convenient it is.
“I thought you said you really liked this game?” I did like the game reader! I did and that’s what we are going to talk about now. Uncharted 3 still has the fantastic writing and storytelling the franchise is known for and I’m going to be frank with you. I kind of like the story of the third game more than the second. I like the section near the beginning where they explain how Nathan ended up meeting Sully. How they formed a close bond and stayed together ever since. Nathan never really had a father or mother to look after him, so to see a figure that he can really look up to helps develop him beyond the guy who just wants to look great for what he does. The story also explores more on Nathan and Elena’s relationship, and why Nathan is doing his best to keep Elena out. After his last adventure he didn’t want to see Elena die, so that’s why he’s doing it by himself for the most part. Near the end you get to see how his relationship works out and it’s a really sweet moment. The game ditches the mythology aspects of the first and second game, and depending on who you are you might love or hate it.
I personally don’t mind as it helps create a more believable story. Not just believable, a story that is more down to earth and explores the tug and pull that goes on in Nathan’s head. All of his friends ask him why he ventures in the first place when there are clear signs of why Francis Drake abandoned his journey. The enemies he faces this time are more ferocious, and the more he angers them the more he puts his most trusted allies into danger. There’s a moment where Charlie nearly dies from breaking his leg and later on, spoilers by the way, Sully gets kidnapped and Nathan finds it to be all his fault. His mind was too fixated on proving he was right about the treasure, and now his mentor is being used as a tool until his usefulness is no longer needed. There’s even moments where Nathan gets drugged. Where he sees things he didn’t want to see. Where his anger is completely let out and he goes on a killing rampage. It works pretty well as we get to see what Nathan is like. What he is like besides a wise cracking adventurer. I thought it worked, so that’s good. The villains aren’t as memorable to me as Rafe or Lazarevic, but they're still great villains nonetheless and have better connections to Nate than the others. A rival that Nate and Sully had ever since their meeting in Columbia, and how Nate has done his best to outwit her. Prove that he could do better without the money, men, and resources. It’s great, it truly is great to me.
The story is still pretty great and the environments are especially spectacular. You travel along desert sands, forest paths, and venture through ancient tombs. You walk through more city streets than the other games which does limit the amount of nature you go through, but I personally like it as it helps add some life to the world of Uncharted. Seeing actual people interact with each other, and how Nate and his friends deal with it. The cinematic moments are a thrill ride to go through still, but they can only be gone through once so that’s a really big bummer. A majority of the characters are entertaining and memorable. I thought Charlie Cutter would be a throwaway character as he was introduced out of nowhere and he exits the main story really early on. They still did him pretty well and I’m surprised he didn’t die. We reserve the theme of death for when The Last of Us came around. Those moments where Uncharted tells a magnificent story is still what gets to me. I love it for what it is, but I can understand why people got sick of it. Uncharted 3 came around a time when big Triple A games really started to drag players by the hand. Rather than offer challenging and engaging experiences they instead take them on one time ghost train rides.
2011 was the year of linear shooter campaigns. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, Battlefield 3, Resistance 3, Gears of War 3, Warhammer 40k: Space Marines, Bulletstorm, Rage, and finally there was Uncharted 3. Even other games adapted the cinematic linear based design like Portal 2 and Dead Space 2. Everyone was getting sick of it despite some of these actually being good, and that’s why we were so glad when Dark Souls came out as it broke the cycle and ended up being a challenging and engaging experience. It was a video game! Uncharted 3 is somewhat generic like the rest of the listed ghost train rides but I still prefer it more as the story, the art direction, the character, and heartfelt moments are what keep me remembering this game. It's why I love all the Uncharted games, because they have some amazing stories to tell.
That’s how I ended up still recommending it. If I were to rank the franchise Uncharted 4 would be my favorite. Uncharted 2 would come second, then Uncharted 3 would be third, The Lost Legacy is fourth which is an unpopular opinion of mine, and then the first game is last. In the end I’m going to give Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception a 8.5/10 for being pretty good. With everything I complained about with the gameplay this should have been an extremely divided experience. Those complaints should have dragged it down my review score lower, but remember it's much better than a majority of linear based shooters out there. Mainly in the writing department. Not as good as the fourth game, but in some way it improves upon the last two entries. (Deep breath) Look. I love Uncharted and how much it got me to care. Thank for the journey guys.
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