Game Debate #112: Uncharted Trilogy

[Reed Rothchild | 9,530]

[DarkTone | 984]

5, 7 and 7 respectively. 

[Brickman | 3,986]

7,8,7.

The first was good but had its issues, the second is my favourite in the series. I really felt they got the right balance of action and puzzles in that one. The third was similar to the first for me and the story really didn't interest me as much.

[spacepup | 2,404]

I gave them 8, 9, 8.

I love the Uncharted series!  It's just such a fun adventure, with fun characters and great exploration. 

It was easy for me to just get sucked into the world and take a fun ride on the adventure.  It's like the Indiana Jones of video games - I don't know, kinda hard to explain exactly what I mean, but it was easy for me to overlook any technical flaws because I just had so much darn fun playing the game and enjoying the stories.

I highly recommend the series to anyone who hasn't played them yet!

 

[fox | 1,667]

Uncharted 1 - 7
Uncharted 2 - 9
Uncharted 3 - 8
Uncharted 4 - 8
Uncharted Golden Abyss - 5
Lost Legacy - 9

Good action, funny dialogue, amazing set pieces.  There is a scene in the second one where you are in a building as it crashes into another building and everything in the room is falling forward as you move through it, and it just blew my mind.  Every other game would always cheat and switch to a cutscene when the action gets really crazy, but they actually let you play through it in real time.  Every other level would have some crazy set piece like that, so it just put the game on a whole other level compared to everything else out there.

[DefaultGen | 5,405]

Uncharted - 9/10
Uncharted 2 - 10/10
Uncharted 3 - 8/10
Uncharted 4 - 7/10

I played the first two games many, many times. UC2 is my favorite game in the genre, but UC1 is right behind it just because UC2 improved controls. Immediately after beating both games I upped the difficulty and started a new game, which is something I rarely do. Usually I'm just done with modern games when I beat them once.

UC3 is still awesome, but doesn't improve anything over UC2. It's basically the same game again. UC4 is too much of a movie. Uncharted 2 feels like playing an action movie. Uncharted 4 feels like it is a movie and you just happen to be holding a controller. I have never played a 10 hour game with a plot worthy of being a 10 hour movie. Stop making games into movies.

[Webhead123 | 675]

At one point, I made the mistake of trying to play through this trilogy. I forced myself to suffer through and finish the first game...and I do mean "suffer" because there was almost nothing about the experience that I was enjoying by the end except some of the set piece locations. The controls and combat mechanics were outright painful in some respects and the story wasn't doing much to help keep me invested. 4/10

After hearing for years and years how Uncharted 2 was not only the best in the series but one of the "best games EVAR", I decided to hop right into it after finishing the first and see if it would offer some redemption to the horrible experience I had. I can say that the sequel is superior in just about every way. However, it didn't do enough to get me past some of the core frustrations I was having and, as a result, I never had the willpower to finish it. 5/10

At that point, I gave up on Uncharted and that leaves Uncharted 3 sitting lonely on my shelf. Unplayed

Not even slightly a fan of this series.

Edited July 29, 2022 by Webhead123

[Tanooki | 4,933]

Went with 8 9 and 8, given .5's I'd 7.5 the last entry as it was a down swing off #2 and the first.

The stories told, the set pieces, incredible audio and visuals, the controls and gameplay mechanics were very spot on.  It was like living in a modern day Indiana Jones style adventure, it out Tomb Raidered tomb raider so bad that when it got rehashed anew they definitely took some pages from the uncharted book.  I'm not a fan largely of the style but I largely couldn't put these down, just the last one got a bit long and tedious compared to the others, two was like butter...smooth, like living a movie just that well done.  A rarer game where I don't feel I'm partly not fighting the challenge, but a wonk camera or control scheme as it just works, great.

Thanks for not including vita or 4...blah.

 

I'm hoping that place holder on Steam, it's a re-issue of these three gems.  I'd pay up whatever Sony asks to do them again after so long and in a far more polished environment.

Edited July 29, 2022 by Tanooki

[Reed Rothchild | 9,530]

I played all three near release, which is gonna make this hard.

I'm also wondering to myself if Tomb Raider out-Uncharted'd Uncharted (after Uncharted out-Tomb Raider'd Tomb Raider, ironically)

[360collector | 289]

7,8,7 all good fun but nothing special

[CMR | 520]

I got digital copies of the first two games with my PS4.  I tried playing the first one, but the awful, awful Wheadonese dialogue drove me away.  I never bothered with them afterwards.

[Andy_Bogomil | 815]

I played these back to back to back over a few weeks. Pretty much what the others have said about 1 having a few issues, 2 improving on those and then 3 just being there. Playing them so close together probably took away from the 3rd as I was pretty burnt out from the series by that point. I'll likely go through the 2nd again at some point.

[cj_robot | 542]

9,10,9

I love, love, love these games. Gorgeous visuals, incredible setpieces, excellent music. Top-notch acting, Nolan North is perfect as Nathan Drake. These are some of the closest I've ever seen video games come to matching the feel of an actual blockbuster movie.

You can certainly make a case that the gameplay isn't terribly deep, but I think it's just pure, simple fun. The controls are very intuitive and work perfectly. It always feels so easy to do exactly what I want. They always manage to find a great balance throughout the games with the puzzles, action, and climbing stuff. There's nothing too complex about them which makes them great as pick-up-and-play games, but there's enough of a challenge to keep from getting bored (at least on the harder difficulties).

The Uncharted games are some of just a small handful of games I actually enjoyed from that gen. I played the hell out of them on the PS3, and then again on the PS4. Great stuff.

[Nintegageo | 582]

8, 9, 9

[Californication | 1,477]

Played the first one and turned it off after four or five hours. Seemed mindless and repetitive. 

[rdrunner | 422]

Haven't played any of these and I don't have a PS3 or higher.  Probably not gonna happen.  Can't play everything.

[Tanooki | 4,933]

I will add 3 is worse than the other two if for one reason, the aiming/firing control were made more clunky and less intuitive from where they refined it to excellence in #2, not sure why the if it ain't broke don't fix it motto got ignored.

[JamesRobot | 5,800]

Dabbled with the first two.  They're ok I guess.  I don't really care about the series.

[fox | 1,667]

On 7/29/2022 at 1:28 PM, Reed Rothchild said:

I'm also wondering to myself if Tomb Raider out-Uncharted'd Uncharted (after Uncharted out-Tomb Raider'd Tomb Raider, ironically)

I thought the same thing.  Uncharted cribbed a lot from Tomb Raider then Tomb Raider cribbed some from Uncharted.  
 

That 2013 Tomb Raider was really good.  Not sure if I’d put it on par or higher than Uncharted.

[Reed Rothchild | 9,530]

7 minutes ago, fox said:

I thought the same thing.  Uncharted cribbed a lot from Tomb Raider then Tomb Raider cribbed some from Uncharted.  
 

That 2013 Tomb Raider was really good.  Not sure if I’d put it on par or higher than Uncharted.

I'll probably do all 7+ games in the next couple years, including replays of the 4 I've already done, and see what I think.

[fox | 1,667]

17 minutes ago, Reed Rothchild said:

I'll probably do all 7+ games in the next couple years, including replays of the 4 I've already done, and see what I think.

It’s not in the poll but don’t sleep on Lost Legacy.  That was a lot shorter but much tighter experience than Uncharted 4.  It flirted with an open overworld design which flowed really well.

[TDIRunner | 2,740]

Always wanted to try them, but never did.  

[AstralSoul | 502]

9,9,7

Absolutely loved the first two games especially the first one, the third fell off a bit for me..I don't know why, I just didn't like it as much. Still good but not amazing. Haven't played any past that.

[Tanooki | 4,933]

They broke the aiming/control/fire control of the third one.  The first two were consistent and they decided to change it up a bit and it's clunky, more fiddly, and less responsive which messes with you coming off the others.  Combine that with some less entertaining stages in places and overly repetitive runs of too many enemies at spots to fake pump up the challenge it sucks the fun out.

[Sumez | 2,951]

Kind hard for me to compare the games because I played them so far apart. So it's hard for me to tell if Uncharted 3 really is so much worse than 2, or if I'd just gotten more fed up with that style of superficial rollarcoaster ride game design since then. But I go into details about that in my mini-review for the backlog thread.

Overall the series is hard to truly rate highly due to its general refusal to offer genuine gameplay, using the interaction mostly as a relaxed way to involve the player in its visual storytelling. That said, they do that very well, making the Uncharted series belong to probably the absolute top tier section of casual videogames.

 

Uncharted 1 suffers the most from general pacing issues, doing very little outside of switching between climbing and shootnig at stuff from behind covers. The climbing simply involves looking for the different colored ledges and then moving in that directions, while the shooting becomes repetitive incredibly fast due to seemingly endlessly incoming enemies every time the game stops for another gunfight.

Considering that, it's quite impressive how well Naughty Dog cleaned up the series for Uncharted 2, fixing pretty much everything wrong with the first game. The concept was still the same, but a much higher budget allowed for constantly switching locales, insane serpieces and constantly impressing storytelling.
Unlike the terrible pacing of the first game, U2 is almost a study in perfect pacing for what it does. It constantly switches between shooting, climbing, and completely quiet scenes of just walking around taking in the setting - something that admittedly was probably a lot more novel than it is nowadays. But it's all really nicely cut in a way that prevents any individual aspect from overstaying its welcome. And despite having a completely dumb and pointless plot, the way the story is told still manages to be engaging.

Looking back on discource on Uncharted 3 from when it came out I've come across a confusing amount of "controversy" over people refusing to give the game a 10/10 - a crazy perspective considering I can't even really consider this a good game at all.
One thing it does well is all the notable setpieces trying to top its own predecessor - gunfights on small boats as the waves bop up and down, escaping a ship while it's sinking, and hanging on to a crashing plane, is all memorable stuff that really elevates the cinematic experience. So I guess if that's what you care about (as opposed to, you know, video games) it's probably great. But every time it's time to stop and shoot stuff, the game becomes more tedious than anything before it, and just like the first game most of these sequences just seemingly go on forever. It seems the game is trying to spice them up by making them more difficulty this time around, but instead that just results in them feeling more frustrating and reliant on memorizing enemy locations. Yeah, not really a fan of this one.