Uncharted ultimately uses all of this glimmer to deliver a gameplay experience that is fast-paced and intermittently spectacular, but also really familiar and a little inconsistent. There are two significant concepts in Uncharted that make up most of the game's running time, though they very rarely intersect. There's environment traversal, which will have you leaping across chasms, scrambling up ledges, and swinging on vines to progress through the game. As good as Uncharted is at making this stuff look harrowing, the game gives you a lot of direction as to where you need to go next, as well as a lot of leeway in the accuracy of your controls. It's easy fun to scrabble your way across these occasionally contrived environments, but other games have done it more elegantly.
By comparison, the combat can be devilish at times in its difficulty. The combat consists mostly of gunplay, and you'll be brandishing a variety of handguns, assault rifles, shotguns, and grenade launchers over the course of the game. Nathan's a pretty fragile dude, and it takes only one or two shots before the color starts draining out of the screen, which makes it important to find and use cover intelligently. By comparison, the pirates and mercenaries that you'll face through most of the game are remarkably sturdy, and can regularly absorb half a clip before going down. Headshots help move things along, though oddly, we found pistols to be far more effective for this than anything other than the sniper rifle, even at several hundred yards.
Enemies are also pretty smart, and if you stay in one position for too long during a firefight, they'll flank you. Dealing with half a dozen cagey enemies who can take roughly as much damage as you isn't impossible, but it can often take multiple tries, which can be fist-clenchingly frustrating when dealing with wave after wave of enemies. There are portions of the game where it seems like you're just moving from one infuriating firefight to the next, and it creates a weird contrast to the easygoing platforming stuff. If you can get close enough to an enemy without getting perforated, which is a rarity, there's some simple hand-to-hand combat. It looks more dynamic than it really is in terms of gameplay, which is both a credit to how hard-hitting the fisticuffs look and a slight against their simplicity.
Resilient enemies can make the combat mighty challenging.
Amidst all the jumping and shooting, the game includes some straightforward environmental puzzles, as well as some really entertaining vehicle sequences, including a lengthy chase sequence where you man a gun on the back of a jeep, and another that has you piloting a personal watercraft up a raging river. The game is also fond of those little interactive cutscenes that every God of War and Resident Evil seems to be brimming with these days, and though the novelty wears a little thinner every time they crop up in a game, they still work well enough in Uncharted. There's a little bit of motion control wedged into a few spots, but their pretty halfhearted, which makes it a bit of a relief that they don't show up that often. Interestingly, Uncharted uses a performance-based reward system very similar to the Xbox 360 achievements to dole out making-of featurettes, concept art, alternate costumes, and the like. It's a minor touch, but it's a smart and proven way to enhance replay value.
It took us about eight hours to get through Uncharted: Drake's Fortune, and it was an action-packed eight hours, without much in the ways of load times or informational status screens to break it up. The imbalance between the gunplay and the platforming is jarring but forgivable--but the platforming itself works pretty well and looks fantastic thanks to the game's excellent motion-captured animation. If nothing else, Uncharted is a graphical showcase for the PlayStation 3, and it dazzles the senses at nearly every opportunity.
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