I don't get the praise for the Uncharted-series, brought to mind by just finishing Uncharted 3. Great as they are for the moments of jawdropping actionsequences, they fail equally hard to be good games.

As experiences, they are awesome. They have some good moments, some great moments and a couple of "god damn it this is just so f'ing awesome"-moments I can't recall finidng in other games. The characters are good, allthough I find Drake himself to be a bit flat I really like Sullivan and the chemistry between the two. Elena Fisher and Chloe Frazer are more "traditional" characters with more standard roles and could have been used more, differently and more fleshed out in general

The shooting is sub-par. It's even below sub-par. Try comparing Gears of War to Uncharted - they aren't that different, they focus on fast paced shooting, moving around and taking cover. But where a normal game makes weapons fire seemingly real bullets, the triology with Nathan Drake puts peas in their weaponry. Going from Dead Space 1 or 2 into the Uncharted-games is another way of showing how not so great the series handles the shooting. Albeit the Dead Space-games focus more "in your face"-shooting and not so much taking cover behind corners, it's still third person over the shoulder camera-shooting.

The guns of Uncharted 3 felt really good, looked good and had a nice sound (just the the previous two games) - sadly, using them felt like farting in the general direction of the enemies (again, same as the two earlier titles). Sadly, shooting is becoming more and more important the higher the number on the cover, on the cost of good old fashioned problemsolving.

Melee combat also falls flat,in the lates innstalment of Uncharted it feels like unscripted quick time events with stiff animations and magnets on everyragdoll to make the action fit the picture in the game. As for stealth, it just feels off and fails to do anything but frustrate me, and gives me the impression of being an elephant in a porcelainshop.

Where's the balance between fighting, thinking and storytelling?

The enemies are a different thing. Whilst Uncharted 3 had more variation of people, they were still brothers of that red haired guy in the grey overalls in Uncharted 2.

The AI is really bad - in Uncharted 3, they were commiting suicide with their own grenades, they ran around like headless chicken or they had such great belief in their own skills of running right at me, possibly formed from their blind faith in their pea-resistant armor?

I do know they drop their nades when I shoot them (a nice little detail), I'm not talking about that.I'm talking of people blatantly throwing their explosive pineapples into the wall they stand behind, the back of the guy in front of them or just dropping it two feet ahead of themselves.

And what happens to a grenade when you miss the spot on throwing it back? Does it glue it self to the ground or what? The mechanic of throwing back the grenade is a nice little addition to the shooting giving it a more tactical feeling (and also works as a great way to get grenades when you don't have any yourself), but it falls flat when it for some reason only works if you hit triangle at the right time. It doesn't even make sense since it's possible to throw the grenade back at the time it blows up, since it depends on where you press and where the little area displaying the timing is.

All in all, as stated, I like the games. They are fresh, coloufull with high quality in most areas like voice, looks and sound, but it falls flat on the gaming-side of things, wich leaves me with this question:

How can these games get so high reviewscores mostly all over the board?

I don't get the praise for the Uncharted-series, brought to mind by just finishing Uncharted 3. Great as they are for the moments of jawdropping actionsequences, they fail equally hard to be good games.

As experiences, they are awesome. They have some good moments, some great moments and a couple of "god damn it this is just so f'ing awesome"-moments I can't recall finidng in other games. The characters are good, allthough I find Drake himself to be a bit flat I really like Sullivan and the chemistry between the two. Elena Fisher and Chloe Frazer are more "traditional" characters with more standard roles and could have been used more, differently and more fleshed out in general

The shooting is sub-par. It's even below sub-par. Try comparing Gears of War to Uncharted - they aren't that different, they focus on fast paced shooting, moving around and taking cover. But where a normal game makes weapons fire seemingly real bullets, the triology with Nathan Drake puts peas in their weaponry. Going from Dead Space 1 or 2 into the Uncharted-games is another way of showing how not so great the series handles the shooting. Albeit the Dead Space-games focus more "in your face"-shooting and not so much taking cover behind corners, it's still third person over the shoulder camera-shooting.

The guns of Uncharted 3 felt really good, looked good and had a nice sound (just the the previous two games) - sadly, using them felt like farting in the general direction of the enemies (again, same as the two earlier titles). Sadly, shooting is becoming more and more important the higher the number on the cover, on the cost of good old fashioned problemsolving.

Melee combat also falls flat,in the lates innstalment of Uncharted it feels like unscripted quick time events with stiff animations and magnets on everyragdoll to make the action fit the picture in the game. As for stealth, it just feels off and fails to do anything but frustrate me, and gives me the impression of being an elephant in a porcelainshop.

Where's the balance between fighting, thinking and storytelling?

The enemies are a different thing. Whilst Uncharted 3 had more variation of people, they were still brothers of that red haired guy in the grey overalls in Uncharted 2.

The AI is really bad - in Uncharted 3, they were commiting suicide with their own grenades, they ran around like headless chicken or they had such great belief in their own skills of running right at me, possibly formed from their blind faith in their pea-resistant armor?

I do know they drop their nades when I shoot them (a nice little detail), I'm not talking about that.I'm talking of people blatantly throwing their explosive pineapples into the wall they stand behind, the back of the guy in front of them or just dropping it two feet ahead of themselves.

And what happens to a grenade when you miss the spot on throwing it back? Does it glue it self to the ground or what? The mechanic of throwing back the grenade is a nice little addition to the shooting giving it a more tactical feeling (and also works as a great way to get grenades when you don't have any yourself), but it falls flat when it for some reason only works if you hit triangle at the right time. It doesn't even make sense since it's possible to throw the grenade back at the time it blows up, since it depends on where you press and where the little area displaying the timing is.

All in all, as stated, I like the games. They are fresh, coloufull with high quality in most areas like voice, looks and sound, but it falls flat on the gaming-side of things, wich leaves me with this question:

How can these games get so high reviewscores mostly all over the board?

I disagree, It seems like your only real problem is the combat and the problems surrounding it (shooting, melee, AI etc), and I thought all that was just fine. I mean, I'm not saying it's better than Gears or anything, but in Gears you just unload a clip from a lancer into the head of a Boomer until it falls over- how is that not 'bullet spongy?'

I can't comment on the 2 and 3, as I got bored a few hours into 1. It just wasn't my thing. I just don't get to attraction to it.

I completely disagree with your reading of the game. First off, your comment on sub-par shooting is in comparison to Gears of War and Dead Space, the two best third-person shooters on the market. You want par-for-the-course third-person shooting, check out Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days. Sub-par? Mindjack. Personally, I enjoy the gunplay in Uncharted 3's campaign more than the gunplay in Gears of War 3's campaign; as TooWalrus pointed out, the dudes in Gears are extreme bullet-sponges, and the movement is so much slower that I couldn't get into it. The melee combat in Uncharted 3 feels great, and in one particular sequence actually feels suspiciously like the Arkham games. And the stealth, while not as good as Uncharted 2's or, say, Metal Gear Solid or the Arkham games, was still pretty excellent (if rarely optimized.) I did not have your AI problems, and I'm baffled as to how you thought there was more enemy variety in Uncharted 3 than in Among Thieves.

That's not to say I think the game is perfect or anything, I just don't agree with your criticisms.

Judging from my experience with Uncharted 2 and the little time I spent with the first, I never had a problem with both the shooting and A.I. Everything is competently executed but I will say that Uncharted falls flat on its face when it focuses too much on shooting instead of a nice varied mix of storytelling, platforming, puzzles and exploration. My favorite moments have always been the feeling of going to new places and exploring(well the illusion of exploring in these incredibly linear games). I find shooting generic Russian dude #47651 in the face incredibly boring in the Uncharted games but that's just me.

Yep, the shooting is Uncharted is not fun and the game has too much shooting in general.

@TooWalrus: Well, it is what annoys me the most, probably because the game is cluttered with these shootouts that should have been avoided. I don't recall the storymoments of the last two games that well, so I didn't want to elaborate too much on it since it would probably end up showing me remembering things differently or not at all. But yeah, especially U 2 has some moments where I just shook my head at the writing, especially when for some mystic reason the bad guy, going after the same treasure as you, could not for the life of him figure out that a triangeled dagger-thing would fit perfectly into a hole in the floor shaped like a triangle.That's just crappy writing. Also, the first half of U 3 has some excellent moments just becuase the whole group of 4 is together. It feels like a heist-movie - a bunch of kids out snitching apples and it plays really well. The later half of U 3 is sadly more straight forward standard game, allthough Sully/Drake still has the great chemistry as I mentioned in my first post.

As for the bulletspongeness, that's true - but in my opinion Gears at least gives me some response to what effect my gun has on the enemy, as seen in Dead Space as well. Uncharted has three animations: alive, some staggering when shot, and dead. Also, some really crappy ragdoll-physics.

@Little_Socrates:

If it fails to compare with them, it tells me that it's not that good as the best - a five star game ought to bring something new to the table or atleast not fade in comparison. They have put a lot of shooting in the game, it's not like they treat it as something less important because it takes up like 5 minutes of gameplay - it's a huge part of the games and it ought to work close to perfect to hold up to a five star review.

As for the enemy differences, you are right - I totally forgot about dark haired man in a suit.

I might be the minority here,but when I played Gears 2, the combat to me felt slow compared to Uncharted.Plus, I don't get the melee system at all.

@HellBrendy said:

@Little_Socrates:

If it fails to compare with them, it tells me that it's not that good as the best - a five star game ought to bring something new to the table or atleast not fade in comparison. They have put a lot of shooting in the game, it's not like they treat it as something less important because it takes up like 5 minutes of gameplay - it's a huge part of the games and it ought to work close to perfect to hold up to a five star review.

The Uncharted series' shooting lacks some basic qualities that have been established in other shooters (lack of feedback when hitting enemies, for example), but I feel like it makes up by being the only game that really does "traversal combat." Unlike other third person shooters, sticking to cover and shooting from behind it isn't the only style of combat that the player can opt to do. There are various moments in the series when running or climbing through the environment popping enemies along the way. These moments aren't canned sequences either. Shooting an enemy while hanging onto a ledge, for example, can be done at any point in the game.

In Uncharted 3, the melee system also gives you another way to fight. A lot of people have been complaining about how the melee system is useless as enemies will shoot at you while you are locked into a fist fight. That's not really true, as you can just grab the enemy and push them off so you can run away. Also, the melee system can be extremely useful, but you have to be mindful of when to do it. Fighting an armored enemy out in the open while three other guys have their sights on you get you riddled with bullets. Instead, make quick haste of those three guys first and then engage in a fist fight with the armored enemy. This way, you don't spend a single bullet to take out the armored foe.

Lastly, I find the issue of bullet sponginess to be due to cognitive dissidence. Take Gears of War for example. No one takes a second thought that even a bullet from a Lancer going straight to the un-helmeted head of a Locust will not bring them down. The fact that they are bulky, underground monsters allows the player to believe that this is acceptable. Meanwhile in Uncharted 3, not being able to kill with three shots from a M9 straight at the chest of an enemy wearing just suit and tie seems ridiculous. To it's credit though, all regular enemies will go down in one headshot from just a pistol, even on Crushing difficulty.

I share the OP's sentiments, it just looks jarring to see my gun shooting diagonally in a game based in the real world. However that's a very tiny detail that's hard to fix in my opinion, something that could be improved upon with the combat I believe is the reaction to being shot. In Gears of War enemies flinch, they yell, they react. In every single Uncharted game, I can stand a couple of feet away from an enemy and shoot them in the neck, shoulder, whatever with my pistol or rifle, and they'll stand there acting as if they felt a cool breeze. If Naughty Dog spent more time into giving visceral feedback to the combat, they would have one of the most immersive games in their hands.

I think that the shooting has been universally noted as one of the weakest aspects of the game in general. Sad because it occupies so much of the game. I did enjoy the first 2, and will get 3 eventually, but I sort of thought that 2 was a bit overrated.

@HellBrendy: If we're talking about glowing reviews, then, it's because the cinematic aspects of Uncharted 3 raise the bar above games like Gears of War or Dead Space SO HIGH that it completely embarrasses them. The story in Gears 3 is pretty awesome, don't get me wrong, but in terms of integration and actual storytelling it is completely EMBARRASSED by Uncharted 3. Uncharted 3 is also far more of a technical spectacle. It may fall the very best in terms of gameplay, but it excels beyond them in every other aspect. In a world where a five-star game must be better in every category than most of its competitors, no game would receive glowing reviews.

I'm not sure that'd be such a bad thing, but I'm also the kid who thinks that the only shitty Zelda game is The Ocarina of Time. Your mileage may vary.

I don't enjoy Uncharted games for the combat, much the same as Tomb Raider. Having said that, the combat is adequate for all the other things you get from an Uncharted game. You know "the whole is greater than the sum of its parts" saying? I think that adage holds particularly true for the Uncharted series.