Uncharted 4 Review

• Developer: Naughty Dog
• Publisher: Sony Interactive Entertainment
• Genre: Action Adventure
• Platform: Playstation 4
• Release Date: 10th May 2016

Those who wait…

After many delays, this final part of the Nathan Drake story from Naughty Dog finally made it to release.  When a game has delays such as this one did I always worry that there are going to be problems and it will be rushed out, half finished with bugs aplenty and needing lots of patching.  Thankfully this is not the case with Uncharted 4.  There was a fairly hefty day one patch but throughout my whole playthrough I didn’t encounter a single problem.

Visually this game is a masterpiece, with character animation that is nigh on perfect (aside from minor lip syncing issues but I have played Bioware games so this gets a pass from me!) it is a wonder to behold, voice acting is spot on with some genuinely funny moments.  At 14ish hours long I found it to be a good length for the game and did not feel that any parts were rushed or padded out.

Gameplay is very natural, the controls feel good and I rarely had any problems remembering what button did what.  The quick time events have been drastically cut down from some of the earlier games and although they are still there, they are not so frequent that they become an annoyance.  The puzzles were good, most were fairly simple and could be figured out pretty quickly, personally I would have preferred a little more challenge but I enjoyed them regardless.  The combat was solid, I played through on the middle difficulty which was perfect for me, challenging at times but rarely frustrating.  I briefly dipped my toe into the online side of this as I enjoyed the action parts of the game very much.  This I found to be quite enjoyable and to those that are into competitive online majiggery I am sure this will give you something to play on and enjoy once the main story is done.

A fine bit of tale…

For me it is always the story that makes a game and this one delivers, with a plausible tale of a pirate colony hidden away for centuries with a trail of clues scattered all over the world starting in Scotland and moving around from there.  Nathan has settled down with his wife and has a fairly normal salvage job when his brother, who Nathan believed to be dead shows up needing his help to get him out of trouble.  A great story with a few twists that kept me interested the whole way through.

The only negatives I can pull from this are the lack of any real innovation, everything has been done before but never with this level of beauty and the other is present in all games of this genre; sometimes you can struggle to find the way to go when there is only ever one way which does tend to annoy me, but this appears to be the trend with this type of game.  It would have been nice to have a little more freedom of movement on some of the stages and in some cases there are multiple paths available but these are always the obvious ones.  Anything else I could say are merely plot points which could have been changed for a slightly better ending but are too spoilerific for this review.

Uncharted 4 is a fitting end to the series and gets an

8.5/10