Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception

Rating: 3 out of 3 Stars (why only 3 possible stars?)
Genre: Third person cover shooter; Sub-genre: Platforming/Puzzles
ESRB: T (Lots of gunplay and some profanity. Feels like an "M")
Estimated hours of gameplay (thorough play/quick play): 12/10
Developer: Naughty Dog
Wiki page

There are a lot of sad people in the world who chose to stick by Sony in this generation of consoles. PS1 killed Nintendo, and PS2 was Goddamn amazing. So who can blame them? I don't need to go on, this generation of consoles is near the end. The argument is over. Well, not as far as Naughty Dog is concerned. The Uncharted series has single-handedly made my PS3 useful. Especially since I don't own any Blu-Ray movies. That's a pretty amazing feat! So if you have small-girl-hands, a bunch of Blu-Rays, and no concern for things like operating system and giving money away to a foreign company (our economy is messed up, buy American!)... why don't you already own this game?

I'm saying the XBox is as American as Optimus Prime, is what I'm saying.

I'm just going to skip straight to the strength of this game, since gameplay and story are solid. And that is the "cinematic storytelling" approach it uses. I think I first started hearing this phrase when the first Modern Warfare came around. Which was a bit confusing to me, since no games in the Call of Duty franchise have an ounce of story in them. Seriously. If someone like Roger Ebert wants an example of storytelling in a game, for the love of all that is good PLEASE do not use a Call of Duty game as an example. Anyone with a critical brain will laugh at you. The game has no characters, and the cutscenes are just a video of a fucking map while faceless voices tell you about objectives in very direct, military fashion. And the things you are doing are far outside of how the military works, unless you're Arnold Schwarzenegger in an 80's movie or something. Uncharted, on the other hand, has things like a "main character" and a "story arc" and "coherent dialogue". But getting back to the "cinematic" nature of the game, I think the biggest thing is the simplest: movie editing. Yeah, when a scene ends, it'll cut to the next location (sometimes with a cheesy wipe effect) without a load screen. The game flows like a damn movie. What I've seen from other "cinematic" games is the use of videos to cover load screens (which is a nice trick, when it's not a video of a fucking map or whatever the hell was blinking on the screen in Black Ops) and forceably pulling the camera away from the player, usually to watch a helicopter crash. The Uncharted take on this is to have each section of a level lead into the next part. You punch a guy through a window, his friends on the ground below come up after you. The bad guy opens the cargo hold of the plane, you fall into the desert. I would go on, but I would have to list every single thing that happens in sequence of the game. The whole thing just moves, man!

This is not a pre-rendered cut scene. I don't think. I really can't tell, it's nuts.

When making the first sequel to Uncharted, Naughty Dog decided it wasn't enough to come out with the most amazing single player campaign. They delved into multiplayer! Now I didn't get around to trying it back in Uncharted 2, but I made sure to try it out for 3. It took me quite a bit of extra time to gather enough information to piece together my opinions, and I still feel like perhaps I didn't give it enough time. This is because there are essentially three major categories of multiplayer: competitive, co-op, and the recently popular game type I call "Horde mode".

There should be a name for this. It's like I'm referring to an FPS as a "Doom-style game".

For my own personal tastes, I will say the competitive multiplayer (team deathmatch, CTF, etc.) is total bullshit. So much so, I made a list of 23 things that piss me off about it (I'll put it at the bottom of the review). I would have probably found more items for my list, but I quit the game in frustration. That sounds pretty bad, but I will say that those with the patience to take on its unforgiving curve against newbies and who don't own a copy of Call of Duty (who knows why that would be) this will be a very deep and engrossing multiplayer to get in to. It has a slew of wacky unlockables to keep players in the game, but mostly I found the ability to climb around everywhere in the levels to be the thing that provided the most surprises.

Fucking skeletons! Why!

Co-op is the strongest game for me. Missions are chosen at random (when you look for players online, anyway) or you can choose to play with your PSN friends or split screen. But I've never heard of anyone who owns more than one PS3 controller or who has PSN friends, so searching online is the way to go. Each mission is a vignette with a loose connection to each other. The cutscenes are kept short and simple to assist with the "we just want to play, dammit!" attitude of co-op games. While these are cheap levels in comparison to the grandiose single player campaign, it feels to me like reading a series of supplemental comic books in accompaniment to a movie. It gives a feel to the background of the characters as they are sent on their lesser adventures. Also, you shoot lots and lots of dudes. I definitely appreciate this, and it is MUCH better handled than the awkward co-op missions in RAGE.

My biggest complaint is that sometimes the game lets another player control Sully.

Lastly, there's Horde mode. Both this and co-op are strangely limited to 3 players instead of 4. I'm not sure I understand why. Maybe Naughty Dog thinks "four's a crowd"? Anyway, this mode again suffers from my feeling that "this isn't Mass Effect 3" syndrome that I have. But I think this might be the second best. Matches are shorter than Space Marine, and you can win instead of having stupid infinite waves. There's also upgrades to unlock to give a sense of progression. But without the wide array of stat and power customization that ME3 has, your character will feel a bit samey. Also, there are far fewer enemy types. That all being said, this mode also offers deep and engrossing options to steal your time away from you.

Conclusion:
If you have a PS3, you should have this game. Otherwise, I'm not sure why you even have one. Is it really that good for playing Blu-Rays? C'mon! Use the damn thing to play a video game at some point! Jesus!

I Google'd Jesus playing video games for that last sentence.

TIME FOR BITCHING ABOUT COMPETITIVE MULTIPLAYER!

1. The PS3 controller prevents game from ever being competitive. The triggers are slippery and oddly shaped, and the sticks are too close together. I know this isn't unique to Uncharted 3, but it still sucks.
2. No kill cam. Really not sure why more games don't steal this from CoD. It both prevents camping and lets newbies learn how to play the game.
3. Unnecessary respawn timer in death match. Still unsure why respawn timers are the default for game developers.
4. Unable to spawn "in combat" is completely worthless. You can easily get killed by a far away sniper or a guy turning a corner elsewhere. Could be to prevent backing up a buddy, but isn't that a large part of including this feature to begin with?
5. Unable to see own latency. I play late at night, and do not appreciate being thrown into games with people from Europe or Australia unwittingly.
6. Players able to choose unfair character models such as "skinny girl" and, much worse, a fucking skeleton. FUCKING SKELETONS! Can bullets go between their ribs? Holy shit this is dumb!
7. Stats are given on guns, but damage is not one of them. The damage in this game feels wildly inconsistent without any kind of explanation.
8. Kill streaks flat out suck. It's very hard to earn medals to unlock them, unless you've memorized the whole list and can recall in an instant the best way to earn the most medals on a given action.
9. Perks suck. There's too many of them, and they are in no way balanced.
10. Cover difficult to use due to it being the same button as roll. I'm pretty sure the pro's never use cover, so this will be a lucky kill if you catch them failing to roll. Maybe they don't roll either.
11. Taking cover animation too slow. This needs to be tweaked.
12. Inconsistent melee animations. I see players retaining movement during melee while I stand still, even when melee'ing from a sprint. Might be due to lag, unsure.
13. Inconsistent climbing animations. Unsure if this is timing or lag. Not possible to tell if people are using the fast climbing perk.
14. Inconsistent damage stun. I find myself unable to move in certain situations, but enemies able to do so in the same situation. Unsure if due to lag or some perk or something.
15. Able to hear enemy chatter. I just think this is stupid.
16. Unable to hear incoming enemies. I wasn't playing with headphones, sure, but I really felt completely blind.
17. No form of radar (or something similar like UAV). Video games CANNOT match the precision of the human ear. So when I hear loud ass gunfire and the game doesn't give me a way to determine where the hell it's coming from, I get annoyed.
18. Both a leveling system AND item/weapon placement on maps makes this game extremely hard on newbies.
19. No way to pick class at start of a match. Instead, it automatically picks whatever you have set as "default". Why?
20. Medals not listed in alphabetical order. Fucking OCD nightmare.
21. Unable to cook grenades. Unless I'm missing something.
22. Assassinations completely inconsistent. As far as I know, you just need to melee someone in the back. But I've performed a regular punch to the back of enemy heads several times and looked like an idiot. This is definitely a lag thing, but it still sucks.
23. No way to leave games during countdown. So why have a countdown?