Backlog Beatown: Charting Fortunes with Uncharted: Drakes Fortune

I bought Uncharted: The Nathan Drake Trilogy soon after I gained access to a PlayStation 4; having been on Xbox and PC for most of the years prior, I hadn’t played any Uncharted games prior. I knew the basic premise of the game, (Gears of War meets Tomb Raider,) and I knew the lead character Nathan Drake was a wise-cracking rogue who could never quite make you sure whether you wanted to buy him a drink or deck him, but other than that, Uncharted was a blind buy.

Straight in the nuts. You know
you want to!

I had a go with the first of the three games it showcases – Uncharted: Drakes Fortune – and I found what for me was a standard action-adventure. You play as Nathan Drake; an Indiana Jones-like character who bears a passing resemblance to a younger Gerard Butler and is voice-acted by the renowned Nolan North. You’re on a quest to find the treasure of El Dorado, either for fame and fortune or for the fact that you may or may not be related to Sir Francis Drake who was looking for the treasure originally – probably a little of both. Along the way, you get caught up in a conflict of interest between Sully, your mentor, Elena, a reporter, and a group of criminals and mercenaries who also want to find El Dorado. Conflict escalates, and you are forced to run, gun and jump your way through an increasingly hostile environment as you search to find the truth behind the treasure and save your friends.

There are two main sections to the game: Platforming, in which you jump from wall-section to ledge in order to traverse difficult-to-get-to areas, and combat, which mainly involves shootouts with modern-day pirates. The platforming is not difficult; it is rarely a challenge to see where you need to go and even if you do get stuck, the game will show you where you’re supposed to be going next if you stand still for a few seconds. Once you know where you’re going, the route is usually obvious, and the challenge is avoiding traps and making sure you don’t linger to long on a ledge lest it crumble beneath your feet.

The bulk of the game's action is in scenes like this.

The combat is standard cover-based shooting, and is handled well enough, with the one puzzling exception that grenades are mapped to L1 (R1 is the standard, right?) You shoot some enemies, move up to the next area, find some cover and shoot some more enemies. There is an array of weapons in the game, but you can only carry two at a time; a pistol and one other weapon. These are what you would expect; machine guns, shotguns and grenade launchers. Uncharted is very much “of it’s time” in terms of its level design; the ammo pick-ups are in all the right places so you’re never out-gunned, and conserving resources between one fight and the next is rarely a consideration. One particularly memorable moment near the end of the game came when I was in a church with snipers in the raised areas; this could have presented a very different challenge if there hadn’t been a sniper rifle lying around in the first place you dive for cover; classic 7^th gen design!

I mean, even if Wikipedia wasn't a thing,
you'd know how this was going to end up...

Uncharted is presented well; the voice-acting is spot-on, and the graphics are good for their time. The sounds are as good as they need to be, the gun sounds work fine and the music fits the environments, though it isn’t particularly memorable. The game is not especially long, but it tells a fun story with an effective twist, and it doesn’t outstay it’s welcome.

It’s difficult to know how to call this one. While I was writing this, I had to go back and check all the times I’d written the word “Standard” and go back and change some of them. Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune was released in 2007 and, while it’s still fun to play now, doesn’t bring anything to the table that wasn’t there before. It’s as standard as a 7^th generation game gets, and is very competently put together, but now that I’ve got to the end of it, I’ll be more likely to put it to bed than go hunting for all the achievement trophies.

Final Score: 3/5. Worth a look.