Uncharted 3 First Impressions [GO]

Uncharted 3 single player Gamescom 2011 screenshot
The best adventure serial you'll ever play! (Photo courtesy naughty_dog)

Everyone’s favorite treasure hunter, Nathan Drake, is back once again for his third journey! What’s it like? I’ll tell you. I’m about eight chapters in, but you can expect some degree of story spoiler if you read this post. I don’t think anything huge has happened yet, but if you don’t want to know about which characters are in the game or what happens at all, DON’T READ THIS!

– Transitioning from the super-solid hand-to-hand combat of Arkham City to here is jarring/kind of disappointing. Speaking of going from one game to another, the slightly different cover buttons from Gears of War 3 has also caused me to pop out of cover prematurely/accidentally. Whoops!

– The most common complaint is that the aiming dead zone is kind of big. I actually noticed it on one of the pistols, but on the rifles I think it’s mostly absent. Still not the smoothest aiming (and it never has been), but we’re three games in, Naughty Dog.

– Fighting the brutes was fun…once or twice. Why are there brutes EVERYWHERE?!

– All this emphasis on how old and tired Sully is along with how Drake is letting things get too personal worry me. I don’t want Sully to die, guys!

– Young Drake! Young Sully! Columbia! I wonder if they just pitch-shifted Nolan North’s voice, because Young Drake sounds a little weird in an unnatural way.

– Chloe’s back! I was worried that she wouldn’t make it since we’d only seen Elena. I haven’t met Elena yet, but I can’t wait to see her again. Both of them are so great!

– The new guy, Charlie Cutter, is pretty cool too. He looks like someone I’ve seen on TV/movies before. I checked the IMDB page and his voice actor, Graham McTavish, isn’t familiar to me, but I learned that he voiced Lazarevic last game, which is insane! I like how he’s a know-it-all to Drake and how Nolan North plays the annoyance in a subdued fashion. It’s still early, but at least we’re seeing that not all Englishmen in Uncharted games are evil.

– Chloe seems really familiar with Cutter too. I wonder if that’s the original crew where she met Drake.

– There are some seriously devious puzzles in this game. The main one in the chateau with the tiles…Devious. It took me a while to figure out all the elements in the room, but it’s kind of brilliant.

– Oh my god the spiders! So fucked up. No more. No. I hate it. If they reappear later…

– I don’t love the inverted camera angle chase/escape sequences. It’s hard to see where you’re going when the obstacles pop up split seconds before you have to react.

– Thank god someone has a brain! When Chloe is all, “Hey, remember the last time we tried to unearth a huge treasure and there were evil blue monsters everywhere?” I was all, “YES!” It’d be funny if you had an option to say, “You’re totally right, Chloe.” Credits.

– I actually stopped myself from playing too much last night so that I could spread the fun out. Can’t wait to run into Chloe (my favorite character!), but I’m having a lot of fun in Syria in the meantime. I got killed by rocket launchers maybe six times before I got them all with the sniper rifle.

Comments

2 responses to “Uncharted 3 First Impressions [GO]”

  1. Min Avatar
    Min

    OMG so many spoilers. And I was just gonna buy a PS3 and play through the series.

    Oh well.

    1. Dan Avatar

      My secret motivations for every one of these is to ruin as many games as possible for you.

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