A sign of greater things to come.
Nathan Drake is the perfect man. Everything he says he says with irresistible charisma, every other line that comes out of his precious lips are either sarcastically funny or funnily sarcastic and he’s built, but built in a way that looks elegant, sleek and still very manly. All that talk about him being a fallible everyman is total crap. Look at him; he personifies everything any male human being aspires to be – the wisecracking adventurer who even gets the chick at the end. If you’re one to constantly compare yourself to other people, stay the hell away from this game. You will feel inadequate, worthless and like a loser who hasn’t done lick of adventuring in his petty life.
If you can just appreciate Nathan Drake as a great character, then good, there’s a pretty fun game here for you to play. It has a lot of problems and Drake's Fortune, especially if you’ve played Uncharted 2: Among Thieves already, feels like a proof of concept. Just how much could be done on the PS3 on purely technological level, just how the basic combat would work and how the platforming would play. It’s really just a promise of things to come. Well, my perspective on all this is probably skewed because of me just finishing Among Thieves last night and Drake’s Fortune a few days before that, but still, the game’s more or less an idea, an idea that gets fully realized in its sequel.
Drake’s Fortune tries its damndest to be cinematic. The cut-scenes are great; the longest ones clock in at around 5 minutes and all of them inject the characters with vibrancy and color, parcels of plot unfold and are interspersed throughout the game consistently and thoughtfully. The game never overindulges and never removes control from you long enough that the cut-scenes simply become irritating; they’re succinct and are rewards for your progress.
So, the problems come in when it tries to transfer the game’s cinematic trait onto parts that you play. Gunfights look and feel exciting. Nate utters words of panic when grenades land near him and he’s animated to perfection. The way he stumbles around when he’s running past a hailstorm of bullets and the way he flinches when bullets get a little too close for comfort when taking cover all convey a real sense of humanness. It almost makes his one-on-a-dozen-guys firefights extraordinary feats, where luck played just as much of a role as raw skill with a gun did.
The gunfights go from the Extraordinary Feats of Human Being Nathaniel Drake to derivate then to frustrating. It gets stupidly overwhelming at times. A typical encounter towards the end of the game can be mercenaries with grenade launchers sending out a constant barrage of explosions, three snipers constantly trying to draw their beads on you and a groups of mercenaries pouring out from the front, back, probably underground and probably a few more battalions parachuting from above. It certainly can be exciting, but it compromises the balance, tipping some of the more intense fights into frustratingly difficult. That combined with enemies taking an inhuman amount of bullets to take down and a cover system that can sometimes send Drake to cover that you totally did not want him to take cover on, Drake’s Fortune has its share of moments when dying constantly while learning when and where new spawns are triggered becomes the norm. There's so much killing and so much dying that it starts to feel wrong. I mean, sure, Nate's fighting for his life and they're provoking him to fight, but even when Nate starts complaining, you have to wonder if the developers were aware of the problem or if they thought it was a hilarious line they could fit in. Whatever the case, it's pretty funny, I guess.
Between all that madness are platforming bits. It’s pretty straightforward stuff. Climb, jump, climb and climb. Drake will occasionally not grab the piece of something you wanted to grab onto, but it’s mostly intuitive and fun. There are a lot of things to climb and a lot of precarious leaps, making almost as fun to watch as it is to play. There are a few puzzly sections here and there, but they’re so straightforward and so obvious that calling them puzzles would be a misnomer. All of it is extremely linear, as the sweeping and cinematic camera guides you along the path. It does kill any chances of freeform climbing action, but it's fun and if it weren't for these, I'd be completely burned out from the excess fat of shooting. Platforming makes up around quarter of the game, but it might feel like even less if you’re prone to dying a lot in the thousand-man skirmishes.
But you know, there’s a spirit and spry energy to Drake’s Fortune. The little bouts of banter between Drake and friends, the excellent cut-scenes, the pulse and adventurous attitude of the game’s score. It goes on and it gives Drake’s Fortune a real identity and this more than anything was what made me keep on playing. The gameplay was sufficient and it worked and the graphics were pretty despite all the screen-tearing, but it was the charisma exuding not from just Nate but the entire game. It’s clear everybody working on this game had a love for escapism adventure, but the complex problem of discovering the inner-workings of the PS3 must have gotten in the way. Overly long and overly tough combat scenarios and very, very few setpiece encounters or scenarios hurt the game a lot, but when the chemistry between Nate and Elena is positively irresistible, when you blindfired and shot that guy in the face, when Sully chomps on his cigar as he says words, when a spiraling rocket skirts past Nate's denim as you roll away just in time or when Nate just acts like his perfect, flawless and awesome self, I wonder just how much better the sequel could be.
A sequel to this game would probably be really great.
