Familiarity, the close acquaintance or knowledge of something. That is the exact definition I got when I searched up the word, familiarity. Depending on who you ask, familiarity can either be a good or bad thing. During those cases familiarity is good, it means we have grown comfortable with it. Maybe we have grown comfortable around our friends, or we’re just fine with having to mow the lawn every once a week. We grow comfortable with certain events and individuals, and slowly they become enthralled in our lives. We won’t see them going away anytime sooner, but that’s fine with us. We have adapted to familiarity and wouldn’t want to get rid of something that we are accustomed to. The cases when familiarity is bad usually deals with tedium. It’s when an event or individual happens so much that we get sick of it. You wish that this person or event would just go away or stop happening. At least wanting one aspect of this person or event to change, but nope it just wants to keep going and going without any improvement or failures. You are stagnant to this familiarity and would rather prefer anything else. Those are the two forms of familiarity, and the reason why I give this analogy is to show how it connects to the video game industry and what goes on now.
There are games that stand out against the test of time. They may have a well written story, a fantastic world to be in, or have solid game design. Whatever it is, these games stay in our hearts for a reason. “If it ain’t broke then don’t fix it.” The formula a team of developers stirred up works and they want to continue that formula to please those who want more. They’ll make sequels to continue the plotline, but when it comes to the core structure that keeps what made the last one work. Remember that this can either be good or bad. I’ll list a few examples so you may get an idea of what are good or bad forms of familiarity. The original three Halo games are some of the most well acclaimed first person shooters ever made. They were fun, breathtaking, and straight out addicting. Nothing much about the gameplay structure or mechanics changed in between the three games, but people still loved them because the formula worked and it didn’t need any changing. The same goes for me and the Dishonored series. They were tightly designed stealth-em up immersive sims, and nothing much had to be changed since it worked. Time for a bad example of familiarity in video games, and there is no better example than Call of Duty. All of the games are structured similarly, play similarly, and feel like edited clones on each other. There were attempts to change the formula, but not by much to be honest with you. Many fans of the franchise have complained that Call of Duty needed to change or else it would become stagnant, yet again there are also fans who want the franchise to stay the same since the ideas they introduce are poorly executed. The same could apply for every sports franchise out there, but you should get the idea by. Familiarity can be good or bad, and there’s a reason why I opened up today’s review with this discussion.
Naughty Dog, you may know these guys especially with the mass controversy they stirred up back in 2020. They made some of the most legendary video games the industry has seen and they are fond of familiarity. The original three Crash Bandicoot games all played similarly, and the original three Jak and Daxter games played similarly. This wasn’t a problem though, because those games were generally fun with a lot of people. They worked! Their most acclaimed series of games is none other than the Uncharted franchise which has garnished a lot of praise since it’s debut back in 2007. They are narrative focused experiences with action packed gunfights, incredible locals, and bombastic cinematic sequences. They work for a lot of casual gamers, but for some they don’t. All the games are extremely linear and they are basically roller coasters. You only have to go on them once to get full enjoyment, and any second rides tend to lose the magic the first time around. The gameplay and combat is simplistic, and not much has changed. Some people don’t like Uncharted and I can understand where these criticizers are coming from. The Uncharted series has influenced a lot of design choices with modern Triple A games, and a good chunk of Playstation 4 exclusives borrow something Uncharted. Climbing sequences, puzzles that lengthen out the time between each fight, those segments where they slow down the main characters and make them talk for a few minutes, and much more. Uncharted is to blame for a lot of annoying decisions with modern gaming…… and I don’t hate it. I don’t hate what Uncharted has influenced upon gaming. I don’t mind sequences where the characters spend time talking rather than progressing. I don’t mind downtime between combat and excitement. I don’t mind having games place a huge focus on the narrative rather than the gameplay. If it’s one thing that Uncharted has shown us it’s that cinematic storytelling can have a place in the game industry. I love good stories, I love good writing, I love good characters, and I love to be taken on a grand adventure and whisked away from reality. I don’t hate Uncharted. It’s not a perfect franchise of games, but it’s one that can be played just for how hard it tries to cheer you up and carve a big old smile onto your face. I love Uncharted and it has a long legacy.
I do have to make a disclaimer that I haven’t played all the Uncharted games. Well that's a great way to kill the build up to this very moment. The only games I played in the franchise was the fourth installment, Uncharted 4: A Thief’s, and Uncharted: The Lost Legacy which was the standalone follow-up. Played Uncharted 4 for the first time back in 2018 and passed it off, but replayed the game in 2020 and my opinions completely changed on the game. Wrote a whole review to show how my love for the game grew. It made me rethink my views on storytelling in gaming and took me on a wild ride. It is a cinematic masterpiece with stupendous writing, and one of the ten examples I would use to describe how to tell a story in a video game. It’s soon going to be ported to PC and unlike a majority of Playstation fanboys I am completely fine with this even though I’m not a PC gamer. Introduce a fantastic game to a group of people who haven’t had access to them and get them excited for what is to come. Same goes with God of War and hopefully soon they’ll port Bloodborne. You better do it one day Sony. It’s great, but during this announcement I realized I never played the last three games and decided to experience the excitement I missed out on. Played the first game, Drake’s Fortune, and a lot has changed since then. It’s still a fantastic game that holds up today, but it does have some faults. Today we’ll be talking about why I quite liked Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune and why it deserves your attention.
Story
Before Nathan Drake became one of the most legendary treasure hunters who ever walked this earth he started out small. He and his best friend Sully were drifters, and their first big game was the sunken coffin of Sir Francis Drake. A long distance ancestor of Nate. The two of them are out at sea trying to fish for the coffin and they are accompanied by Elena Fisher, a journalist wanting to document their search for the treasure. Elena films Nathan as he pulls the coffin straight out of the ocean, but to their surprise the coffin doesn’t contain a body. Just a journal belonging to Francis Drake. Suddenly Elena’s filming is disrupted when they are both attacked by pirates. Not those epic Pirates of The Carribeans where they sing songs and drink mead, I mean the pirates who kidnap you and point guns towards your head. An epic gunfight ensues and the two manage to survive and escape with the clues and evidence they found. Nate and Sully analyze the info they found and discover that Sir Francis Drake was in pursuit of El Dorado. A mythical tribal chief who was buried within a tomb of gold. Surrounded by other piles of gold within a bigger tomb of gold. That’s a lot of gold folks.
Nathan and Sully prepare to fly over to where the coordinates guide them next, but they are worried that Elena might drag them down or grow suspicious of their plans. They leave her behind and end up in a temple containing the next clues. This somehow guides them to a U-Boat from World War II, and when Nathan is searching the abandoned vessel the two drifters are attacked by Gabriel Roman. He’s the leader of a gang of mercenaries and Sully owes a lot of money to him. Gabriel is interested in the treasure the two are looking for, but they refuse to tell him where to go. Sully is shot dead and Nathan is on the run from Gabriel’s goons. Elena shows up and it turns out she followed them on their journey. Nathan and Elena escape from the mercenary and use Sully’s plane to fly to the next location. They discover a mysterious island containing the ruins of an abandoned city and underground passageways with inscriptions. Together they’ll have to overcome obstacles, fight the fiends that stand in their way, and find out what happened to Sir Francis Drake and the tomb of El Dorado. That’s it. That’s all there is to the story segment. There usually is more, but this is the first game and the plot doesn’t get more complicated until later. There will be more discussions in the final section. Okay guys? Okay.
Gameplay
It’s a cover based third person shooter. You should know how all of these play by now. You have an over the shoulder which mostly gives you a clear view of what is ahead and around you. Enemies will be firing at you and trying to enclose onto your current position. You have a handgun and a rifle to defend yourself from ensuing enemies. Ammunition can be picked up from corpses if you are running low, but you can loot different guns off of enemies in exchange with losing the gun you had equipped. You have a dodge roll which offers a few invincibility frames to avoid gunfire, but a majority of the time you’ll be taking cover behind chest high walls. Your guns will shoot, stop, need to be reloaded, and you do this over and over. If you get shot then your health will go down and this will be signaled with the world around you turning into gray and white, but that health can be recovered if you avoid gunfire for a short period of time. Otherwise, our dear friend chest high wall. There are a couple of distinct enemy behaviors. We do have a couple of guys who run around shirtless with shotguns, snipers who wait from afar, guys who blow you up with grenade launchers, and eventually you encounter extra prepared men wearing helmets. “Do all you do in this game is shoot the same six to seven different NPCs?”
Fear not dear viewer, because in between the funtime ho downs are climbing sections. The platforming if you may. You scale along, hop along ledges, hang from bars, and hope that the level geometry is guiding you towards the correct spot to jump. If you die then you get respawned to the spot before the platforming section, and this can become a burden if the section is longer than it should be. F*ck it, because at least the later games improved this inconsistency. There are many reasons to explore the environment. There are collectible treasures hidden in the levels, but they don’t improve your performance and there isn't much of an award to collecting them. If all of this sounds like a list of expected design troupes then you are correct, because Uncharted is as basic as ghost train rides get. If you want a good explanation of what the ghost train ride is then watch Yatzhee Crosshaw’s explanation of what this is. It’s not a terrible way to tell an experience, but not the most hand free one to go through. Besides that, there really isn’t much else to say about the gameplay of Uncharted. This section would last longer, but there just really isn’t much going on. Later entries would improve the problems the first game had, but even now you can realize how minimalistic the first Uncharted was. It is still fun to play and there are a couple of cinematic sequences that are epic to go through, but there’s nothing to really celebrate when all you're doing is popping the heads of baddies. Oh well, hopefully you can discover where the tomb of El Dorado lies and carry on your legacy as an adventurer.
Thoughts
Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune is still a pretty good game to experience today, but it is a really flawed one though. I still recommend it to see how the early days of modern Naughty Dog started off, and it has been more fun than some of the other Triple A games I have tried to go through recently. However, it is easy to see the areas where the first game felt underdeveloped. This may sound like a long list of nitpicks, but I’m going to give thorough explanations as to what made Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune flawed.
Well the gameplay is a starter as I already explained that there really isn’t much going for it. You shoot people, hide behind cover, and shoot some more people. Melee combat feels finicky as your punches lack impact and weight. They more like flinches to be honest with you. There is a way to stealthily take down baddies, but it doesn’t work half the time. It’s hard to tell when Nathan is in a stealth animation, and when you do kill an enemy the rest of them spot you since you are placed in such an open space. Climbing is fine, but I do see why Uncharted 4 added the grappling hook to change up how you traverse the environment. I can already see how annoying rail climbing got without playing the third entry. The puzzles aren’t that very complex or satisfying to solve compared to later entries. Nathan does move much faster compared to the fourth game and his jumps are much quicker. At first I thought this was good, but then I found the downsides to it. He feels very floaty when he is in the air and is extremely slippery to control. There were oftentimes jumps I missed, because Nathan ended up lunging further than he should have or went the wrong direction. While we’re on the subject of cheap deaths, quicktime events. I hate how these have been popularized in modern day video games, because they are a cheap way to take a life from the player and force them to lose some progress. They're just an absolute waste of time and I don’t know why developers are so fond of them.
That’s my complaints with the gameplay, so what’s next on this long list of buggery? The entire game takes place within a jungle and ruined temples which is fine. I’m more used to Uncharted 4 and how it took you to a plethora of locales. Seeing forest after forest gets annoying, and there aren’t that many set pieces to make up for how repetitive seeing the color green is. One problem I do want to bring up is one I don’t think I brought up with my review of Uncharted 4. A problem that the Uncharted games have always suffered with. That ensuing problem is ludonarrative dissonance, the disconnection between the story and gameplay. You can have all the heartwarming story you want, but if the gameplay follows them doing something completely against that story then all the elements don’t add up. Sometimes this dissonance can harm the story and characters. Nathan Drake is this happy pappy adventurer who goes on grand adventurers, cracks funny jokes, and spends time with his loving friends and family. So it’s kind of hard to see that image when he and his friends are running around killing dozens of people and no one seems to bring this fact up. He’s blowing them up, shotgun blasting them in the chest, sucker punching them into oblivion, snapping their necks, and a lot of other horrendous things. No one seems to notice this problem, but yet again ludonarrative dissonance always ruins how we view stories in video games. Do you know how many plotlines ludonarrative dissonance can be applied to? Alot. Alot of plotlines and it can make it extremely hard to enjoy a narrative.
These sound like really big complaints, but why do I still recommend this game? That story of course. Now I just went rambling on about the topic of ludonarrative dissonance, but bear with me for a moment. The goal of an Uncharted story is to take you on a grand adventure and to cheer you up with it’s characters. They have always succeeded at this category and the first game still does this pretty well. The characters are charming, the moments they have together are enlightening and deepen their character, and those moments where they make sacrifices to protect one another are spectacular. The plotline for Uncharted is basically a cheesy written Indiana Jones esque script, but I like this type of writing. The writers are aware how over the top these games are and they take it a step further by putting you in out of this world scenarios. That’s why I still recommend the original Uncharted. The later games are much better, but the story is still worth going through just to see where Nathan Drake started out. It took me roughly around five hours to beat Drake’s Fortune which I did find really short. There are a total of twenty two chapters and some of them last ten minutes long. However, the runtime makes sense for the first game and it did improve with time. I played the first game using The Nathan Drake Collection which is the most superb way to play these original three games. Graphical fidelity has improved as well as the gameplay. Drake’s Fortune has me excited for what is to come with the second and third game and I cannot wait. In the end I am going to give Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune an 8/10 for being pretty good. I do want to let you guys know that I have exams coming up and won’t be posting reviews for a bit. Sorry. Anyways, see yah!
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