Easily the Best This Series has offered yet, despite some things.
Uncharted 3 was probably every PS3 owner's most anticipated game of 2011. After Uncharted 2 re-wrote some things (I'm still not the biggest fan of Uncharted 2), many were looking at 3 to be even bigger and better. And while a lot of people were hard on 3, I feel that 3 offers everything great you could want from this series.
Maybe I'm just not a fan of the snowy environments of the previous game, I don't know. Perhaps I felt the previous game dragged a bit, who knows what it was. I just didn't enjoy Uncharted 2 as much as literally everyone else seemed to. However, three is a vast improvement over just about every thing that the previous two games did wrong...well almost.
While the melee combat system has finally been fine tuned and offers the best of this series, the gun combat is downright horrible at times. I fail to understand how the Uncharted series fails at gun play so much, but it does. What's more baffling, is during my intermission of about twenty-four hours on this game, I loaded up the original Tomb Raider on my PC, and discovered that the gun combat works about fifty-times better there then it does in Uncharted. Sad, but true. What's more maddening is the horrible enemy spawn system, which has progressively gotten worse through out the Uncharted series. It seemed like it was becoming better in two, but here it just takes a turn for the worse. I can count about a dozen times I was screaming obscenities at the screen because an enemy spawned behind me. Enemies will pour in from about any side of a room your in, including behind you, and they can sometimes even kill you with one hit. It's frustrating, and downright ruins some of the enjoyment that should be had here. And towards the end of the game, a new kind of enemy is briefly introduced, one that can teleport. There's a room in particular where you must fight about five of these guys at once, while barely being able to find cover. This was one of the most frustrating parts of a game I've encountered this year, and this was on Normal. Just goes to show, sometimes there is still bad game design out there.
Despite those two complaints, I enjoyed the story of Uncharted 3 vastly more then I did 2. Perhaps it's because my favorite character is Sully and he was pretty much absent in the previous game, I'm not sure. The set-pieces are astounding at times, offering up just about as much action as Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3's campaign did this year, sometimes even more. The sequences on the rocking boats and the whole airplane sequence have to be some of the most memorable moments I've had with any game.
At the end of the day, Uncharted 3 delivers exactly what I expected and wanted. However, I for one hope that Naughty Dog takes a step back and re-works the gun-combat. Please.
