I've always had an issue with dropping games after getting stuck -- even if very briefly -- only to struggle to want to pick them up again after spending time away from the game. uncharted is a special case here, with me getting stuck on a puzzle around the final third of the game when I was a spry 12 years old. a couple months ago my gf asked me to pull this one out, and I ended up exhuming this decade-old save... slotting back in was almost too easy. when your whole game is the most by-the-numbers cover shooter it's hard to forget how to play it, and the rest of the components barely qualify as notable gameplay additions.

this an early cover shooter too, and it is relatively rough even compared to its forebears. snapping to cover is not a natural system and rather seems sloppily mapped per-object, meaning that many deaths will occur from drake refusing to crouch behind whatever wall or railing he's near. guns are piddly and lack weight, weapon variety is ho-hum, and enemy AI rarely pushes or does anything beyond leaning out of cover. it's effectively a series of light-gun corridors strung together by ico-ripoff platformer sections. they're not bad, and at its best it's a competent third-person shooter -- at the very least the pistol hits pretty hard! during this clean-up I didn't play any of the vehicle sections but given my sparse memories I'll assume they were nothing special, if at least not particularly frustrating. the only real other twist the game takes is a detour into some like horror elements with the introduction of zombie-monster-cursed-people things. perhaps playing a lot of RE has rotted my brain recently, but the ugly mo-cap animations these creatures perform after taking full shotgun rounds to the face really feels unsatisfying. no gibs? no more than a couple little spurts of blood? the added sixaxis-powered motion QTEs when they jump on you have really aged poorly as well, though I suppose I can forgive it considering it came out in only '07.

also it's old hat to say it on here by this point, but good god is nathan drake just completely devoid of character. naughty dog has never been good at making anything that wasn't just completely creatively bankrupt, and absolutely nothing in this game has a shred of originality. nathan does nothing and has no character beyond endlessly quipping, which I suppose may be lightly innovative for this time period. years before the overall cultural shift towards non-stop defusing of tension and suppposedly self-aware whedon-ass dialogue this game was already utterly mired in it.