In 1996 Tomb Raider was released for Playstation and other consoles, and featured a new kind of main character…Lara Croft. A big breasted adventurer that had an upper class British accent and travelled the world seeking various treasures from various tombs and taking them when she found them. You might call her a Tomb Raider as she primarily spent her time raiding tombs. This game was very popular with gamers and one of the main reasons being that there were various walls that you could stand Lara up against which would cause the camera to zoom in on her boobs…from what I heard getting to spend the night with Lara Croft was many an adolescent nerdy teens ultimate fantasy.

So since 1996 the character has evolved and as graphics have gotten better Lara Croft has become more and more lifelike but basically she has remained the same, big boobs, tight ass, and clothing that reveals every curve.

You may be wondering why I am talking about Tomb Raider when I am supposed to be looking at the Uncharted games, but that is my point, Uncharted is Tomb Raider except developers Naughty Dog have decided to go in a different direction to the creators of Lara Croft and so have replaced her…

With him…

How could people not take to the Uncharted franchise??

Similarly to Saints Row and Grand Theft Auto we have two franchises which have similar concepts, themes and of course feature globetrotting adventures to locate various hidden treasures. Now whilst the Tomb Raider series boasted the foxy lady below…

...the Uncharted games were not going to have the ever improving graphics enhancing the eye candy of Lara Croft to keep fans entertained.

In all honesty it has to be said that the Tomb Raider games could be really frustrating, I have only played Tomb Raider Legends all the way through because I got killed over and over by a tiger in Tomb Raider 3 for the Playstation which resulted in me getting bored of the game and giving up. But even in Legends the amount of times Lara would not grab a ledge a die were too many to count. She would sail through ledges and bars time and time again because she’d decided that she didn’t feel like grabbing hold of it on that occasion. Still, there were some interesting ideas in Legends that I quite liked which was why I looked past the irritations and continued to play it.

I guess the question that remains is this: as Uncharted cannot simply dangle a pretty lady in front of its fans to keep them from realising that the game might actually not be very good, does this mean the game is actually going to be good??

The Uncharted games do not have the advantage of Lara Croft so it remains to be seen whether a guy can make tomb raiding as entertaining as a woman that looks like this in a bikini…

Date Posted: 26/01/15

Released in 2007 Uncharted is an action-adventure game in which you play as one-man muder machine Nathan Drake as he slaughters his way through various exotic locations to an ancient treasure

Generally I hate games that have a lot of hype surrounding them, and at the time all of my skin sack's friends were raving about this game. I would ask them both what the big deal was and all they would say was I needed to play it to experience it for myself.

So...where exactly do you start with a game like Uncharted?

Well, it’s like every Tomb Raider game except with a bloke instead of a woman. That is pretty much it from what I could see, but perhaps I missed the point and maybe this statement is not an accurate portrayal of the game, a game that was good enough to have now gone platinum. Does it, therefore, expand on the action-adventure genre with full and interesting puzzles to solve, with a beautiful backdrop and an equally entertaining storyline? And perhaps most importantly of all: What does Nathan Drake have that Lara Croft is lacking? Well, balls obviously but let's take a bit more of an indepth look (at the game not his balls obviously)

Basically the game looks very good; the graphics for the scenery, water effects, ocean and the characters themselves make the game feel more like a live-action movie rather than a computer game. There isn’t the traditional heath bar, as Drake takes damage the scenery around him becomes increasingly black and white; to restore his health, simply take cover for a moment and as the colour returns to the screen Drake heals. Although, this feature does away with stocking up on med-packs, it does mean that you will get gunned down as you attempt to seek shelter and recover. In addition how exactly does it make sense for Drake to simply shelter for a few minutes and he can shrug off bullet wounds like he is waiting for his foot to wake up after it has fallen asleep?

Despite Drake’s ability to regenerate once he’s hidden for a few seconds, the game still falls into the same trap that the Tomb Raider games did, it is ridiculously easy to die. It is so frustrating watching Drake plunge to his doom over and over again because you didn’t move the joystick in precisely the right way, this means that when you try and make an all important jump, your hero will either leap to oblivion or simply hop back to where you started from. The game demands that you take leaps of faith frequently, perhaps this was done to add to the tension or just to piss off a bunch of gamers. I tend to think the reload time after you die is a good indicator of how frequently the game expects you to die, if you are having to wait more than 10-15 seconds then you are not supposed to be getting killed often. Drake’s Fortune will reload from a death in about 5 seconds so it expects you to die, it expects you to die a lot, and you will, you will die a hell of a lot.

As equally irritating as the constant leaps of faith are the lack in the range of enemies, at least Lara Croft would encounter tigers, giant spiders or leopards during her tomb raiding, with boss battles included giant snakes and wrath like apparitions stalking through the passageways of burial grounds. All Drake gets to fight for the majority of the game are men, hundreds and hundreds of well-armed men, men that seem to appear out of nowhere to pump him full of bullets the moment you believe you have cleared an area and can therefore explore it freely. Even areas of the game when you have entered an underground burial ground which no one seems to have entered for centuries, you’ll still find rooms filled with guards. Where are the bad guys getting these legions of men? Why are they hunting down ancient treasures when they could march on Washington DC and take over the USA or something?? Getting riddled with bullets time and again gets really old, really fast, and having to constantly hideaway so your health can regenerate means you are going to spend hours crouching behind cover picking away at other enemies who are also hiding behind cover. Varied the combat is not. Get a gun and don’t stop murdering until you reach the treasure you seek, then kill everyone else that may have beaten you to it. There is also a sequence or two when you travel up river on a jetski but you cannot drive and fire at the same time so if there are enemies on the shore you have to stop, drift back downstream and fire at them, then you can start motering back upstream...why design the shooting and driving mechanic this way?? I can only assume to irritate the crap out of the player.

The game looks very impressive, and having to control Drake’s balance with your controller whilst moving along narrow logs or ledges is a nice touch, but you will find yourself cursing Drake as you watch him die yet again, still, if you enjoy hiding behind cover killing more people than cholera as you take on an army of enemies, with a bit of treasure hunting thrown in, then this is the game for you.

I was not impressed with Uncharted as for me it got dull very quickly, I did make it to the end but it was a bit of a cop out and watching Drake getting killed was the best part of the game so that probably says more about me than it does about the game. My Thumb rating is a definite Down, it is okay, but play Tomb Raider because at least that way you get to make Lara stand against the wall which makes the camera inexplicably zoom in onto her massive tits

3/10 - It is repetative and it is fun watching Drake get killed over and over, but one of those games that you will largely forget the moment you stop playing it

Date Posted: 14/06/15

Released in 2009 Uncharted 2 is an action adventure game and was available on the PS3, it continued the adventures of Nathan Drake. As we know Uncharted was basically Tomb Raider with a bloke instead of a woman, so instead of Lara Croft refusing to grab hold of ledges and plunging to her rag-doll death, we got Nathan Drake with his gravity defying hair plunging to his rag-doll death. Now obviously Uncharted was successful enough to spawn a sequel.

Right, so there was a fair amount of hype surrounding Uncharted, especially when screen shots of the game was released showing a German U-Boat in the jungle with obviously no explanation of how it got there. You just have to play the game to find out. I played the game and whilst I thought it was just a poor Tomb Raider clone (and I’m no fan of Tomb Raider as when I do play it Lara Croft ends up dead…a lot…mainly because she won’t grab hold of ledges preferring instead to plunge to her death or in the case of Tomb Raider 3 a tiger kept killing her). Some of my skin sack’s friends were aware that I was not overly impressed with Uncharted but they liked it and encouraged me to go out and play Uncharted 2. More importantly they wouldn’t shut up about it no matter how many times I threatened them with disintegration. Hell, one of them even loaned it to me so that I could play an “amazing sequel” for myself and see that they were right about it all along

So…was it an amazing sequel…well join me to find out…

Nathan Drake is back and this time he is approached by an old friend of his named Harry Flynn who wants his help to track down the lost city of Shambhala. With Flynn is Chloe Frazer an ex-lover of Drake’s who is now involved with Flynn. The night before the trio break into a museum to find an oil lamp that will start them on their quest, Chloe reunites with Drake and sleeps with him. During the robbery Flynn, apparently jealous of Drake’s former relationship with Chloe betrays him, leaving him to be arrested by the authorities.

Three months later Chloe (who escaped with Flynn) helps Drake get out of jail. It turns out that Flynn was working for a soviet warlord named Zoran Lazarević who wants to find Shambhala because there is some stone or something there that will make him immortal.

Drake and Co, including Elana, Drake’s love interest from the first game. I didn’t mention her in my review of the first game because like Juno in Force Unleashed she was so irrelevant to me as a player that I was not interested in even talking about her. So like the first game Drake has to beat the bad guys to the destination so that the bad guy cannot gets his hands on something that has been lost for a reason.

Tell me something, does the plot sound familiar??

You might be thinking, “this sounds a lot like the first game” and you’d be right. You may be also thinking, “hang on, this game sounds a lot like the plot line of the National Treasure films except here they are looking for an artefact of power rather than a treasure”. If either or both of these thoughts rattled through your brain then you are right on both counts because whilst ripping off its own original game it also manages to rip off the Nicholas Cage National Treasure films.

What is different in this game from the last one??

As far as I could tell, pretty much nothing, you run around slaughtering the armies of men that the warlord naturally has at his command whilst travelling from one set piece and one country to another. I will admit that the opening level in which you wake up on a train hanging over a cliff is interesting and does make you want to know how Drake ended up there, and what happens next. Of course when you find out, you learn it was because Drake was seeking an artefact and murdering anyone who stood in his way.

Remember the Nazis in the Indiana Jones films?? No-one has any problem killing Nazis, all you have to do in any game is establish that the enemies are Nazis and you can slaughter them freely without a conscience getting in the way. This game establishes that everyone who is fighting Drake is a mercenary, killing for money or is a soldier of a fanatical tyrannical warlord, and so you are doing them the world a favour by shooting them in the face. I am so tired of fighting wave after wave of inexhaustible armies of men that seem to be conjured out of the ether or something and are naturally armed to the teeth with magical weapons that never run out of ammo, well, not until you pick one up that is. Why are henchmen like Nazis and undeniably evil?? I’m not saying the Nazis who experimented on Jewish prisoners in the concentration camps weren’t evil because they were as close to evil as anyone with a soul can be, all I am saying is that sometimes people are just people, and being a mercenary or even a Nazi doesn’t naturally make a person so undeniably evil that it is okay for a one-man murder machine like Nathan Drake to slaughter them on mass.

Is Nathan Drake as big a monster as those who are seeking these treasures??

How much blood is on Drake’s hands??

Game play wise, (and I may have mentioned this already) you fight men, lots and lots of men, they throw a couple of tanks at you as well before you confront the Guardians of Shambhala, which, just like the first game, were once human but have been changed by the artefact that you seek. In Uncharted it was that weird sarcophagus thing that made those near it into monsters, and here the former inhabitants of the City of Shambhala have been exposed to this resin which makes them immortal.

The controls are a straight copy-paste from the original game and like before there is no health bar the screen just goes grey as you are hurt and brightens as you heal. The scenery is very nice, so that is a plus, but so what?? I don’t play a computer game to admire the scenery, if I want to look at scenery I’ll look at some fucking scenery…

This is a photograph taken in Trinidad, I was there scoping out where my mountain top mansion was going to go when my people finally arrive and reward me for finding this planet with its easily squashable inhabitants…sorry I have wandered off topic…the point is, I think you’ll agree, the scenery looks nice doesn’t it??

So whilst it helps the game to have a nice backdrop you cannot base a game on the background alone. Nathan Drake is the same as before, I have to admit that Chloe is sexy as hell and Claudia Black’s sultry voice fits her perfectly. I am not sure why Drake opts to get back together with Elana at the end of the game when they have obviously had a relationship not work out between the first game and this one when Drake has the chance to get back with big-breasted bad girl Chloe but maybe Drake is just an idiot.

Thinking about it…I said maybe Drake is just an idiot, but the more I think about it, the more I am convinced that Drake is in fact an idiot.

As the game progresses he travels to the same locations as the bad guys usually getting there before them or occasionally arriving just after. Yet when he gets to the locations and realises that there are complex puzzles that need to be solved before hidden passages will open up, he goes ahead and solves the puzzles, even when there is an army of bad guys nearby. It is established that Flynn is no Drake and cannot figure out how to find Shambhala and is basically just following Drake and taking credit for his discoveries. So…Drake if you don’t want the bad guys to progress and you know that Flynn is not smart enough to figure it out, then why are you solving these puzzles?? Just walk away, leave them chasing their tails, and head home. Or better yet call the authorities and inform them that a soviet warlord is currently running around with an army of soldiers tagging along in various countries murdering people. Shouldn’t the governments of those countries take action against him??

I think the best example that proves that Drake is indeed as thick as pig shit is when the resin at the heart of Shambhala has been found. At this point we know it makes people immortal. Drake is hiding as Zoran approaches the pool, he doesn’t shoot him, he simply waits until Zoran has drank the resin, his scars heal and he becomes immortal, and this is the moment that Drake chosen to engage him in a fight.

You know shooting him in the head before he got to the resin would have been a better tactic Drake.

If Drake had shot Zoran in the head and he had fallen forward into it, absorbing the resin and being revived, then fine, that I could have lived with. But why the crap does Drake allow him to become immortal and damn near invincible before trying to take him out?? It makes no sense and leads to a boss fight where you are charging round and round in circles whilst he chases you with a gun whilst throwing various grenades at you.

As you can probably tell I was not sold on Uncharted 2 because basically it is more of the same and I am just bored of killing wave after wave of human in computer games, now in real life, I never get tired of doing it which I guess is a little ironic…

Anyway, Uncharted 2: Among Thieves is just as uninspired as Uncharted Drake’s Fortune, it follows the same structure and whilst I did finish it, gunning down hordes of mercenaries got pretty dull, and as a result my Thumb is firmly Down.

4/10 – I’ll give Among Thieves a slightly higher rating than Drake’s Fortune for one reason and one reason alone, Claudia Black as Chloe Frazer. She is sexy as hell and in my opinion this game should have been rated as an 18 so then we could have seen Chloe get her boobs out like the characters in games like The Witcher do.

But before I go, here’s another photograph of the truly beautiful Trinidadian scenery…

Date Posted: 06/06/20

The first Unchartered 3: Drake’s Deception was released in November 2013 for the PS3, however, the version that I played was the remastered edition which came bundled with the first two games when I acquired my PS4. The game features Nolan North returning to voice Nathan Drake with Claudia Black as Chloe Frazer with Richard McGonagle as Victor “Sully” Sullivan.

After finishing Doom a few weeks ago I have been working my way through finishing Two Point Hospital which had been throwing very few diseases at me recently, instead favouring reaching new targets in my quest for 3-Stars in each hospital. As a result it is taking longer and longer to reach those final Stars because they involve things like getting your hospital up to a high value or increasing staff moral to 95% or whatever. I realised that I was enjoying flipping between Two Point Hospital and Doom because whilst the former is a bit more chilled out, the latter was all about action. Without an action fix I was getting a little weary of Two Point Hospital. Not because it is bad you understand but rather because by the time you are working towards the 3^rd Star, the hospital is by and large self-sufficient requiring little to no micromanaging on your part to function smoothly. So you are really just sitting back to watch the game play out than actively taking any part in it any longer

I fancied playing another game to work through alongside Two Point Hospital so when I grew weary of one I could play the other for a bit. This is what led me to playing Drake’s Deception. Now I replayed the first game to see if there was anything noticeably different between it and the PS3 version I had already played, I didn’t notice anything, so decided to fight my obsessive compulsive tendencies and skip playing Uncharted 2: Amongst Thieves on my PS4 before jumping into the 3^rd game.

The game opens two years after the previous one with Drake and Sully in London on their way to meet a man named Talbot who is looking to buy the ring of Sir Francis Drake that Nathan wears around his neck. The deal seems to be going smoothly until Sully accuses Talbot of giving them counterfeit money. Things quickly go sour with Sully and Nathan ending up being shot in an alleyway behind the bar.

Things then flash back 20 years to a time when the teenage Nathan Drake first encountered Sully. Both are looking for Sir Francis Drake’s ring, Sully for his employer Marlowe, and Nathan because he believes that the ring can lead him to a treasure or something. Nathan is almost killed by Marlowe’s people but Sullivan saves him, and ultimately takes the boy under his wing.

Back in the present Nathan and Sully stand up having been “shot” by a friend of theirs named Cutter, who is working with them so they can follow Talbot who was behind the attempt to purchase the ring. Nathan, Cutter, Sully and Chloe are working together because Nathan believes that Francis Drake was sent on a secret mission by Queen Elizabeth I to Arabia to find the lost city of Ubar.

The stage is then set for a globetrotting adventure in which the treasure hunters must travel to exotic locations, solve ancient puzzles, and slaughter their way through waves, and waves, and waves, and waves...and waves of well armed henchmen all working for Marlowe and Talbot who are trying to find the city first.

Right so there is a lot to get through so let’s get cracking...

First off the sky boxes are very pretty with expansive cities and detailed levels with puzzles to work through. Nathan has his notebook with him to help with solving them. Plus there are a lot of very cool set pieces. The ancient city at the game’s climax and the cruise ship section stick in my mind.

The graphics are also ridiculously good, I noticed that when Nathan was walking through the desert the sand moves in your footprints. The attention to detail was staggering.  It makes you feel like the game world is a living environment with both the water and fire effects as some of the best I have ever seen in a video game.

Nolan North suits the look of Nathan Drake and whilst I have heard him voice numerous other characters (including Deadpool) you couldn’t imagine Nathan Drake being voiced by anyone else. The other characters especially Claudia Black also perfectly matches the sexy Chloe with Brit Graham McTavish lending his voice and likeness to Charlie Cutter. None of the voice actors give a bad performance and give all of the characters some depth which adds to the investment in them.

There are also several sequences when Nathan is affected by a hallucinogenic drug which leads to trippy drug sequences. They are well done and you feel the confusion that Nathan is feeling as he struggles to determine what is real and what is not.

So there are some positives, sadly my problems with the previous games have not been addressed here...

Now this is not necessarily the fault of the game but I have become very used to games that have a parkour system like the Assassins Creed series. Ezio and his fellow assassins are able to effortlessly scale buildings or lightly hop over obstacles in their way. I am so used to parkour games in which X is run/vault so kept making Drake jump when I didn’t want him to which resulted in many a failed jump. Like I said Drake is no Cole McGrath or Ezio as he prefers to climb slowly and carefully, fine if you’ve got time, not so if you have enemies shooting at you.

The puzzles are generally relatively simple to solve, however, if you spend too long on a puzzle the game will straight up tell you how to solve it. Other characters will give you tips and pointers but fail to recognise their hints and the game will just flash up a message asking if you’d like the puzzle solution because you are obviously too stupid to get it on your own.

So now we’re at my main problem with the game...the seemingly endless flow of men who shoot at you relentlessly.

My main problem with the games in the Uncharted franchise is that fact that they have always been about 10% puzzles solving, 10% climbing over various buildings, ancient and modern, and 80% cover-based shooting. 

Drake’s Deception was no exception to that rule. The majority of your time is spent crouching behind one chest-high wall after another as you shoot enemies that are also crouching behind chest high walls shooting back at you. If you venture from cover you are guaranteed to get shot down my thousands upon thousands of bullets. You start off fighting guys in suits, then later guys with riot shields, followed by guys with shotguns that have insane levels of armour that can kill you in a couple of hits. Naturally they never run out of ammo or grenades that are constantly thrown forcing you to move out of cover into the unrelenting cross fire of bullets. You can pick up grenades too but whilst Drake has unlimited upper body strength when climbing, he has never been taught how to throw so his grenades always land a few feet short of distant enemies whilst theirs land in his lap. It reminded me of the Militia in Infamous 2 who could throw grenades so precisely that they would always land perfectly in your face even if Cole was hanging off the side of a building at the time.  

Despite having gun fights in historical locations that are now tourist attractions not once do local police show up when the bad guys start decimating ancient buildings with RPGs in the middle of modern cities.

How many times do you hear Sully yell “It’s an ambush?” as men swarm your position and how many times do you think we find something only for the bad guys to show up moments later to take it??

One of the best parts of the game is when Nathan is lost and in danger of dying in the desert as he desperately searches for water. He ultimately stumbles on a ghost town and is so exhausted he can barely stand. He staggers into an area with around a dozen men and has to engage in a gunfight with them. It is unnecessary and I am flabbergasted that Naughty Dog put such time into making the game look amazing but can’t seem to think of any other game play other than endless waves of men to fight. 

It isn’t all gun fights this time around as there is some fist fighting sequences which break up the gunfights, however there are two main problems with these. The first is that you could be having a punch up with one guy but his mates will shoot you in the back whilst you are doing it, and two the game gives you button prompts advising when to attack, counter and so on. In typical fist-fight fashion there are bigger Brute type enemies that only fight you hand-to-hand but once you have worked out their patterns they become more of an irritation than any credible threat. The button prompts also mean that the final boss fight comes dangerously close to being a series of quick time events.

The game does make an attempt to put in some stealth mechanics but it is one of those games in which you fuck up the stealth and every guard within a fifty mile radius immediately knows where you are. Guess what happens if you make a mistake...yep waves of men appear out of the ether to kill you. Nathan has to sneak on to a plane at one point which had to be done quietly, thankfully a gun fight with a bunch of henchmen, counts as silent and sneaky in the world of Uncharted. A forced stealth section would have been aggravating but it would have given some variety to the usual cover-based shooting.

Plus I had a moment on a cruise ship when I was in stealth and a piece of debris brushed a henchman’s leg which immediately caused him to spot me hiding concealed behind a box nearby. On the subject of debris, there is a sequence on a disintegrating plane in which cargo is rolling around, if it touches Nathan he dies, yet I watched a henchman become non-corporeal as a crate passed through him without causing so much as a scratch.

One of the most bizarre things about the enemies in this game and something that Nathan even comments on, is why do enemies prioritise killing you over their own safety??

It happens time and time again. Talbot sets a mansion on fire which begins collapsing around those inside, and yet his henchmen men are still standing their ground as the building is falling down around them. On the sinking cruise ship I watched a guy standing there shooting me whilst a cargo hold filled with water around him, he was literally still firing as the water rose up over his head and drowned him. I’m guessing programming the AI of enemies to have self-preservation mechanics is hard so Naughty Dog didn’t bother to do it.

Generally it is easy to distinguish the enemies from your allies as the game goes on, however, in the earlier stages I kept taking cover beside enemies thinking they were Cutter because he is bald and wears dark clothes, and the enemies at the time are mostly bald wearing dark suits. In the midst of a gun battle you don’t want to be taking shelter next to an enemy who would shoot remorselessly because at a glance I’d figured he was on my side. Your allies move around so you have to keep track of where they are as well as the enemies to avoid mistaken identity. Thankfully you can’t kill them which is just as well during a sequence where teargas is thrown as I am pretty sure I shot both Sully and Elena in the confusion.

You can really tell what kind of game this is going to be by taking look at the trophies because the majority of them revolve around killing enemies with different types of weapons and getting headshots.

The combat aside as the game progresses it becomes clear that he Atlantis of the Sands is housing something bad, just like the sarcophagus in the first game and Shambhala in the second, and yet Nathan doesn’t turn back. Hell, Chloe and Cutter bow out when they realise how dangerous the people they are up against are.  Why is Nathan so dense to the idea that if things have been lost then maybe they have been lost of a reason? He is ignorant to it despite the fact that the last two treasures that he has gone after have turned out to be so dangerous that they needed to be destroyed before the bad guys could take them back to civilisation, doesn’t he remember what happened on previous adventures?

The bad guys this time around are involved in a secret society of some sort, and the second in command, Talbot, seemingly takes a bullet in the face and disappears mid-chase a few times but no explanation is given as to why. His boss Marlowe wants to find the lost city because there is something there that can be weaponised. The reason the city died was basically because something weird got into the water which made the inhabitants go insane and kill each other. Marlowe and her cronies want to use it to defeat their enemies through fear. It honestly reminded me of the plot of Batman Begins in which something in the water was going to make the population of Gotham City go insane and kill one another.

In the last two games Nathan has been after a lost city which is visible from the sky so why haven’t any satellites ever picked them up before? You’d think a massive city in the middle of the desert or in the mountains would be the kind of thing that a satellite would be capable of spotting, but I guess not.

Thanks to his unlimited upper body strength you spend a lot of time climbing up and down things. As is typical in any game like this in which you climb around a drop of a couple of feet can kill you if you don’t follow where you are supposed to go, but in cut scenes Nathan can jump from twenty feet or more and land without injury

The game reloads fast if you die which is good because during your playthrough there are going to be endless deaths and restarts sometimes because of the enemies shooting at you but also because I have no idea where I am supposed to go. There are numerous sections that kill you stone dead if you make a mistake and go the wrong way for a second or miss-time a jump. Death upon death upon death, which further emphasises what treasure is possibly worth so much risk?

I don’t understand why there are no booby traps in these ancient places, I enjoyed the spider sequences because it was a break from the men attacking, and I just find it staggering that Naughty Dog put so much thought into the set pieces but none into enemy variety. Lara Croft in the Tomb Raider games would have to deal with wild animals during her adventures so why don’t any of the places that Nathan goes have any wildlife that could prove to be a new challenge??

You may be wondering why I played this game at all and it, like the previous two, I played because they had been highly recommended. Drake’s Deception has been given a 10/10 or 95% rating by other who have played it, but I cannot fathom how they play it without getting frustrated by the gun fights. The occasional gun fight, fair enough, but how many times are we going to enter an ancient tomb or something only to discover the bad guys have gotten there first??

Once I have started a game I might stop playing it because I just lose interest or forget about it, but never will I stop playing because I am rage quitting. The game is annoying and aggravating, and there were times when the only reason I pushed through it was because I am stubborn and just like Shadow of War I wasn’t about to let this game beat me.

Paradoxically I really don’t hate the Uncharted games and actively like the characters, I just hate the gunfight after gunfight after gunfight game play. Which I get is like saying that whilst I like Grand Theft Auto I just don’t like the stealing stuff and committing crimes, because that is a massive part of the game, but it is true. I was staggered by the detail of the sand and water effects, the graphics are beautiful, and the voice acting superb. Sadly the constant gun battles wear me down until I am just pushing myself through them whilst getting increasingly angry because the inexhaustible supply of enemies just keep coming and coming and coming whilst you struggle to slaughter them all before going into the next area and doing the exact same thing over again.

All in all I cannot understand why other people rate the game so highly. Drake’s Deception is just yet another Uncharted game that brings nothing new to the formula, Nathan slaughters his way through the enemies to find a treasure that you know right from the beginning is not going to be something he will take home.

Is it any better than the others? Well yes and no, yes due to the graphics and set pieces, but no in terms of being one gunfight after another. I can’t say that I spent more time enjoying the game than I did rolling my eyes or sighing as I approached an open area with numerous chest high walls and guns scattered around knowing what was about to happen because it was exactly what happened about thirty seconds before. As before my Thumb is Down, what I find annoying is that these games do have real potential, they could be really good if they could only get away from the gunfight mentality. I have Uncharted 4 which is Nathan Drake’s final adventure so perhaps it will be different, and perhaps my people will answer the phone...well, an alien can dream.

4/10 – I rate the game based upon my level of enjoyment weighed against my anger and/or irritation. I spent more time angry or annoyed than engaged which is why I am giving the game this score. The moments when I was enjoying it were heavily outmatched by the times when I was sitting there with gritted teeth and an angry expression as I struggled to kill the armies of men firing constantly at me.