Uncharted 4: A Thief's End

The cliff-notes version is this: the writing is as good as it's ever been, and Naughty Dog have squeezed near-unbelievable performance out of the PS4. The gameplay is... well, it's Uncharted: slightly floaty (but mostly forgiving) puzzle/platforming interspersed with fairly loose gunplay, but both are spiced up by the introduction of a grappling hook, which opens up possibilities for both traversal and Tarzan-swinging aerial takedowns that simply never get old.

Narrative-driven games are always more difficult to talk about. Potential spoilers abound, even when discussing the opening stages.

So I'll try and avoid spoilers, as always, but... Pyrates - ye be warned.

The story mostly takes place after Uncharted 3, but it opens in media res, and then flashes back three times, so effectively the entire first half of the game jumps around all over the place, temporally speaking. Some sections are set before Drake's Fortune, others before even the Young Drake flashbacks in Drake's Deception, but the thrust of the story - Nate's renewed search for the legendary pirate treasure of Henry Avery - is full-on sequel.

And this is, after all, Uncharted, so the trail leads all over the world - from Panama to Madagascar, via Italy and Scotland, with ridiculously-complex clues and improbably-still-functional puzzle mechanisms to weed out those unworthy of following in Avery's footsteps.

And yeah, it's Naughty Dog, so the whole thing looks and sounds spectacular. The addition of Photo Mode - essentially identical to the version found in The Last of Us Remastered and the Nathan Drake Collection - has added hours to my play time, and I didn't even use it much in the opening or closing stages.

Narratively, I don't think I could ever say enough about the writing. There are forests' worth of dialogue in this; not just in cutscenes, either, but back-and-forth banter between Nate and his companions, The Last of Us-style optional conversations, panicked shouts in combat - and none of it repeated - at least, as far as I noticed.

One of the things I feel it's missing, though - and this is far from a criticism, really - is context for the collectible treasures scattered around every level. There are a few sequences where Drake geeks out about artifacts that are lying about in the world, but there's no description of the trinkets you can pick up, beyond their name.

In the 2013 reboot of Tomb Raider, Lara has dialogue describing what her treasures are, where they're from, their cultural significance, and in some cases you can reveal additional information by studying them more closely. Uncharted always took a lot of cues from Tomb Raider; they should have taken this, too, maybe folded it into Nate's journal.

In terms of additions to the franchise, there's the grappling hook, and a couple of sections where you take the wheel of a boat or a jeep; several of the locations are bigger and more open, with a variety of routes available. On the whole, though, it's more of an evolution than anything groundbreaking; if you didn't get along with Uncharted before - for whatever reason - then it's hard to imagine A Thief's End winning you over. But for those of us who've been having fun with Nathan Drake since 2007, it's a damn good ride.