A conflicting experience
Uncharted 4 has been one of the most difficult games for me to figure out whether or not I actually enjoyed it or merely tolerated it. While it can never be over-stated just how immensely gorgeous this game is as the series set pieces and the overall presentation of everything happening on screen is easily among the most visually and technically impressive we've ever seen from the industry, simply playing the game is just not fun.
It's strange as the formula of the series hasn't changed really yet Uncharted 2 still remains one of my favorite games ever so I've been thinking what exactly is the major differences of that game compared to this one. It seems to really just come down to pacing and the individual sequences and whether or not they were as well realized as they could have been alongside the gameplay. Where I felt about ninety percent of Uncharted 2 worked incredibly well, I'd say a good sixty percent if not more of U4 frustrated or bored me.
Not one single showcase sequence; the very scripted very linear set pieces of the game really stuck with me. I can barely even recall what happened during most of them, and the ones I do remember were just watered down versions of what Uncharted 2 did better. There is no amazing train level equivalent in this game.
The series has always struggled to find the right balance between being a very directed and cinematic experience verses simply being a good game and I'd say the latter is where 4 fails the hardest. For so much of my time with it I felt like the things I could do and how I could do them were so intensely constrained and specific I could do little more than move a stick forward and press a single button. I don't know why but in the previous trilogy I never really got that feeling more than a couple of times. Perhaps maybe by now I just can't bring myself to accept this kind of design so openly anymore.
Maybe that's just it, maybe now that we are four deep in to this thing all the design limitation of what these games can actually do with this formula is more obvious than ever and where I expected some massive innovation in this release over the last few I was instead met with next to nothing in that regard. Uncharted 4 feels stale and old in many ways and I actually wonder if it needed to exist at all despite how much I enjoyed its story portions.
Its a shame because I absolutely love the main cast and the narrative and all the events taking place within are done better than ever, and the series certainly managed to be better than most adventure movies of the last decade or so not to mention how the amazing animation makes it all work so well with facial expressions especially being so great you can practically see the fun the very talented actors had doing every scene. This is why the game parts of this game are such a let down, in contrast to the story parts they feel like they come from a far worse game, one that never really got to be what it could have been.
Sure you get a grapple hook to traverse large gaps now, and sliding down hills looks neat and the two things combined add some nice variety to the level traversal finally but if you really think about it, its just another form of pushing the stick forward and hitting a button. Even when you do attach the grapple their is barely any momentum or physics involved, its simply a matter of is it safe to jump now? and its typically incredibly obvious when it is so on the rare occasions where it isn't you feel like a complete idiot.
The few times I didn't jump correctly its because whatever ledge I was aiming at simply was too vague to really gauge if it was where I wanted to go and this happened a lot with the regular jumping sequences, far more often than it ever did with the previous trilogy. I've watched Nathan Drakes HD corpse ragdoll down more hills than ever before.
Things like this being figured out don't make you feel smart, no instead it makes you feel stupid because you never had any choice, you just had the designers specific goal to realize and doing so never feels like an accomplishment so much as it does memorizing basic timing or noticing that one particular thing you happened to miss the first time. It wouldn't be so bad in a regular game but in Uncharted where everything is so specific and linear you end up hearing the same lines again, seeing the same exploding truck again and god help you if you get stuck in a loop with something you'll feel like you're going insane. It says something about the value of the set pieces where the second they are repeated their wow factor goes down tremendously.
As is still the case with this series U4 severely lacks the ability to allow the player to merely express themselves and do more than what the very focused direction of progress wants from them. It is as if the designers were afraid to allow their game to be a game where it seems so obvious that some more open ended systems would have done wonders for their fun factor.
Because climbing walls is the same thing over and over, push up, push left, oh no a thing broke and Nathan quipped about it, rinse and repeat a million times. Its exhausting and boring after a few hours and by the seemingly fiftieth time Nathan quipped "ah hah I almost didn't make it!" I was about ready to punch my tv it was so terribly over-done and unfunny. If Uncharted 4 aimed to have a sense of humor it rarely earned it during actual gameplay.
By far the worst part of the game though, the absolute most intensely irritating horrible portion was ironically the most game-like thing the series has ever done; the shooting. I don't know how or why but Uncharted 2 was the peak of the series' cover shooting gameplay and then 3's was way worse and now 4's is appallingly bad, unbelievably awful.
I was constantly struggling to merely hit enemies and when I did they constantly took so many shots to kill I felt like I barely had enough bullets to get the job done and yet when you toggle the auto aim on you may as well stop playing entirely because it is so automated you literally don't even have to aim anymore.
So you would think this means the game is encouraging you to leave cover and maybe grab other weapons but no, the enemies have super perfect laser vision and all of their guns do absurd amounts of damage and yet your cover is constantly being destroyed and you are constantly being flanked by guys you didn't know were there and the grenade spam never ends. Thankfully the stealthy grass parts of levels help to avoid this but once you're spotted good luck finding a place to hide that doesn't get you riddled with bullets.
No matter what you are doing during the shooting segments it feels like a risky gamble and that at literally any second you could instantly go down. Not to mention the enemies also running at you in to melee range where they seem to always be faster and can instantly grapple you at which point you are of course still being shot at.
I honestly cannot think of a single time I countered a guy in melee successfully, not one. This also means the melee-only segments of the game are just about as frustrating because it is near impossible to realize what the timing is on dodging or when to punch. I never got comfortable with any melee or shooting mechanics in Uncharted 4, as if I missed a massive tutorial or something and yet I replayed the game for a bit and learned nothing new. It was confusing to say the least, I have no idea how Naughtydog thought this was acceptable because it's just absolutely the worst. Somehow they managed to get worse at making the game portions of these games over time, not better.
Uncharted 4, as beautiful as it looks, as fun as the characters are, and as entertaining as the story can be fails to be anything more than a tedious player-hating slog when it does decide to be a game and although I was happy to spend one last time with Nathan, Sully and Elana boy do I hope this is indeed the final entry in the franchise and whatever Naughtydog does next is very very different.
