I will catch slack for this statement, but without the 2022 Uncharted film, I would’ve never become an Uncharted fan. It was only after watching the movie and seeing the fan criticisms being levied at it that I became interested in playing through the franchise at all. I needed to see for myself if the writers and actors of the film failed to capture the treasure hunting antics and iconic personalities of Nathan Drake and Victor “Sully” Sullivan that are so important to the series' identity. In hindsight, the film did fail in those respects, but let’s ignore it and discuss the first game in the franchise - Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune.

Released in late 2007, Uncharted: Drake's Fortune was an unprecedented success on the PS3. I’m unsure if this was a foregone conclusion at the time given the stellar track record of the studio creating the game up to 2007, but nowadays the Naughty Dog name is synonymous with polish and quality. Coming off the heels of their success with the Crash Bandicoot and Jak and Daxter series, Uncharted took the studio in a new direction. While they left behind the quirky orange mascot of Crash, the wisecracking of Daxter, and the stoic badassery of Jak, Naughty Dog replaced them with the adventure loving, gun wielding, treasure chasing, and still wisecracking Nathan “Nate” Drake. This was obviously a wise decision on the part of Naughty Dog, as the Uncharted series would become synonymous with the Playstation brand and Nathan Drake would become another Sony mascot of sorts. I, however, was not on board with this change and actively resented the series at its debut. It was replacing my favorite game series of all time, Jak and Daxter, and killing my hopes of a Jak IV (no, Jak and Daxter: The Lost Frontier does not count). Looking back, I realize the advent of Uncharted was necessary to continue the growth of Naughty Dog as a game developer and a studio known for its storytelling. With the overtly adult themes and dark tones of their most recent releases, however, maybe it is time for the studio to return to form and give us something a little more campy and a little more fun.

Drake’s Fortune begins on a boat as the player is introduced for the first time to Nate and, arguably, the second most important character in the entire series, Elena Fisher. The two are in the middle of the ocean to uncover the coffin of the famous pirate Sir Francis Drake, a possible relative to our titular hero. Elena, neither an adventurer nor an experienced diver, is here to document the historical find, while Nate hopes to unearth long forgotten treasure. The two soon discover the coffin, but are quickly ambushed by the antagonistic force of this game, a highly trained group of mercenary’s lead by Atoq Navarro. A shootout between the unlucky couple of treasure hunters and the mercenaries acts as the game’s tutorial and an introduction to the gameplay of the entire Uncharted series.

The best way to describe playing any Uncharted game is likening it to playing an Indiana Jones movie with bigger stunts, just as many puzzles, more guns, more death, and less Nazis. The player will spend most of their time guiding Nate through treacherous ancient death traps, solving challenging puzzles of the past, and engaging in intense and nearly unwinnable gunfights with a limitless supply of goons. The controls are smooth and responsive allowing for precise aiming, quick dives to cover, and effortless 3D platforming. While your ability to aim true and find the right cover will be tested on harder difficulties, the game is never unfair and is able to strike a balance between frustratingly difficult and excitingly challenging.

Looking back on Drake’s Fortune with the knowledge of where the series will go and where Nathan as a character ultimately ends up, this game is a fantastic introduction and is only made better by the subsequent games. Thanks to this foresight, the game's title becomes multi-faceted where “Fortune” takes on several different meanings for Nathan Drake as a character. Let me explain.

Fortune has three widely accepted meanings: (1) a very large sum of money, (2) prosperity attained partly through luck, and (3) destiny or fate. For the first meaning of the word, it is obvious by the end of the game that Nathan and friends find a fortune in treasure. The second meaning, while slightly less obvious, was explained by Naughty Dog themselves in a 2018 interview stating that Nathan’s health bar is actually just a luck meter, with each decrease of the bar representing Nathan’s luck running out. When the bar gets low enough Nathan’s luck has run out and his enemies will get a clear shot and kill him. While this sounds silly, it does mean that everything Nathan has accomplished is partly due to his insane amount of luck, i.e. his prosperity is attained partly through luck. The final meaning of the word, destiny or fate, can be applied to this first game in two different ways. First, the meeting of Elena and Nate was destined to occur as they are meant to be together. Second, it was fate that brought Nathan to the coffin of Sir Francis Drake in the first place and set about this whole chain of events that would span several games, a spin off, and a movie. Am I looking too deep into a title? Maybe.

In conclusion, Uncharted: Drake's Fortune is an absolute gem and a great introduction to the series. With its compelling narrative, thrilling gameplay, and memorable characters, it set the benchmark for action-adventure games going forward and would only be topped by its sequel.

It’s been a while since I’ve had both the time, and motivation to finish a game all the way through. I’ve picked up plenty of titles over the last few months that I’ve enjoyed playing; though none really hooked me.

Not until I finally picked up Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune. Of course the series is praised to high heavens, so naturally, I had to see what all of the fuss was about. Usually anytime a series receives a ton of praise, I tend to agree with the majority.

There are exceptions of course, many of which I’ve just given up on and have no plans to return to (though they won’t be named). But in Drake’s Fortune, I was happy to find my time well spent, and my burning passion for gaming restored.

Sure, it’s rough around the edges mechanically. What would you expect for a game that came out in 2007? Despite its overall clunkiness, there’s a fluidity to the gameplay that you begin to nail down after a while.

Which also makes it easier to giggle at some of the less polished elements that disrupt the experience, which I think will naturally be fixed in later entries. Still, what Naughty Dog managed to accomplish is pretty incredible. The environments and level design are gorgeous and ambitious.

Sure they get a bit samey after a while by todays standards, but I would’ve been blown away had I played this back when it came out. The combat is also pretty awesome. Though I do think the hand to hand combat elements could have used a little more work, even with how little you use them.

The score was surprisingly good, which makes me excited to hear what they bring to the table for the rest of the series. The voice actors were also excellent. Nolan North really sells it.

I think the enemy types was consistently refreshing. I can tell they wanted to keep players interested since there were so many combat sections in the game, and I do think they succeeded at keeping it a fun experience in that regard. The traversal was great, despite occasionally showing its age.

The survival horror element towards the end of the game was also really well done, and you can totally (and perhaps accidentally) see the makings of another game in what they were doing (Last of Us).

There’s a couple sections that I’ve seen criticized that I can’t help but overwhelmingly agree on, and that’s the River sections. The barrel aspect becomes a bit bombastic and comical in that regard, and without a doubt obnoxious. Though I will admit it never became too much of a hinderance.

The story was okay overall, but what I think they managed to get right in this first entry is the characters. They’re thinly written, but endlessly endearing. There’s a lot of potential for them to grow into truly memorable, tangible people. I just think that potentially hasn’t been unlocked yet. Though I can see that happening as I progress throughout the games.

There’s rarely ever a dull moment. The game is consistently entertaining, and chock-full of great moments that will keep you wanting to play. Even when Naughty Dog hasn’t quite found their footing with a series, they still deliver memorable experiences that you can’t help but enjoy, and I absolutely love them for that.

I was really disappointed with this game. Firstly - lets get the good stuff out of the way - the music and voice acting is really good. It does a great job in setting the theme of the game.

Now for all the bad things.
Firstly, the gameplay. It gets boring really, really quickly. There are only 2 types of levels in this game - shoot waves of enemies, and on wheels shooting. The enemies are no fun to deal with - even with headshots they take forever to die. Not to mention how janky the controls are. It is not fun moving Nathan Drake around, and trying to take cover and shoot. Infact, the controls and level designs culminate into one of the worst levels I have seen in video game history. The Jetski drive and shoot level is atrocious. It is impossible to maneuver the jetski and shoot consistently. When playing the level, I thought the objective was to make a dash on the jetski while shooting the enemies. But with the horrible controls and level design, it literally becomes a cover shooter on a jetski. You have to stop, take your time shooting enemies, and then proceed. It is horrible.
The platforming is whatever, its a single click to hop platforms and sometimes you have to time it with falling platforms and swings. Its not the best, but it is something I can see in a "story" focused game.

However, nothing compares to the "twist" near the end of the game. Not going to spoil anything, but I was so shocked and upset by this twist, it completely ruined the game for me.

I gave it a 2 cause of the music, voice acting, and environment design.

troquei um super nintendo e umas fita de 64 por esse jogo, lógico que não foi só por ele, a loja do camelô me deixou escolher vários jogos em troca do snes, e o uncharted 1 e 2 são os que mais tenho carinho.

até aquele momento da minha vida eu não tive muito contato com jogos de tiro, meu mundo era joga mario e esse uncharted transformou a cabeça do luquinhas criança, justamente por se tratar de uma gameplay que unia a base do gênero plataforma com tiro e correria, decisão que dialoga perfeitamente com a estrutura geral do game, escalar lugares que não deveriam ser escalados em uma corrida por tesouro é divertidíssimo na pele do drake.

uncharted em essência não é nada impressionante, seu enredo é uma narrativa que já era uma vaca magra no cinema e até mesmo na literatura (que apesar de não ser uma arte com contexto monetário como o cinema pra falar "vacas magras", já tinha sido saturada histórias de tesouro), drake não fez nada que o Jackie Chan ou Tom Cruise ja não tivessem feito, mas o formato videogame possibilitou que você fosse o Jackie Chan e o Tom Cruise em forma de Drake, um poço de carisma inserido numa história simples que não almeja ser grande, apenas bom.

sendo um pouco impessoal agora, infelizmente o jogo é datado, principalmente depois dos títulos posteriores, sua gameplay envelheceu mal (ou mau?), é repetitivo, meio difícil e com sessões que mudam o ritmo de jogo, mas ainda sim é ótimo, um começo sólido e veio a ser melhorado no futuro. E valeu a pena trocar o snes + fita de 64 por ele? eu nao sei, mas fiz valer pq platinei duas vezes e jogo até hoje

Really just forgettable compared to the sequels. It looks a bit dated, with a saturated color-palette, the environments aren't really memorable, and blend together by the end. The gameplay (not many guns like the later entries, and also the most simplistic climbing) and story also aren't much better. The set pieces (specially the fucking jet-ski levels) are almost a joke compared to the ones in Uncharted 2 and 3. In the end it's just a kind of forgettable Indiana Jones homage. I would probably give it a 4.5 to a 5 if it wasn't for the ship level, which is by far the best set piece in the game, and is so good it bumps the game up to a 5.5/10

It's good for what it is, but it could have had a more interesting story and should have presented more varied set pieces and enemy varieties. The final section isn't that great because it changes the rules of how you play, but at the same time, it's only about 30 minutes at most. The majority of the game is very fluid and constant. Moving around and snapping to different walls, rocks, and crates allows you to quickly get a grasp on any situation and take out everyone. The final section becomes a rhythm game with the final "boss", and it promotes the most boring style of play ever that is often associated with cover shooters, sitting in one spot and hoping people peak a little bit. Whereas before, it was like Halo with a third-person view and snappy bobbing and weaving through the environment while making use of whatever weapons you can find or places you can get behind in these tight and well-crafted combat areas. The puzzles are also great and feel extremely natural and we could have used a few more near the end.

I'm getting really sick of shooting people.


Voice-acting carries this whole game.

And fuck Nathan for making Elena drop her camera. Just fuck him. No redemption.

text by tim rogers

★★★☆

“THE BEST GAME EVER MADE ABOUT A DUDE IN A T-SHIRT AND JEANS.”

I can’t precisely say that it doesn’t make me a tiny bit uncomfortable to admit that I so totally have nothing against actual dudes starring in videogames. The hero of Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune is a Guy in a T-shirt and jeans, with gun holsters over his shoulders. He jumps and climbs and shoots guys in the face. He never expresses guilt when he kills anyone, which leads us to believe that he might actually kill people all the time, which I suppose makes me feel a tiny bit like a Barbie-owning teenage girl must feel when her first boyfriend nonchalantly mentions after her first sexual encounter that the last condoms he used weren’t quite so tight.

Nathan Drake may or may not be the distant descendant of historical legendary explorer Sir Francis Drake; the game starts with him excavating a sarcophagus from the depths of the ocean at the precise point where Sir Francis Drake was apparently buried at sea. It doesn’t entirely make sense, though it turns out that Drake had faked his own death. There’s a girl there, whose voice-actor is not a professional by any stretch (every time she says “damn” or “hell” it’s like watching a whole little girls’ soccer team spontaneously combust seconds before the final whistle), and she complains a little bit. She’s filming a documentary or something. Seconds later, there are modern-day sea pirates shooting at you, so you’re shooting at them. There are a couple of cut-scenes, each of them directed competently, gently unfolding the B-minus-movie plot, and soon you’re on an island, with a jungle, and sunlight, and textures that look vaguely delicious, as much a treat to the refined eyes of an adult with a vintage AC/DC T-shirt collection as a bowl of Froot Loops was to the tongue of a fat ten-year-old; if you have a Very Expensive Television, you may soon be tempted, as I was, to finally remove the little strips of “protective” blue Scotch tape that were stuck to the corners of the display when the deliverymen dropped it off in your living room two years ago. Minutes after this epiphany, you’ve learned to play the game, and minutes later, you’ve sunk hours into it.

I heard someone call this a “videogame mix-tape”. I guess that’s right. Though everyone and their three-year-old sister are rushing to call it “Tomb Raider with a Dude” — or even “Dude Raider” — Uncharted is distinctly post-Gears (yes, we still consider Gears the Game of the Decade). It uses the Unreal Engine, it puts level design above all else, it has intense, cover-based firefights, and, more than anything, it stays heroically focused on and convinced in its hammy plot from beginning to end. That it also includes Prince-of-Persia-like climbing and platform sequences is absolutely essential to a post-Gears game design: you have to put something on the table. (When all is said and done, the third Prince of Persia game is still the king of tricky jumping puzzles. I’d love to see those guys make a game called “The Tower of Babel”, where all you have to do is climb to the top of one enormous tower. I’m sure they could make it work.) Uncharted also adds a nifty (mostly original) semi-rhythm-based melee combat system to the mix. It makes me think, man, as soon as someone makes a Dynasty-Warriors-style battlefield brawler with awesome music and rhythm elements in the fighting, the gaming press is going to stuff aluminum bricks and spray-paint them silver.

There’s really very little Tomb Raider influence to speak of, really. If you say Tomb Raider, I only have it in me to think of the first two, which were, if nothing else, enthralling (at the right time of year / lapses in medication) in the structure of their cavernous, empty, echo-y, massively puzzle-heavy dungeons. If Tomb Raider is “Indiana Jones”, Uncharted is “Planet Terror” — every time a puzzle comes up, Drake flips open Sir Francis Drake’s old notebook, and there’s the solution. Half of me wants to groan like a man groans when his daughter announces she’s getting married to a hobo; the other half admires the gall: because you know what? If big arcane tombs housing phenomenal treasure hordes were actually real, do you seriously think that you’d be able to get to the gold just by pushing a couple of blocks and lighting a couple of hecking torches? No, of course the solution is going to be literally impossible to figure out on your own, and if Nate Drake didn’t have that little notebook (must not wonder how Sir Francis Drake was able to figure out the puzzles in the first place), we wouldn’t have a videogame. Either way, you’ve got to really question the psychology of a person who would lock up a treasure horde in some big fascinating structure. It’s unthinkable in modern times, I guess — maybe way back before YouTube and “People’s Court” and “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?” the human race was graced with a significantly higher percentage of people who wanted to bequeath their legacy to someone who was smart enough to pull only the levers with star marks on them. What kind of evil, stupid, gimp-ass sons did some of these ancient kings have, I wonder? Either way, I’ve noticed that, more often than not, the fantastic artifacts are always hidden in such impregnable fortresses or tombs because someone genuinely wanted to keep the ancient artifact out of reach of future generations because it was dangerous. Microsoft Excel didn’t exist back in the days of El Dorado, so no one was able to plan up a schedule to illustrate that destroying the dangerous artifact (or maybe just dumping it into the infinite expanse of the sea) would actually take less time than enslaving a couple thousand heretics and forcing them at spear-point to build an elaborate temple dungeon.

I can forgive any loop holes in the plot because I loved Indiana Jones as a kid, even though my brother insisted that he was going to grow up to be Indiana Jones, so I had to settle for James Bond, which was, believe it or not, the short end of the stick (it’d take a PhD thesis to explain why). My brother has three kids and two cars now, and I’m a videogame designer in a punk rock band that has actually never finished a song that’s less than seven minutes long, so I guess neither one of us is living the life of death-defying archaeologist. Either way, I can appreciate the jungly context in Uncharted. I see Nathan Drake as the kind of adult-looking guy who might have sighed and looked out the window when the big dude sitting behind me in algebra class slapped a fat wad of gum onto the back of my hair. He would have never kicked me down the stairs, though he wouldn’t have helped me up, either. He wouldn’t even think, “That kid’s got to fight for himself.” He would just turn away and keep walking. He’s the kind of guy who lacks crucial contextual tidbits, and he’s all the more of a dude for it. When Drake has his back to a big stone pillar and there are dudes shooting at him, he gets this look on his face — console games are still three or four hardware generations far from perfect photo-realism, though none of that matters to Naughty Dog: they give Drake actual expressions, and at moments, whether it’s one of the dozen or so unique stumbling animations that will occasionally occur as you climb stairs or the truly terrified look on his face while he’s being shot at, Nathan Drake rises above other videogame characters. He’s more than just a polygon man — he’s, like, the son of a real dude and a woman whose father was half-cartoon. And, whether he knows it or not, he is afraid of death. And not just in a “videogame character breaking the fourth wall” kind of fear of death. It’s just right there on his face. The game rolls right on to its conclusion, through spectacular yet reined-in vistas, increasingly difficult gun battles, tricky jumping puzzles, and even difficult battles while navigating tricky jumping puzzles (though I could honestly do with a little bit more of that last one). When the story manages to spring its “big reveal” on the player, it’s done with amazing nobility. It pulls no punches and makes no excuses. It’s just like, “There it is. Now keep playing.” And that’s what you do. It’s awfully sweet and kind of the game. There’s absolutely no shame about the open-ended ending, either. There’s no groan-worthy bad-guy hand reaching out from beneath the waves, triumphantly clutching air. It’s basically like, the girl says “That adventure was fun let’s go on another” and the hero’s like “Yeah sure”. I, too, was like “Yeah sure”. It’d be really nice if they could maybe write truly excellent dialogue for the next one, though I’m far from worried — if Uncharted is Naughty Dog’s Jak and Daxter for the PlayStation 3, I have high hopes for their Jak 2. I give their first attempt a healthy score of three stars instead of the two-and-a-half it probably deserves because I appreciate its awesome thoughtfulness, and I don’t want to be caught with my pants down when the sequel turns out to be truly excellent. In the meantime, hey, Naughty Dog: thanks for caring.





I played the region-free US version of Uncharted on my Japanese PlayStation 3, and I didn’t notice that the game had been “heavily censored” until my friend Spencer Yip pointed it out to me. How weird is that? Apparently the Japanese version of the game manages to scoop out all of the blood, gore, “impaling deaths”, and even the god damned rag doll physics — and even if you play the uncensored American version of the game on a Japanese PlayStation 3, it somehow manages to censor the game just as though you were playing the Japanese version. Curious! Before learning this factoid, I had played the game for four hours, and never once thirsted animalistically for blood, nor had I even once wondered why people weren’t gushing gel-like red ooze all over the place whenever I touched them. I had, however — only twice — wondered why the enemies all do the exact same “Matrix”-ish arm-flail-swooping animation whenever they get shot. Where’s the real-time flinching, popularized by such games as Turok 2 on the Nintendo 64? At first, I thought it was a design choice — and I managed to applaud it. (This happened late at night.) In Gears of War, your character can completely heal to full health after being shot something like thirty times. All he has to do is crouch by a wall and wait, and then he’s healed. This makes the game about moments, yes — about staying in the zone, about multiplying the rush as you stay in that zone. Though ultimately, if you suck at the game, it comes to look exceedingly silly. If you’re careful enough to survive through three staight levels, you have to wonder how a guy can keep running like that — he must have at least a thousand rounds of ammo embedded in his muscles. The weight in lead alone should keep him pinned to the floor. Yet Gears was — as Uncharted is — a game where the idea of “suppressing fire” works as both a concept and a method — it’s not like Brothers in Arms, where the enemies’ “suppressed” circle turns red if you shoot in their general direction enough. The abstraction is kept to a minimum by the sheer power of the concept, uh, literally working. Here I was thinking of how clever it was that neither Drake nor his bad guys ever got hit by a bullet unless that bullet was the killing bullet. I mean, it’s a pretty brilliant concept. It’s like, as the look of fear grows to encompass Drake’s face, it’s not because he’s getting hurt, it’s because he’s getting scared, and thus getting sloppy, and that’s why that last bullet — that last tick off the hidden “life meter” in the sky — manages to hit, and kill. This was a really healthy way to think until, well, I looked up some videos on YouTube and was like, dude, it actually looks cool when people are getting shot. You have to wonder, why allow people to die in a game at all if they’re not going to at least look a little dead? I mean, why not just make them throw down their guns, surrender, and run off into the jungle with their hands gripping the backs of their trousers whenever the PlayStation 3’s CPU registers a “killing shot”? I could be a millionaire with these ideas.