![]() Naughty Dog has already realised, with extraordinary competence, its vision to bring the adventure serials of the 1930’s to life in blockbuster video game form, blending together both high and low tempo sequences and complementing this with a blend of its shooting, platforming, and gentle environment puzzles. This is very much Drake’s story, and for better or worse our hero is solo as he takes his moment in the sun. But where Uncharted 2 flexed its ensemble cast, the third trims it back: appearances from Chloe and Elena now feel like passive cameos, the characters denied the driving roles they had in the last game, and Sully is rarely allowed to cast off his role as the wise-cracking sidekick. Her path criss-crosses with Drake and the cigar-chomping Victor Sullivan, now taking a more active role in the adventure, and before long the duo find themselves broken, bruised and burnt, chased throughout most of Europe and reunited with both Chloe and Elena.įor the player, this feels like a reunion with old friends. Lacking the physical menace of Lazarevic, Marlowe assaults with mind games and twenty years worth of unpleasant history. Also chasing the same promise of unimaginable wealth is the coolly calculating Katherine Marlowe, head of a 400-year-old secret society. The fabled destination this time around is Ubar, a mythical city of riches lost somewhere in the 250,000 barren square miles that make up the Rub’ al Khali desert. The overall simplicity to the plot is part of its well-deserved charm, once again taking Drake on a lengthy journey from one part of the world to another and filling it with a non-stop string of confrontations on the way. The basic approach to Uncharted 3’s design has been to cajole players through its rolling landscapes and ornate sunken tombs with an ever greater aplomb than before, shunting Drake from area to area with an insistence that not even a single footstep is spent lingering. The resulting punch-up finds our hero comfortably nestled within the series’ signature mix of scripted sequences, gorgeous cinematography and pithy one-liners, but the overall tone is less bombastic and more muted than the second game.Įven when Drake is having his head cracked into a grimy toilet seat in a British boozer, it’s rare to see a game that offers such a glorious escape from the dreary confines of humdrum reality, where players are thrust into a gorgeous, free-flowing world of rugged adventure and sparkling vivacity. The last adventure opened with Drake regaining consciousness in a train carriage dangling precariously over a cliff Uncharted 3 starts with him going to an English pub. Naughty Dog also deserves credit by aiming for a different vibe than that of the simply phenomenal Uncharted 2. ![]() The aesthetic variety is also staggering: 90 minutes earlier, Drake is pushing his way through a rusty ship graveyard, rocking slowly from side to side in the middle of an emerald ocean, as foaming jets of water penetrate open cracks and shear open the hulls of abandoned metal. Take a moment about two thirds of the way through the game, as Drake bounds through a canyon underneath the glare of a piercing sun, spinning truck wheels kicking up sandy plumes as they grind through previously undisturbed terrain, the scene framed with a glorious panorama of jagged cliffs and the soft sheets of shadow hanging over. ![]() Now we’re gently airing the lovable rogue’s dirty laundry, matching the game’s industry-leading animations and script delivery with a plot that looks to Drake’s recent past alongside its usual forte of ancient history.īut the real star, perhaps, is the stylised world that effortlessly cracks, crumbles, and explodes underneath Drake’s feet, and it’s here Naughty Dog has created a string of larger-than-life environments that are works of art married with extraordinary technical proficiency. Uncharted 3 knows this (well, maybe not the specifics of my feelings) and it’s decided to weave a more personal tale for our half-tucked friend. Either way, or perhaps because of my worrying infatuation, Drake has become one of modern gaming’s bona fide stars. Is it the dashing good looks, those irresistible rapscallion ways, or that seemingly inexhaustible string of pithy comments? I can’t tell. Let it be publicly known that Nathan Drake is a card-carrying member of the rather exclusive club of video game characters I have a whopping big man crush for.
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