We all have those games that we miss the first time around. With the busy release schedule of modern gaming, no one has time to play everything. That is why we at WingDamage present to you “Fashionably Late Reviews“. This is our series on games from the current generation of consoles that we may have missed on their initial release, but have gone back to experience now.

Back in August, I wrote a piece on Piles of Shame, and had our readers vote on which game I should play through to completion and review. “Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune” won with 48% of the votes. There is much love for this game and, while it isn’t perfect, it is easy to see why.

Everything about Drake’s Fortune is designed to give the feeling of a big summer blockbuster movie. The plot revolves around ancient lost treasure, the odds are stacked overwhelmingly against you, it is full of exotic locations, and there are lots of explosions. Oh, and don’t forget the sassy female sidekick.

The game is broken up into two very distinct sections. By that I mean there are the exploration sections and the gunplay sections. While the exploration and gunplay flow seamlessly into one another, they do feel like two very distinct chunks that the game flips back and forth between.

The exploration sections were my personal favorite. While a little more linear than I would have liked, they give you a chance to stop and appreciate how gorgeous this game is. If you need a graphical showcase for the PS3, look no further.

Drake is guided by where the next safe hand-hold is, which is fairly obvious most of the time. Occasionally, these sections would have camera problems when they were in tight quarters, but the ones that took place outdoors made good use of dramatic angles to further the summer blockbuster look and feel.

This is the part of the game that adds the “Tomb Raider” part of the equation when people describe this game as “Tomb Raider” meets “Gears of War”. It does feel very reminiscent of Lara Croft’s adventures, but with tighter controls and way less tigers and dinosaurs.

Gunplay is something that many third-person action games fail at. It can be the aiming, a broken cover system, or a host of other problems that can ruin the game. Uncharted’s firefights were a mixed bag for me. While the cover system was fun and forced your to use the terrain to your advantage, I would occasionally have trouble getting Drake to hide where I wanted him to.

My biggest gripe with Drake’s Fortune is that enemies take too many shots to kill. Maybe it just expected a level of precision not easily achieved on a PS3 controller, but sometimes enemies would take three head-shots to take out. I also should not have to unload half a clip from an automatic rifle into a regular human’s torso to kill him. It’s a small complaint, but it did make a few sections drag on more than I would have liked.

There is also some basic melee combat. If you run up behind a guy, you can take him out in one very well animated move. You can also just run up and start punching guys in the face. There is a combo system, but it didn’t seem very responsive. I generally ended up just button mashing my way through these confrontations.

One of the design goals with Uncharted was to make Drake feel like a regular guy. While most regular guys I know could not scale walls, heal in a few seconds, or shoot a gun nearly as well as Drake, they did do a good job of making him feel vulnerable and mostly ordinary. You can’t jump ten feet into the air like Mario or run at super-sonic speeds like a certain blue hedgehog. When Drake pulls himself up to a higher ledge, you hear him straining. When you barely make a jump, he reacts. When you fall from too far, he clearly sounds like he is hurting (or dies instantly).

By all accounts, “Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune” is a great game. This is why the flaws that are there stand out as much as they do. There were a few parts I found very frustrating, but they weren’t enough to kill my overall enjoyment. While the last few sections lost some of the magic set up by the first 3/4 of the game, I still recommend this to anyone looking for a great action title for the Playstation 3.

Tags: 3rd Person, exploration, Fashionably Late Reviews, naughty dog, platformer, ps3, shooter, Uncharted, Uncharted: Drake's Fortune

This entry was posted on Friday, October 2nd, 2009 at 5:00 am and is filed under Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.