The Therapist Gamer

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.