Buried treasure?
I’ll never forget the first time I played Uncharted. It was 2012: I bought a refurbished PlayStation 3 from Amazon, and Uncharted was the first game I bought from GAME’s pre-owned section (remember that?). At the time, I was working on a large AV technology setup at a university department, with a floor-to-ceiling projector screen and beefy sound system. Naturally, we needed to ‘test’ this new equipment, so we hooked up the PS3 and I played Uncharted on my own personal cinema. What a ride! The graphics weren’t better than anything on the Xbox 360 at the time, but Naughty Dog’s eye for cinematic flair, previously hinted at in Jak and Daxter, finally had the technology to do it justice.
Despite those strong first impressions, once the visual splendour wore off, I don’t remember Drake’s Fortune that fondly. I remember being frustrated by the gunplay… that bit at the end where you shoot countless mutant freaks… that the characters were fun and believable… but aside from those fleeting memory vignettes, it was… fine. I remember Uncharted 2: Among Thieves and 3: Drake’s Deception much more fondly: 2 was a masterclass in action game design, 3 wasn’t as strong as 2 but had some mind-boggling set pieces like the burning building and the ship graveyard. (We’ll return to those one day).
Those were my 2012 memories; now I am returning to the Uncharted series through the PlayStation 4 ‘Nathan Drake Collection’1 of remasters with fresh eyes. They’re a modest upgrade from the PS3 originals: a little extra resolution, higher frames per second, but not a significant difference. Fortunately, the remasters were developed by Bluepoint, who were also behind the outstanding Metal Gear Solid HD Collection, so I was confident it would be a faithful and classy collection.
Is that faithfulness a good thing? Does The Nathan Drake Collection cement Drake’s legacy, or does it highlight the flaws? Can I get through this writeup without using the phrase “ludonarrative dissonance”?
Welcome back to 2007
When it comes to sheer programming wizardry, Naughty Dog must be the world’s best developers. They have relentlessly pushed the envelope for years since the development of Crash Bandicoot. That’s great when the technology is new, but less impressive as time marches on.
Uncharted’s character models were the state of the art in 2007. In 2024, following the advances of Uncharted 4—or The Last of Us, somehow a PS3 game!—they look like crude rubber mannequins by comparison. However, the animations and voice acting have stood the test of time, and the way characters interact with each other in cutscenes has a natural ease that recalls Uncharted’s biggest influence, the Indiana Jones movies. There’s an undeniable chemistry between Nate, Elena, Sully, and even the baddies that shows Naughty Dog’s growing abilities in videogame storytelling that only improve with subsequent Uncharted games (and, of course, The Last of Us).

After a leisurely introduction with some basic puzzles and the discovery of a Nazi submarine on top of a waterfall—it really is difficult to imagine Nathan Drake in a world without Dr Jones—we’re thrust into wave after wave of gunfights. For a game that doesn’t necessarily style itself as a shooter, there’s a lot of shooting in Uncharted, much more than something like the modern Tomb Raider games. The platforming sections are easy little coffee breaks that punctuate the endless violence, and the puzzles are so simple they’re barely puzzles at all, more like interactive cutscenes.
I soon realised that I’d been playing Uncharted wrong, and misjudged it, back in the PS3 days. For context: by the time I’d gotten around to Uncharted, I’d completed the Gears of War trilogy, Vanquish, Binary Domain, and loads of other mediocre third-person shooters2. Gears of War is all about cover (notoriously, its environments consist mostly of chest-high walls), and you need to stick to that cover, unless you want your head torn off by a rifle round or explosive arrow. Some games, like the aforementioned Vanquish, allow for more freedom of movement. But you’re still mostly dashing between cover points and taking potshots, rather than standing your ground and circle-strafing like the good old days of Doom and Quake.

Uncharted doesn’t work like that. Enemies swarm from all sides into bowl-shaped combat arenas, and they love to rush you. Even if you think you’ve found cover, they will find a way to chip away at your health. You don’t have the luxury of getting comfortable in a corner: you need to run and gun, rushing enemies and pushing forward while Drake automatically aims. You need to act more like an action movie hero, but rather than aping Indiana Jones, you should channel John Wick. Uncharted rewards efficient, accurate players who can consistently land headshots, more than most games I can recall.
Ducks and Drakes
My biggest mistake for my original play-through on PS3 was trying to rely on assault rifles and shotguns, which are your primary firearms in most shooters. In Uncharted, you should use a handgun for most fights and focus on landing accurate headshots at midrange. Save your rifles and shotguns for when you have to break cover or an enemy is rushing you. The rifles and submachine guns are surprisingly useless, wildly spraying bullets in a wide arc that makes landing headshots much harder. Instead, if you’re patient with a pistol, you can use it like a mini sniper rifle.
On the normal difficulty setting, Drake is made of tissue paper that wouldn’t survive a serious nose blowing, let alone a hail of gun fire. Enemies are supremely accurate over long distances, and if you try to flee the battlefield to give Drake a breather, they will give his back a hot lead massage. Despite the occasional frustrating choke point, Uncharted is not that difficult once you understand how you’re expected to play. I decided I didn’t need to prove my skills by cranking up the challenge: this remaster adds a new ‘Brutal’ difficulty which is comically hard (based on the YouTube videos) with some of the cheapest deaths this side of being crushed by a closing door in Duke Nukem 3D.

Even if you’re playing Uncharted the ‘right’ way, it still feels like a slog at times. It’s a curious thing: the story really sucks you in, and the set pieces are very 2007 — gun turrets, vehicles with turrets, waves of enemies where you could really use a turret — but there’s also a blandness to it, a sense that you’re doing the same thing over and over again. I guess that Naughty Dog invested most of their development resources into making Uncharted an audiovisual spectacle on the notoriously challenging PS3 hardware, and that didn’t leave much room for gameplay innovation. Technical splendour aside, when you’re actually playing Uncharted, there’s more style and less substance than Naughty Dog’s PS2 offerings, Crash Bandicoot on PS1—a game I don’t love, but do respect. Uncharted never lives up to the expectations of what a PS3 game could be; it’s a beautiful PS2 game.
I had a lot of fun in the post-game trophy hunt, even if those trophies are dull: kill 50 enemies with every gun, a couple of speed run challenges3. Admitting to trophy and achievement hunting is gauche these days, but I enjoy them after I’ve completed a game as an excuse to explore the systems and levels more deeply. I was also much better at the game by now, and I knew the arena layouts, which matter more in Uncharted than a casual play through of something like Halo. You need to know where the next wave of enemies will emerge, you need to know where that sniper rifle or grenade cache is hidden. Your first campaign is fraught with ambushes and the terrifying click of an empty gun magazine, both of which are more easily managed on subsequent attempts. Every game is easier when you know what’s coming, but I wish Uncharted had a flair for improvisation to match its protagonist. The best Halo levels have a thousand different strategies, with AI that adapts on the fly. In Uncharted, it feels like there’s only one way each fight will pan out, and it’s up to you to find that way.
I had hoped that on my second playthrough, older and wiser, Uncharted would reveal itself as a hidden gem. Instead, it’s cursed to be that game you should begrudgingly play before Uncharted 2. It’s still a blast, but it’s shorter and smaller in stature than you remembered, diminished by the shadow of its superior sequels.
- Whose Uncharted collection could it possibly be? Isn’t he in the fourth game too? What a strange name ↩
- That generation was one long series of line third person shooters, much like how the subsequent generation was one long series of open world third person adventures ↩
- I’m not sure if Uncharted’s trophies were patched into the game at a later date – the PS3 did not release with trophies, they were a later addition that ripped off Xbox 360 achievements – and many PS3 exclusives have trophies that lack imagination. Bluepoint could have mixed things up for the remaster, although considering the Metal Gear Solid 2 HD border on torture, I should be careful what I wish for. ↩