Uncharted is a popular PS3-exclusive title, centered around Nate Drake, a treasure-hunter in search of a big haul, as he follows the footsteps of his ancestor, Sir Francis Drake.
Gameplay: The game is essentially a 3rd person shooter, much in the style of Mass Effect or Red Faction: Guerrilla, except with decidedly less battle features, making the gameplay a little linear. To get around the area, you'd often use climbing, running and jumping, etc, drawing comparisons to platformers and parkour-style games. The meat and potatoes of this game are in it's combat, though.
The weapons you're given are grenades, a pistol of some sort and a larger gun of some sort, such as a shotgun or a machine gun. There's very little variety among weapons, certainly nothing like what you'd see in a sci-fi game. The weapons are still kind of fun to use, the shotgun and sniper in particular. There are also methods in which you can fight with your fists, but these methods are also pretty bland - two buttons in combination will easily kill somebody, or you could just mash the square button until they are dead, and you'll rarely lose.
Don't get me wrong, the gameplay is halfway decent... it's just that not much of it is very original. You'll find yourself doing pretty much the same thing from point A to point B, throughout the game. Every battle circumstance feels about the same, too.. lots of guys in an open field with cover scattered around the floor and walls and you, or maybe you and a friend, have to beat them all with your pistol or shotgun/assault rifle.
There are a few rare instances of driving, but these driving sequences are actually pretty bad, particularly when you're forced to control both characters. Fortunately, these are used pretty sparingly.
Presentation: The game's visuals look very good. Most of the game is set in a jungle and a rustic-castle sort of environment, and everything has tremendous detail. It's really a nice-looking game from front to back.
A lot of the animations are a bit cartoon-like and exaggerated, in the sense that if you blow somebody up or shoot them with a powerful weapon, they'll fly through the air and do all sorts of inversions, mid-air. But, I'm not a guy to complain about graphics or anything. If they look good, they look good. No complaints here.
Theatrics: Uncharted's cut-scenes and dialogue are the high point of the game. Their scenes of story-telling are actually interesting, funny and they give good depth to the characters even though it's a pretty short game. Very few games actually make me chuckle and very few games have cut-scenes that are this intricate and well directed. It's really a gem when it comes to being entertained between the points of gameplay, where it's necessary to fill in story to the hold the game together. The story isn't particularly deep or inspiring, but they tell it in a way that's entertaining, and that's what is important.
Controls: This was really my biggest complaint about the entire game. The controls, for the most part, are pretty simple. Typical firing buttons, jumping, dodging, fighting, changing weapons, etc. But, there are a few instances in which you are forced to drive a vehicle where the controls are just awful. It's actually not so much the controls themselves as it is being able to control your character without running into walls or explosives while you drive. The acceleration/braking along with influences from things like water and rocks make driving scenes very bumbling and frustrating.
There's also points in the game where you're forced to jump around, avoiding gunfire, but the button to dodge is the same button to enter cover, which can lead to some stupid deaths if you're not really careful about where you're diving. Personally, I don't know why games even bother to make you press a button to enter cover. I think if you press up against it, you should enter cover.
Replay Value: Uncharted is a single-player only game, but they do a good job of putting achievements in the game to give you an incentive to play through the game again, so you can unlock special game modes, clothes, videos, game art and a few other things. It's replay value isn't amazing, which is why I'd recommend trying it before you buy it. The entire game should take a player between 10 and 15 hours.
My Overall Rating: 8.7
It's hard to say this is a GREAT game, but it's definitely a good game. It does everything reasonably well, but it just doesn't leap out at you and blow you away. The most comparable title(s) I can think of for this game would be the Tomb Raider series, due to the similarities in jumping/climbing and gun combat. This game is better than the Tomb Raider series, though.
My Recommendation: Rent it, play it for a few days, and decide if you really want to keep it. You can get it on the cheap either way, by this point, since it is a bit dated. It's certainly not a bad game, but if you play a ton of video games, it's likely you'll see this one as pretty ordinary. Although, it's actually very popular among casual gamers and a lot of people deem it a top 5 title on the PS3, comfortably. But, the good thing about the game is that if you buy a PS3, Uncharted comes for free with the system (at least it did with mine!).
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