Uncharted: The Nathan Drake Collection Review

Nathan Drake is gaming’s equivalent to the two most loved Harrison Ford characters of the 70’s and 80’s. A blend of Indiana Jones and Han Solo, Nate splits his time between rummaging through caves for lost treasures and getting himself into shootouts with an army of pirates, mercenaries, and then a secret British society, chucking out quips as he goes. With his sly smile, even when facing impossible odds, you can’t help but like him.

The Nathan Drake Collection is a trilogy of third person action-adventures, with gunplay and puzzle-platforming, with Drake’s search for treasure taking him to dense jungles, scorching deserts, and the remote regions of Nepal across these three stories.

Released in October 2015, comparisons to Xbox One’s Rise of the Tomb Raider are inevitable. Despite the attention paid to improving the resolution of the textures and the framerate, there’s no escaping the fact that they look like old games. Especially when compared to one of the best looking games on the new gen. In gameplay terms, the two are very similar too. The advantage goes to Uncharted though with the bump up to 60fps on all three games, looking to fix the “sluggish” problem many had with the original releases, resulting in a more responsive combat experience.

Coming from Bluepoint Games, the team behind the Metal Gear Solid HD Collection, Uncharted: The Nathan Drake Collection is a superb remaster. Ahead of Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End next spring, gamers who jumped from Microsoft to Sony in the new generation now have the chance to catch up on one of the PlayStation’s flagship series.

Being one of these people, it made sense for me to start with Drake’s Fortune. Popular opinion claims that the sequel is better, but like many, I had never played one of these titles. I had always thought that the Uncharted games were more like puzzle games, and I believe I’m right in saying that this one has the most shooting sections. It may also be that it stood out more here because the fighting in this game is awful.

The main gameplay focus seems to be shooting dudes, but Naughty Dog didn’t seem to understand what makes shooting dudes fun. One of my gaming pet peeves is when a weapon seems a lot more powerful in the hands of your enemy than it does in your own. Taking down one enemy can take an entire magazine, and yet I seemed to be going down with a double tap to the chest. And why is Drake so bad at aiming? When I aim for a guy's head, I want to shoot the guy in the head. Bullets seem to whizz off target on a far too regular basis. And this is with improvements added from the other games.

Despite this, I still really like Drake’s Fortune, and I think this is mostly down to the characters. The plot here is the largest load of gumpf in a trilogy of gumpf, but I grew attached to Nate, Sully, and Elena fast. I think that this attachment spoilt Among Thieves.

I don’t really like Uncharted 2. Chloe is just a bad character, if you ask me. I get what they were trying to do. She is darker, and more edgy than Elena. I guess they thought people would like that. But I had just come from a game that seemed to be all about a growing relationship between Elena and Nate. I wanted more of that. I did get that, later, but only after the point where I’d given up on following the plot. I think most of it was about Nate looking at Chloe’s bum all the time or something. That’s all the two of them ever seem to talk about. The chief antagonist Lazarevic, the Serbian gun-for-hire after the same treasure as Drake, was rubbish too. He looks like he’d be more at home as a Resident Evil baddie.

Jokes aside, Among Thieves does have better shooting and puzzles. With Drake’s Fortune releasing early in the PS3’s cycle, Naughty Dog had more experience going into Uncharted 2, with a major improvement on the visual side of things. Character models started to look more like people, and you only have to compare the Amazonian rainforest of Drake’s Fortune to the Borneo jungle of Among Thieves to see the differences.

Drake’s Deception is my favourite. It had a more personal story, and a villain that suits it. Marlowe is not a physical challenge for Nate, but an intellectual one. Not some armour-clad madman, but smarter and manipulative. Naughty Dog were able to get so much more out of the confrontations between Marlowe and Nate because she actually seemed like a human being, and this made her more of a threat. They also remembered that the interactions with Sully are the highlights of the series, so I was glad to spend more time with him. Elena’s in it a bit more too! And Chloe isn’t!

Bluepoint had the tricky job of not only bringing the trilogy up to the standard people expect in their remasters, but in tying together a series that saw drastic improvements in both visual fidelity and gameplay. Each runs at 1080p/60fps, and Drake’s Fortune benefits the most, with character models that look less like they’re made out of wax and the eradication of its infamous frame tearing. The shooting stays shoddy throughout, and some of the fights get needlessly difficult for games that should primarily be fun. The puzzles get much better by Drake’s Deception, especially those in the French château chapters, and Drake started to feel like much more of an actual adventurer as opposed to just a mercenary in denial.

I didn’t expect to have as much fun with Uncharted as I did. The characters and the stories carry the weak gunplay and the repetitive platforming, but in the weekend I spent with The Nathan Drake Collection, I was hooked like a kid with cartoons, including the jumping out of bed first thing Saturday morning. And with Uncharted 4 only a matter of months away (delays permitting), it’s the perfect chance to catch up or revisit.