Played the first two games for the first time via this collection on the PS5. In a nutshell the first game isn't great and hasn't held up well, while the second is decent but seems like mostly an excuse for spectacle. Bloated games that start off alright and then devolve into overly-convoluted messes that refuse to end, centered around boring antagonists with zero substance. By the end of the second game, I had no desire or patience for the third.

Not really going to spend much time talking about the first game. Incredibly one-dimensional and generic antagonists, terrible chemistry and what feels like a forced relationship between Drake and Elena, clunky gameplay, and the inclusion of zombie-like enemies at the end of the game mostly for the shock value.

It's impressive how great of a leap the series took with the second game, and in only two years. And while it's easy to see why Uncharted 2 (U2) got many of the accolades and praise that it has, I also didn't go into this series with the nostalgia that many people have for it. So while I agree that U2 was ahead of its time and has some genuinely impressive moments, I also think it's overrated in many ways and critically flawed in others.

The story isn't particularly complicated at first: partner with old associates to steal a treasure which contains info on the location of a greater treasure, get double-crossed, one of them has a change of heart and partners with you again to stop the bad guys from getting to the greater treasure. But, as is the nature of Uncharted games, things quickly snowball into a world-threatening race against both time and poorly developed, flat antagonists. Flynn and Lazarević are at least somewhat more interesting (and get significantly more screen time) than the enemies from the first game but are ultimately just Bad Guy Minor and Bad Guy Major.

Writing is this game's biggest weakness, despite the writers clearly thinking very highly of their writing. Off-screen storytelling works when you have writers who know how to do it. This team did not. Despite the events of U2 occurring only two years after the first game, Elena and Drake are already broken up. No explanation for this is ever given, not even after Elena is forced back into the story and spends much of it shitting on Drake or making sarcastic remarks at his expense. There's no sexual tension between them and they spend most of the second half of the game quipping at each other. So when Chloe asks if he loves Elena at the end of the game and Drake all but explicitly says yes, and then he and Elena are back together again, you're left wondering why and why you should care about this relationship that seemed to be long dead in the water until they ran into each other again by chance in Nepal (the absurdity of which I'll address in a minute).

By contrast, Chloe (who is significantly more interesting than Elena) makes so much more sense as a love interest for Drake. She's part of the same treasure hunting underworld that he is, she can physically keep up with him (likely because they've had the same training and she's explored much of the same terrain he has), and she already has romantic history with him. There's so much lost potential in not exploring this relationship further and sticking Drake with humdrum Elena, who seems to harbor more resentment and annoyance toward him than anything resembling love or deep affection. Their relationship is more akin to the dumbbell husband and exasperated wife combo that's dominated most commercials and sitcoms for a couple decades now.

Elena's sudden appearance in Nepal makes little sense. She went from adventure show TV host to serious journalist visiting war torn nations on the ground, mid-firefights, in two short years. Was Elena perhaps a journalist-turned-TV-host-turned-journalist? Don't know! Is Drake the reason why she can now parkour across dangerous chasms and scale walls like he can? Don't know! Why can Elena speak fluent Tibetan? Don't ask questions, just go with it.

Why is Drake sent to explore dangerous terrain with someone who doesn't speak a word of English, with whom he can't effectively communicate? Why did Schaefer lead his men through an insanely treacherous trek through ice caves to a dead-end temple when he could've just killed them at any point on the godforsaken, lonely mountain they were on? How exactly did he figure out what the Cintamani Stone does to men if he never reached Shamballa? Who were the men who got to Shamballa first, how long ago did they find it (hence the fully decomposed skeletons), and why did they have AK-47s (suggesting they were a more modern set of explorers)?

And how did Elena not only survive a grenade blast to the face, but how did her shredded, bloody clothes get repaired and cleaned to factory newness in a remote Tibetan village? Where the heck did Sully come from?

The answer for many is probably, "You're taking this too seriously and it's just a game." My retort to that would be, "Naughty Dog presented a story that it wanted me to be invested in and didn't care that much of it didn't make a lot of sense." And again, while none of them were trying to position themselves as modern-day Hemingways, they did make an effort to write a story more interesting than bangboomexplosions. The problem is that they didn't get enough people outside of the writer's room to ask if it was cohesive.

One of the worst moments and most egregious examples of making me bury my forehead in my hand was when Lazarević attempts to guilt trip Drake for the hundreds of Lazarević's men he's killed, saying Drake is really no better than him. Drake, who has indeed killed hundreds of men in this game alone (to say nothing of the hundreds he killed in the last game), chooses to let the Shamballa guardians beat Lazarević's skull in instead of just shooting him, almost as if to prove Lazarević wrong. As if there's any validity to this stupid, shallow, desperate bit of movie villain writing, and if Drake had dared to blow this dude away like all the other guys, he's be proving Lazarević right.

Let's also not forget how Elena berates herself and Drake for bringing danger to an innocent Tibetan village, how all the murders are their fault, and then instantly drops the lecture and never brings up the topic again.

Awful writing aside, the gameplay in U2 is night and day compared to the first game. Granted, I'm aware that certain mechanics were retooled for these remasters compared to the original releases, but even despite this it was clear that U2 fine tuned much of what made the first game feel so clunky and sluggish. Unfortunately, while it's a much funner game to play, there were too many instances of, "Hey, wouldn't it be fun to fight another five waves of enemies even though you just did that two minutes ago? And have to start from the beginning of the fight if you die?" Along with a lot of instances of, "Oh gee, this door is locked or the way forward is impassable, looks like you have to engage in more spectacle-laden parkour to get around."

Much of the climbing and scaling just felt like an excuse for the player to spend more time admiring the (admittedly outstanding) set pieces of this game. A lot of it could've been cut or streamlined. While some of it was very cool, some of it started to overstay its welcome and contributed to my choice of the word "bloated" to describe the game. U2 began to feel like the friend who doesn't understand when to go home and keeps trying to harangue everyone into just one more drink at one more bar when everyone else just wants to go to bed and already had their fill.

Scaling the train at the beginning of the game was fantastic. Scaling it a second time, exactly the same way, was somewhat effective for narrative purposes but ultimately a time sink. Fighting your way to the front of the moving train had some great, creative gameplay moments. Fighting yet another helicopter while doing it created some genuine moments of frustration.

Is U2 a bad game? Not taken as a whole. It does some things very well and does others very poorly. Is it overrated? In my opinion, yes. The Uncharted series undoubtedly left a mark on the industry and inspired many titles that came after it. But the games ultimately feel like more spectacle than substance, and ask you to care about characters who give you very little reason to care about them.

And after reading the full plot synopsis of U3 and U4, I can't imagine slogging through another two games worth of vapid writing that takes itself very seriously, middling puzzles, and a forced on-again-off-again no-chemistry relationship between Drake and Elena just to end the last game with the possibility of the fifth being led by their Disney Channel reject looking kid.

Really hoped I'd like these games more than I did. In the end, they weren't for me.