In the last week I've been running, jumping and shooting my way through Uncharted: Drake's Fortune on the PS3. Although it only took me 11 hours to finish it, I had a thoroughly enjoyable time.
Think of a cross between an Indiana Jones movie and the Prince of Persia games, and you pretty much have Uncharted. You play Nathan Drake, a modern-day treasure hunter, trying to find the lost gold of El Dorado, fighting a rival group who's trying to get there first. It's a mix of a platformer and a third-person shooter, and it works really well.
I'm not a big fan of shooters on the PS3 because I find trying to aim with an analogue stick a complete nightmare compared to aiming with a mouse. But I didn't have too much trouble with Uncharted at all. Maybe I'm starting to get used to it. The next time I play a PC shooter it's probably going to seem incredibly easy.
So what was so great about the game? The graphics were nice, particularly the character models, although I still think that top-end PC titles like Crysis have them beat. The story was enjoyable, if predictable, with several hugely fun set pieces (the vehicle chase and the jet-ski ride upriver standing out). I liked the way that finding the hidden treasures scattered around the levels gradually unlocked special features, such as making-of videos and special abilities - it really gave you an incentive to explore. Ammo was rare enough to make you worried about running out, but not so rare that you often did. And auto-save points were sufficiently frequent that I rarely got frustrated.
The few, minor annoyances included quicktime events which sprang from nowhere and required you to quickly press a button or instantly die (which invariably meant that I died the first time), and Drake's unpredictable ability to automatically grab onto ledges when running off them.
But all in all, Uncharted was the most fun game I've played since Rainbow Six: Vegas.
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