No intro sentences. I'm just miffed.

The whole plot in Uncharted 3 feels so damn contrived. Nothing flows together well, shit just kinda happens and you're expected to just accept it. Well, guess what Uncharted 3? I feel completely detached from everything happening in front of me. The setpieces may be some of the most over-the-top ones I've ever experienced, but it doesn't complement the story or pacing. Why is Chloe back after the events of Uncharted 2? Who is Charlie and why should I care about him? I think there's supposed to be a plot thread about Sullivan adopting and raising Drake, but it's only addressed at the very beginning and the very end. What the hell happened here?

Drake is so unlikeable in this title that I really don't care about him by the time he's literally dying in a desert. It's like watching your hero live long enough to lose his way, except I never liked Drake enough in the first place to care. Everyone that Drake drags into his selfish escapade has the same questions to ask: "Why are you doing this? Is it worth risking your life? You can stop at any time, you know?" The villains are somehow worse than Drake, at least he leaves an impact on you. The Queen of England and her henchman (whose name I already forgor) need Drake's Ring so they can decipher the location of Sand Atlantis, because reasons! Reasons you're never told!

The previous two games had an acceptable level of polish, but this entry feels particularly sloppy for some reason. I wonder if Bluepoint Games's "remaster" running at 60 FPS is at fault here. Regardless, cover mechanics felt a lot less reliable, platforming occasionally failed me for no discernible reason, the camera clipped through walls on a few occasions, and other various oddities. Outside of that, the combat in this game just feels baaaaaaad. Combat segments are so frequent and tiresome, and it feels like I am always in a do-or-die situation, no time to breathe until the encounter itself is over. You could tell me that the combat arenas themselves were just borrowed from the multiplayer mode, and I would believe you in a heartbeat. It all feels very inorganic. We've also got a new enemy type, brutes, and boy do I hate them. It's not because they're difficult, no, it's because they're just a boring melee QTE damage sponge. And to add insult to injury, the final boss of this game is effectively just another brute!

I apologize for calling Uncharted 1 "unsharted", I should've saved that title for this one. Uncharted 3 is arguably the better game in terms of spectacle and gameplay, but I would be lying if I said this game had a coherent plot to follow. It's a passable game, but boy is it forgettable.

This might be my favorite Uncharted game yet. This is basically Drake's Fortune with a story as good, if not better, as the one in Among Thieves (with this I'm referring to that the story develops its characters which are the main strength of Uncharted as a franchise). There's not much I can say that I haven't said in my reviews of the previous games. This time the enemies are less bullet-spongey than in the previous games, the arenas are better designed with more covers and more room for movement/platforming, the shootouts are shorter and the climbing paths are more clear. The melee combat feels better than ever, now it's not just mashing the square button, you can push around enemies and counter their attacks.

All of this comes at the cost of feeling extremely linear, even more so than the previous games. For example, there's a lot of sequences where you have to run towards the camera and quick time events. These game's needed a more meaningful improvement to the formula than just "fixing" everything, but for what Drake's Deception is, I think it's an ok action-adventure cover-shooter. I know this franchise is always compared to Indiana Jones, but I think that since Among Thieves, that comparison isn't correct, as this turned more into a modern Hollywood action blockbuster.

Even though it's a good game i'm quite disappointed in how it ultimately turned out. It had a lot of great moments and set-pieces but the last 1/3 or so was a total drag. I really hated the combat in here. I don't know if I'm so bad at this game or what but I've been dying really often in Uncharted 3. There were a lot of encounters with 20+ enemies (including guys with RPGs, grenade launchers, sniper rifles, shields etc.) and you just sneak from cover to cover to eliminate them one by one, hoping that you won't get randomly killed by the last one. I haven't been this exhausted by a game in a long time.

I'd give it a weak 7/10 because it's still decent in most aspects. It's just painfully frustrating.

It improved on the formula of the first two games. I was fond of the variety in the chapters, with a good mix of the different gameplay styles. Sequences like the mansion fire and the ship escape stand out a lot. Other than that, I had fun with the improved arsenal of weapons.

Graphically, this game has quite a distinctive artstyle. I liked the realism of it a lot, from the arid deserts to the intricate interiors. I also felt that the sound design was a step up from the first game, on par with the second. Some great tracks and performances.

I liked the game's story, but there are some aspects of it that didn't click with me. Chloe and Charlie being written out in favour of Sully was pretty weird, and I don't like how the game did yet another Sully fakeout death. The exploration of Nate and Sully's relationship and pasts was neat, the extents they would go for one another. Conversely though, I think Talbot and Marlowe could've been a lot better. Apart from the sequence where they drug you (and Charlie before that), I don't think they lived up to my expectations. Still, it was an exhilarating quest, even if it wasn’t for some grand treasure.

I really can't say much about this game, it's fine. I enjoyed it for the most part. It's a good Uncharted game, same structure and everything. The main thing it does wrong is the story, it's not bad but the pacing is off, it drags a lot.

I noticed that the shooting is surprisingly more clunky than its predecessor, it feels like they doubled down on the hand to hand combat and focused less on the gunplay.

Overall, it's a fine entry in the franchise, not a very memorable one but still better than the first game.

An overall disappointment after the second episode. I understand why everyone pretty much dismissed it when it came out. Following up on something so huge was no easy task, and never ever does the ride entertain as much as the epic moments already lived in the previous game.
Still has every design problem the other games had with countless enemies coming out from God knows where to try and murder you, and a hero who has no problem brutally slaughtering legions of grunts but suddenly has a conscience crisis at the very end and attempts to save the big baddie's life for no reason.
Also hand to hand combat sucks ass and this episode insists on having way more of them.

Gotta be honest Uncharted 3 had such a slow start feels like I had to get through 5/6 chapters till I started caring about the story here but once I got through that man this was such an incredible game!

This Uncharted game had the most confusing puzzles of the series which I really did not enjoy because at times I was just staring at my screen questioning my sanity on what to do at certain parts and a Uncharted game had never done that to me before.


I think this Uncharted game probably has some of the most back to back action/unexpected moments in the series once you get through the extremely slow start of this game!

Nolan North as Nathan Drake continues to be amazing with another fantastic performance

kind of a mess? the first few chapters were quite promising yet it dies off with a second act that behaves more as a franchise retread than anything. and the last third is the most frustrating - it has all the brightest ideas yet production was clearly rushed, leading to an abundance of clunky set pieces marred with some truly awful combat.

speaking of combat, the levels are constructed very poorly. as per usual with this trilogy, the core gameplay loop involves these massive settings with row after row of enemies to fight that just drag on for far too long - and even with smoother shooting controls it just doesn't quite work. the opponents are like cardboard, and the hand-to-hand combat emphasized in this installment doesn't really work. for example: it's very easy to get locked into fisticuffs when an enemy approaches you, and as such the dodge mechanics don't work in a wider setting, so you can easily get sniped. the brute enemies are really annoying as well, as was the final boss - really just a glorified qte. and for a cover-based shooter, the actual cover mechanics were awfully unreliable. little things like that or the poorly developed stealth controls make the gameplay loop rather irritating.

as far as these grand set pieces go, the absurd maximalism makes this less of an adventure movie homage than a pastiche of modern hollywood. and it's a lot of fun at times! but the ideas never synthesize well with each other - the poorly constructed story has us moving from place to place, shooting gallery to puzzle to shooting gallery to big set piece with some utterly awful chase scenes and zero cohesion. it just doesn't work. a game of this length has no reason to be so repetitive. there's a lot of dedication to the game's influences here, yet the passion and tension is lost in indulgence after a while. i can only watch so many structures collapse in one game, everyone.

the story is disappointing too, finally offering some sort of commentary on drake and his impact on those around him only to abandon that development in favour of a happy ending. very little changes for these characters, it's almost a total retread of uncharted 2 without the ingenuity that makes uncharted 2 decent. there are some cool narrative strokes though - one of the principal villains deciding that the best way to combat drake is to have him trip on some unexplained hallucinogenic is hilarious. i just did not care for a single thing that was occurring otherwise.

with all that being said, there were some things here i quite liked. the trek through the desert is quite good, as is the preceding plane sequence (although thats the one thing in the game that shouldve been longer!). there are other good environments that simply aren't developed in an interesting way, with most introduced mechanics not being enough to stop each shootout from feeling exactly like the last. i do harbour a weird nostalgia for these games as they were the first i bought for my playstation, but i'm glad to get this one out of my backlog lol. here's hoping for uncharted 4 to be an improvement when i inevitably forget my frustrations with this franchise 🙏

Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception took what Uncharted 2 improved and destroyed it. Take, for example, the stealth mechanics. With Uncharted 2, the enemies didn't detect you within .5 seconds behind cover like they did in the first game. This game decided to go back to its roots and now the enemies can spot Nate behind cover in no time flat. Perhaps I just suck at video games, but a lot of the combat sections felt overly tedious. You could be almost done with one section and then it would feel like the game would spawn an enemy right next to you they would instantly kill you.

On a more positive note about the game's combat, it does feel good (for the most part). Both shooting and melee combat felt great, with the melee being the best in the series so far. Though, I can't 100% say shooting was fantastic in this game. At first, I thought I was crazy but the more I played the more I realized I was right. It's like enemies would absorb the shots and not take any damage. I'm not talking about the enemy types that are designed for that sort of thing, I'm talking about low-level grunts. I could headshot these guys and they wouldn't flinch.

Overall controls for Nate were all over the place. Sometimes, Nate felt great to play as. Other times, it felt like he had ice skates on. There is no in-between.

The story starts strong, but I lost interest in it about halfway through. To be honest, it feels like two different games after a certain point. The ending felt very rushed.

That's a good word to describe this game: rushed. Other aspects outside of the ending felt very rushed. For example, some cutscene glitches that were present here weren't present during the first Uncharted game. Little things like that could have been avoided if this game had a bit longer development time.

Uncharted 3 had the potential to be great but in the end, it was kind of a dud.

Uncharted 3 is a step backwards, leaning into the worst aspects of the series's gameplay and delivering a rather odd story.
Lstick holding is when the game forces you into a segment where you only hold the left stick, and nothing else. It's the most base form of gameplay, just moving your character in a direction mindlessly. Unfortunately, Uncharted 3 has quite a few of these, and they're quite lengthy. It takes you out of the game and makes you want to pull up your phone with your free hand.
Our two additions to combat for this game are expanded hand to hand combat, adding grapples and throws to the mix, and the ability to throw grenades back at enemies. The expanded melee combat is a good idea, but it led to some melee-only sections that really dragged on. The ability to throw grenades back at enemies is cool, except for towards the end of the game when enemies will spam the shit out of grenades at you- and you're expected to throw them back while taking heavy machine gun fire.
Concerning the story, it takes much longer in this game for us to actually figure out what's going on and what our ultimate goal is. It makes the pacing more awkward and the advancement of the plot feel more arbitrary. There's also some issues of Sully being out of character. It makes sense why they wanted him around for this story, but I think it would have been better served as a prequel. Sully's departure in Uncharted 2 felt properly timed and sensible given his age.
There's still some memorable setpieces here, and I had fun overall, but the game's mostly just okay. Is it worth playing when you're going through the trilogy? Sure. Is it worth going back to, or playing individually? Probably not.

The previous two Uncharted games brought me on a one-of-a kind adventure that I'd never experienced before. Unfortunately, this third entry in the franchise doesn't do much to separate itself from what had come before and instead relies on some aggravating gameplay choices rather than innovate the franchise.

Uncharted 2 is one of the best games of all time, not just because of its story but also because of the way it improved upon many of the issues that the first game had. It's a shame that this sequel brought back those issues like the difficulty spike, making the stealth mechanic that Among Thieves introduced, unusable due to the large number of enemies. What's worse is that if Drake dies and the game loads to a checkpoint, enemies would spawn alerted to Drake's presence, removing the possibility of stealth and in turn drastically changing the way you approach combat.

Also speaking of the use of melee attacks, I hated all of the enemy encounters that forced you to use hand-to-hand combat, as instead of being an actual combat sequence, they were all presented in QTEs, which felt more like you were watching an interactive cutscene rather than playing the game.

The game also likes to take you out of control, with the game forcing you to just walk in snail's space and the camera often zooming in for finishing moves. Now, this would have been incredible and cinematic, but it's done so often that it pretty much loses its impact. There's even an entire segment where Drake was running, but everything was played out in slow motion, making movement such a drag, and there's an entire chapter where all you do is walk. You know, they should have called this game Uncharted: Drake's Walking Simulator.

One thing I did like though was the antagonist. Well, at first anyway, Talbot was so mysterious and intriguing due to his ability to disappear out of nowhere and even take a gunshot, I thought he might be a magician and might just become my personal antagonist in the franchise, but unfortunately none of his abilities were explained and ended up being a massive plot hole.

The story was also massively disappointing, never reaching the heights of Among Thieves, with fewer stakes, character developments, some characters are even just written off out of sequences; and worst of all, there's less adrenaline-pumping action to be seen, with one of the few being there, only serving as a filler segment.

Don't even get me started with Chloe's awful-looking character model downgrade.

At the end of the day, Uncharted 3: Drake's Walking Simulator is not a bad game, it's just a terrible sequel to one of the best games of all time