"Two years down the line, Drake's Deception gunplay can't help but feel just a little dated," Hoggins says in his 9 out of 10 review. The Telegraph's Tom Hoggins is also captivated by the Uncharted formula, but the mechanics of aiming and shooting - never the series' best quality - display a curious lack of attention in such a carefully polished package. There's still nothing else quite like it. "The way the game frequently transitions almost seamlessly from gameplay to cinematic cut-scene back to gameplay in short bursts is just as exciting as it was when you'd never seen it done before.
"Man, those set pieces," Shoemaker opines. Drake's Deception offers a pleasingly familiar mix of puzzles, acrobatics, gunplay and knockabout adventure, garnished with some of the most audacious set-pieces in an industry increasingly besotted with them.
If you are, you could just stop reading here, because anyone who enjoyed the previous games should play Uncharted 3, full stop."įrankly, that probably covers most people. "By now, you should know if you're onboard with Nathan Drake's smirking brand of globe-trotting adventure or not. The problem Drake's Deception faces is that its predecessor got the mix so right, leaving only the responsibility of not dropping the ball - no small task, of course, but sticking to a formula is far easier than reinventing the wheel. Ultimately, Uncharted 2 was the perfect realisation of a formula Naughty Dog roughly established with Drake's Fortune, the first game in the series. "If I were to tell you Naughty Dog has just delivered another superb Uncharted game, would you be the least bit surprised?" he asks, but Shoemaker wouldn't raise the question if he didn't already know the answer. Giantbomb's Brad Shoemaker kicks off his 5 star review by paying lip service to this unspoken understanding.
If the 40-something reviews currently circulating the internet are any barometer, Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception does a better job of being that kind of game than its predecessor - which is to say, it is a marginal improvement on what many hold up as one of the best games of the last 10 years, if not all time.Īnd if we're brutally honest, few would have expected it to be anything less. The kind of game that trades interactivity and player expression for tight scripting and elaborate staging, going directly against what many see as the very nature of the medium, while still feeling like an essential part of it. When this console generation finally ambles to a close, when Microsoft and Sony have exhausted every "additive" feature or peripheral that could delay the inevitable for another few months, Naughty Dog's Uncharted 2: Among Thieves will stand out as the very pinnacle of a certain kind of game.