Get on with it

I've finished Uncharted 4. Finally. Good grief, it takes its time to finish.

I kept thinking "This must be approaching the end. We appear to be wrapping up." Nathan would get to the Huge Amazing Temple where surely the treasure was going to be, and I felt like I'd been playing forever, so this was probably it. But no, pretty much every Big Final Place would end up being wrong. Just another clue leading to yet another Maybe The End place.

Don't get me wrong, I was having fun. Uncharted 4 is an incredibly enjoyable game, full of variety, wonder and excitement. The locations are spectacular both in terms of their aesthetic and their level design. But it all just felt a bit... much.

Maybe I'm just in the wrong demographic now. AAA titles like this are aimed at players who spend many hours on their games - an audience that tends to be younger than me. People of my age, even those without children, tend to have less time to play. And maybe even when I have the time, I feel a little guilty about spending hours and hours pretending to be a man swinging around a jungle.



Balancing act

But I'm not sure it can be just age. I've played plenty of other games for longer. Metal Gear Solid V took many, many hours of my life - far more than Nathan Drake's zany adventures. And I happily spent whole evenings on Deus Ex, and even snapped up the DLC as soon as it came out.

So it must be something to do with the game itself. As I've noted in a previous blog, there is a decent variety of things to do in the game. Driving, climbing, shooting, sneaking and puzzling are all seamlessly integrating into the game's narrative and the timings are very smart. A frantic combat section will be followed by some calm exploration, which will then lead to a dizzying climb across clifftops.

But as well balanced as the game is, there is a limit to the amount of times you can pull the same stunts. Everywhere Nathan goes seems to be utterly impossible to get to, without leaping across chasms and clinging onto tiny ledges by his fingertips. It's fun, but it gets old after a few dozen repetitions.

So I started to experience some level of fatigue with the mechanics. As brilliant as the level design is, there's only so many times you can hear Nathan saying "Oh no, a dozen more bad guys got here before us! We must now sneak about strangling them all one by one," without starting to lose interest.

And then there's the narrative issues.


What are you doing here?


It's very apparent that the Uncharted series is not leaning heavily on 'realism' as its main selling point. Part of the joy is the ludicrous nature of the situations Nathan finds himself in, and the insane good fortune he has when swinging from collapsing roof to burning forest.

But I still want to feel like things matter. And it's the small things.There are so many places which are simultaneously:

a) Full of enemy soldiers and
b) Utterly impossible to get to without leaping across crumbling cliff faces.

How do the soldiers get there? Do loads of them die, every day, just trying to get to work?

Not a big deal. But I like the world to feel real. The Last of Us did a much better job of making the situations feel believable and lived in. Different tone, I realise. But maybe that's why I've played that game three times through and would play it again tonight. I believed in the world.


In conclusion

Uncharted 4 is certainly a good game. It has many exciting sequences and well designed experiences. But it's very linear and gets repetitive. So it's not a great game. I want a little more control, please.

Next up, Until Dawn.