It is that point in the year, and decade for that matter, that we all look back at what we’ve played. Now, yes I know Drake’s Fortune didn’t release this decade, but I played it this decade so your argument is beside the point. I was a little too busy when it first released having adventures into the bed of my neighbor’s grandaughter while watching Grease or being confused as to why another neighbor was hanging outside my front door. The happiest and most confusing point in a ten-year-old’s life aside, I was also a little too busy not caring about Sony and Microsoft’s war for boring, brown, mediocrity.

You see, I’ve been a long-standing proponent of the fun and enjoyable things in games rather than the dark, boring, and depressing. The PS3 was the point when games went from PS2 fun movie and TV tie-in games (did you know there was a Futurama game?) to yet another dull bloke with a brick for a face and all personality sandblasted off. It is something I’ll blame Joss Whedon for until the day he dies, and probably after too. Games went from Ratchet and Clank to Resistance, Burnout 3 to NoS: ProStreet; and the worst of them all, Spider-Man 2 to Spider-Man 3. It also saw the uptick in cover shooters go from one or two to one quintillion in seconds.

Along with the very boring cover shooting, Drake’s Fortune brought the atrocious “movie game” to the foreground. Only previously seen by David Cage’s Simon Says simulator. Since then, even Drake’s predecessor and best action protagonist pre-2013, Lara Croft, has gone from a fun character to being shot, stabbed, and in one case almost raped, to pretend that’s character building.

So as you can tell out of the gate, I’m not exactly enthralled by Uncharted‘s first attempt. It is dull, lifeless, and about as engaging as one of the many foreigners that haunt Nathan in his dreams. You play as the titular Nathan Drake, a misguided soul who has been told all throughout his life, if he can be smug enough he can be as lacking in personality as Edward the Third is these days. Even then, the corpse of a dead monarch would have better stories over drinks than a mass murder without empathy.

The general idea of the game is that Nathan is on the quest to find Sir Francis Drake’s fortune, hence Drake’s Fortune, as he believes his long lost ancestor is Drake. Yes, as you might have gathered with three more games in the main series, whacky antics and action set pieces put Nathan out of the reach of Drake’s fortune; unfortunately. So it drags on that we’re to go to the next scenic vista one after another putting up with him and his band of Scooby gang pals fitted out with love interest, old man, someone to turn on him, the other person that turns on him, and about twelve others that do the same.

One of my main issues with Drake is his inability to understand that the person with the English accent and face that’s as smarmy as the hole between Piers Morgan’s cheeks isn’t a friend. That’s the core of my displeasure with the Uncharted series, Drake’s incapacity towards seeming human. He’s a focus tested blob of hyper-masculine action heroes without the flaws that Indiana Jones, John McClane, or Tony Stark to an extent all have. The only flaw Nathan has is one to remember, react, and change the next time something comes up. i.e character development.

The gameplay is the shining star of it all, and even that is now in retrospective a bit crap. Every game has since either improved on it or copied it so much with ease that it no longer feels original or fun. Dark Souls, for example, is copied more times than that one time I used a photocopier for nefarious means, and yet still it has to be toppled by anyone or anything because it wasn’t shuffling forward, it leaped ahead. The gunplay and punching both feel as empty as a political leader’s handshake. Naughty Dog themselves have improved on that with Joel from The Last of Us putting more weight into every hit.

The most memorable section of playing any of the three in The Nathan Drake Collection for the PS4 isn’t something you play. It is the U-boat section stolen from Indiana Jones, it is the train dangling in the second, and it is the London pub cutscene in the third. Admittedly, the last one is my favorite because it is the least Uncharted of them all. The rest of it is noise. Bioshock, Modern Warfare, Portal, Mass Effect, and Peggle are more memorable for their gameplay; mostly because they needed a sequel to prove it wasn’t a one and done.

Gears of War the year before did the cover shooting enough to warrant it to be called to progenitor for the genre, so Drake had nowhere to go. Yes, the masonry was very pretty, with a remaster it was made even prettier, but that still doesn’t destroy the fact it adds nothing. What it does do is lock me in the room with a homicidal git and then expects me to like his smarmy, useless whit.

In conclusion, Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune isn’t terrible, but how it was received with open arms and a lot of dry humping at the end of year parties baffles me. It is entirely a popcorn game that you’ll play once, have mild disinterest towards the gameplay, and want to send Nathan off a cliff after Thelma & Louise. The supernatural elements towards the end are from the left-field and interesting, but once it is repeated, it just loses its appeal.

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Uncharted: Drake's Fortune

$19.99 USD

5

Score

5.0/10

Pros

• A fine popcorn flick
• Functional gameplay that's aged well.

Cons

• A protagonist I want to kill at every turn.
• A plot that's as useful to the game as the void of space is to a fish.