Uncharted

I've been full of cold this weekend and have played a lot of Uncharted 4 in direct response.

It's a very beautiful game, and it's very pleasing to play. This is hardly news to anyone, of course, as it is an incredibly popular tentpole release, building on an already massively successful franchise. But then, there are plenty of games that are also mega popular and somehow, strangely, suck. So I guess popularity isn't all that big a deal.

Anyway. I like it. I like that it has a few core mechanics which it uses in a variety of creative ways. You can climb stuff. You can sneak about strangling people. You can do shooting. You can solve puzzles. Just enough to keep the gameplay varied, but not so much that the overall experience ends up feeling fragmented.

Nathan Drake - our cheerful, murderous protagonist - spends an awful lot of his time jumping about, grabbing hold of impossible ledges and swinging about in a wildly improbable manner. And, when I'm playing him, plummeting to his death on a regular basis.

Excitement! Adventure! Really wild things.

Most of the time this is thrilling and fun. There are two primary pleasures here. One is that you feel smart - each sequence of rickety rope bridges and jagged rock faces is a puzzle to be solved. It looks impossible, but there's a way through. And when you solve it, there's a little rush of joy at being so very clever. Apart from all those times you died. Let's forget those.

Then there's the vicarious thrill of being, for a little while, strong and dextrous enough to skip across ravines and swing from rope to rope. I can barely get off the sofa without going momentarily dizzy, so it's fun to feel like a strong, fit, impossibly agile hero as I skip lightly across a cliff face.

I do get slightly irritated with the game occasionally, when Nathan's ability to catch hold of things decides not to kick in. The problem with a protagonist who can grab onto the slenderest of ledges is when the game suddenly decides that no, that wasn't the kind of ledge you grab - that was a bit of ungrabbable scenery. The guys at Naughty Dog have tried hard to differentiate between 'game' ledges and 'aesthetic' ledges, but once in a while the difference is minimal, and I was left cursing the makers as Nathan plunged to his unreasonable doom.

Take that, evil doer

The combat mechanics are fine and one of the nice things about gameplay is the way that a stealth scenario can turn unexpectedly but seamlessly into a firefight. But I always feel a little like I've failed when that happens. I'm at my happiest sneaking around a graveyard, avoiding the patrolling soldiers and knocking them off, one by one, like an archeologically inclined Michael Myers.

The stealth is pretty good and the AI of the enemy units is convincing. I've spent many happy hours crouching motionless behind a wall, observing and calculating the patrol patterns of the soldiers below, formulating my murderous plans. The character animation makes them all seem pretty believable - an illusion only spoiled by the fact that they don't seem to notice all their friends silently disappearing, one by one. You'd think they'd wonder to themselves, "I'm sure there were seventeen of us a moment ago. Why has it gone so quiet?"

The puzzles are probably my least favourite part of the game, as they were with previous Uncharteds. I get why they are there, and they are impressive in how they've been worked out. But it all feels a little trial-and-error in the execution and I don't have that same sense of satisfaction as I get from traversing a tricky ravine, or taking out a bunch of bad guys without being seen. Maybe I'm just bad at puzzles.

So. A lovely game, which is giving me great pleasure. It looks good, too, and the dialogue works pretty well. I'd recommend it, but what's the point? If you're going to play it, you've already decided.

It's nice to know that in the world of AAA franchise games, there are still things of beauty to be found.