Keith posted a pretty good review of Uncharted 4 over at gametimebro.com a week or so ago, and I don't have much to add to his effusive praise. This was probably the prettiest-looking game I've ever played, which makes sense, given that it's on the newest and greatest system of any game I've played. Beyond that, it's an Uncharted game, and if you've played Uncharted 2 or Uncharted 3 you know what that entails: a jovial protagonist, tons of wall-scaling and rope swinging, mediocre gunplay, and chaotic action sequences that transition seamlessly back and forth from cut scene to playable sequence.
I can't go quite as far as Keith, who called this one of his top five games of all time. I'm not even sure if I'd place it above Uncharted 2. (That's no slight! I called Uncharted 2 the greatest game I played in 2011 - wow, yikes - so even if this one's only almost as good as that one then it can't be very far down my all time list.) But Keith's praise focuses in particular on the story in Uncharted 4 and that's definitely the game's highlight. Indie games have been kicking big budget titles' asses for years now in the "emotion-provoking storytelling" department, but Uncharted 4 ranks right up there with Infamous 2 and BioShock when it comes to action-adventure Triple A titles from the last, I dunno, ten years? It's a short list! Maybe the Tomb Raider reboot is also on it. (And here's where I have to mention that I haven't yet played The Last of Us. But I will! On my new PS4, no doubt.)
Four years ago, in trying to explain how Uncharted 3 wasn't quite as enjoyable as Uncharted 2 for me, I said (with new emphasis added):
And that's where Uncharted 3 comes up a bit short, I guess. It wouldn't be fair to judge the game for its plot and character development. After all, that's not the way I've judged the previous two games in this series, and it seems unfair to ask Uncharted to suddenly become something it's never been, which is a game that can tell a memorable story with memorable characters. But the thing is, for a little while it seemed as though that's exactly what Uncharted 3 was trying to do. When the third level took place twenty years ago and depicted the day Drake met his wise-cracking mentor and sidekick, Sully, I was suddenly intrigued about their shared history in a way I'd never wondered about before. Just who is Nathan Drake, and what makes him tick? For the previous two games, I'd been content ignoring his history and letting him be a generic but charismatic 21st century hero. But suddenly, I wanted to know more about him, and that's thanks to Uncharted 3 willing to "go there" for lack of a better phrase. But just as soon as I thought this would be Drake's story, it wasn't; aside from a moment where the game's antagonist addresses Drake, "or whatever your real name is," implying that our hero has made up his own alias and is not in fact a descendant of the legendary explorer Francis Drake, we never hear about our boy's past again.
Maybe I can assume that Naughty Dog developers read my little blog post because Uncharted 4 feels almost custom-ordered to address that little complaint I had. More than an action-packed thrillride, it seems like what Uncharted 4 wanted to provide, above anything else, was a conclusive character analysis on Nathan Drake.
I don't want to say much else, because doing so would spoil the story in some ways, and for the first time in Uncharted the story really does matter. Suffice it to say that while Uncharted 3 left me wanting something more, Uncharted 4 has pretty definitively closed the books on the Nathan Drake saga in a satisfying way. Here's one more choice pullquote from my Uncharted 3 post:
I'm hoping for Uncharted 4 to happen more than ever, not necessarily to "redeem" Uncharted 3 but more to provide closure that Uncharted 3 didn't.
Four years later, satisfaction.
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