Generally good and quite enjoyable on the gameplay front, but the story feels amateurish and weirdly cut down.
It starts with the barely characterized villains, who are almost omniscient and always do the exactly correct thing to keep the plot going. Why are they constantly drugging and not just shooting Drake? They were ok with killing him on so many other occasions and sending a small army after him.
Just like 1 and 2, nobody develops as a person, across these harrowing adventures, it's just more of the usual snarky commentary. It would have been nice, if Drake had an epiphany after the desert.
He should be like "Holy shit, I've cheated death so many times, it's only a matter of time before something kills me, I should actually commit to Elena and other people in my life I care about".
The side characters don't play any real significance (What the fuck was the point of Cutter and why does everyone know him?), Salim just becomes Nathan's steadfast ally for basically no reason, and disappears when convenient. There was a chance here for Nathan to reflect on the carnage that grave robbers and ex-colonial powers bring to the Middle East and places of culture and treasure through his interactions with Salim, and yet...nothing. The game genuinely just feels like a butchered cut of a theoretically good story.
Even the AK in the desert sand from the title screen feels cut. Nathan picks it up in a dramatic cut scene, and you can hold it for a few montages of desert walking and then it just... disappears from your back with 0 announcement? What the hell was the point?
They made a mix of Indiana Jones 3 and Lawrence of Arabia, that is worse than either one.
TL;DR Everybody outside of the writers did a great job though (especially the environment designers and the programmers for the hallucinations, holy shit)
P.S. The lamest parts where the ones with the spiders though. Are they even supernatural or related to Ubar? What was going on there?
It starts with the barely characterized villains, who are almost omniscient and always do the exactly correct thing to keep the plot going. Why are they constantly drugging and not just shooting Drake? They were ok with killing him on so many other occasions and sending a small army after him.
Just like 1 and 2, nobody develops as a person, across these harrowing adventures, it's just more of the usual snarky commentary. It would have been nice, if Drake had an epiphany after the desert.
He should be like "Holy shit, I've cheated death so many times, it's only a matter of time before something kills me, I should actually commit to Elena and other people in my life I care about".
The side characters don't play any real significance (What the fuck was the point of Cutter and why does everyone know him?), Salim just becomes Nathan's steadfast ally for basically no reason, and disappears when convenient. There was a chance here for Nathan to reflect on the carnage that grave robbers and ex-colonial powers bring to the Middle East and places of culture and treasure through his interactions with Salim, and yet...nothing. The game genuinely just feels like a butchered cut of a theoretically good story.
Even the AK in the desert sand from the title screen feels cut. Nathan picks it up in a dramatic cut scene, and you can hold it for a few montages of desert walking and then it just... disappears from your back with 0 announcement? What the hell was the point?
They made a mix of Indiana Jones 3 and Lawrence of Arabia, that is worse than either one.
TL;DR Everybody outside of the writers did a great job though (especially the environment designers and the programmers for the hallucinations, holy shit)
P.S. The lamest parts where the ones with the spiders though. Are they even supernatural or related to Ubar? What was going on there?