*=Video
^=Music
All Caps=Recommended
May 2018
Some gameplay with zero gravity enabled. It doesn't affect normal gameplay, but rather affects stationary objects like bricks or bodies.
This is a great scene from the game rendered in a few different audio and visual styles. The one I find most amazing is the ASCII characters, which means that everything you see is simply colored keyboard symbols; it amazes me that this can happen in real-time.
Hover mouse over screenshots for commentary.
 |  You play a few scenes as young Nathan Drake. |  |
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 Even the tutorial levels look lovely! |  |  I honestly think I have that same photo. |
 Elena is awesome in this game. |  Prison break. |  The game has a photo mode so you can get shots like this, and the next one without Drake in it. |
 |  It looks a lot like the Cinque Terre in Italy. |  Even though it's not realistic, the grappling hook has a fun feel to it. |
 My phone! |  Makes you want to visit Madagascar, right? |  This part of the game is actually more linear that it appears, but there is a huge open space to drive a jeep wherever you want. |
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 Good thing we got the insurance! |  Of course. . . |  |
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 I don't know how confident I'd be about that bridge holding a car. |  |  I'm pretty sure I got a screenshot like this in each Uncharted game. |
 |  Let's just take Drake out of the picture . . . |  |
 |  |  Drake is being dragged through the water. |
 Barely missing the boat. |  I thought the crane scraping the overpass was a nice touch. |  Classic Uncharted unrealistic mayhem! |
 |  |  Never has a game made me want to travel so much. |
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 |  What secrets are hiding here? |  |
 In this scene it the rain just feels so think and harsh. It's amazing what the artists and programmers are able to put together. |  |  |
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 |  You find all sorts of collectibles to put in Nate's journal. You can press a button to be able to read them in plain text. |  |
 |  |  Hiding in the bushes. |
 It really would be cool to explore an abandoned, ruined city. |  |  I wonder how effectively you could punch if you were hanging from a ledge? |
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 |  Sometimes when you throw enemies off of ledges they hang on to you. |  |
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 |  The snipers in Uncharted have the strongest lasers on earth. |  |
 A car going off the falls. |  |  |
 |  |  Nothing to see here! Just a bunch of arms! |
 |  I would say exploding mummies is a bit too far even for Uncharted. |  |
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 This sword fight is actually really tough, especially on the hardest difficulty. |  |  |
 A skyline in ASCII. |  Zero Gravity. |  More zero G zaniness. It's crazy how many inanimate objects are in each scene. |
 Part of the menu when framing a shot in photo mode. |  |  |
 Elena really is great in this game. We'd all be lucky to have a spouse who acted like her. |  |  Running over cairns with zero gravity. |
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 |  8-bit. |  |
Uncharted 4: A Thief's End
Uncharted 4 is very similar to the previous Uncharted games, and that's mostly a good thing. Like it's predecessors, the game is marked by it's top-tier graphics, action set-pieces, puzzle solving, exotic locales, natural and funny dialogue, and decent story. The third-person gun-play is tight and engaging, and the new grappling hook mechanic is a fun (if unnecessary) addition. It is, basically, an Uncharted game on a new generation of hardware.
I thought the story was more impactful that the previous games. The previous games had engaging stories but they weren't exactly profound, nor did they illicit much introspection. I wouldn't say the story in Uncharted 4 is profound but I think it is likely to touch a lot of people and cause them to think about their life. Having spent many years on wild and dangerous adventures, Nathan Drake has settled into a normal life that lacks the fireworks that he's used to. He enjoys his life with his wife Elena, but there's clearly some part of him that yearns to return to a life of treasure hunting. The story unfolds in a way that I thought was engaging and relatable - even though the average person hasn't been on a grand treasure hunt, I think most people can relate to themes such as work taking priority over family life, becoming obsessed with certain pursuits, and finding ways to deal with the drudgery of life. Though people are bound to have different experiences with the ending, I really liked it and found it both touching and inspiring.
Keeping in mind the themes of the story, it's perhaps on purpose that some of the gameplay has overstayed it's welcome over the years. In any event, some of the gameplay got a bit tedious and there were sections of the game that could have been refined. In the context of the current gaming landscape, however, the game still shines bright.
I did find the inclusion of one gameplay mechanic to be quite puzzling. About three-quarters of the way through the game you get a piton, which is basically a metal spike you can stick into certain surfaces in order to reach higher places while climbing. It does add a very thin layer of interactivity to the climbing sections, but ultimately the game didn't really need it. The part I found the strangest is how late in the game you get the item - getting an almost pointless item pretty close to the end of the game just baffled me. I'm assuming it was added because the newer Tomb Raider games have a similar item.
I have one other complaint but I'm not sure how fair it is because it's related to trophies. If you ignore trophies then this will not sway your opinion whatsoever, but I'm including this criticism because they are simply a part of modern games that many people are interested in. Prior Uncharted games had trophies that were fairly straightforward, and the most difficult ones were to beat the game on Crushing difficulty and to collect all the hidden treasures (also there were a couple of really tedious ones about using hand-to-hand combat mixed with gun-play). A person could generally get the platinum trophy if they thoroughly completed the game twice. Uncharted 4 has a series of difficult trophies that just make it way too tedious to go for the platinum trophy - for example, completing the whole game with at least 70% accuracy, and beating the entire game in under 6 hours. I thought the trophies in prior Uncharted games were more lighthearted and fun to complete, whereas some trophies in Uncharted 4 are brutal and, to me, uninteresting.
The game does have some post-completion rewards, however. You can unlock a variety of filters and other gameplay modifiers that hearken to the days when you could enter cheat codes into games to mess around in all sorts of silly ways. You can turn them on and off after you've completed the game, and can make changes such as playing with 8-bit graphics, with zero gravity, or with various character skins. In my second play-through I had one character perpetually dressed as a fancy waiter (including during a prison break), and had gravity turned off.
All in all, it's very much an Uncharted game. Perhaps the series has lost some of it's luster as time has gone on, but in a weird way I think the developers knew that and addressed this issue through the story. Even if it's not perfect I think it's still a game worth playing, and it might just impact you in a way you didn't expect.