Before I get into my usual swearing hatred towards Nathan Drake and how Naughty Dog doesn’t have a single adult on staff that can communicate like a human being, I want to say one thing. It is a bit of a backhanded compliment, but it is worth saying nonetheless. Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End, despite being another slow, boring escapade into the dull tawdry adventures of a useless man with no personality and his immature “friends”/family, and all my usual gripes with the series, it is the second-best game that I’ve played in the series. That is really like coming in second in a boxing match.

The longest of the four main series installments, A Thief’s End doesn’t gallop out of the gate. Last week when talking about Uncharted 3, I noted that the pacing is at a breakneck speed. it is there and with its predecessors, but here it is slower. This is where I think it would be nice to roll out two quotes from the former president and CEO of SIEA, one on game length and one on pricing. “I would welcome a return to the 12 to 15-hour game,” said Shawn Layden in 2020. “[games have] been $59.99 since I started in this business, but the cost of games has gone up ten times. If you don’t have elasticity on the price-point, but you have huge volatility on the cost line, the model becomes more difficult.”

Why am I using Layden’s words to talk about pacing in Uncharted 4? I’m not denying that games have become more expensive to make in the 25 years Layden had been in the business by that point, but even the tired Uncharted story that keeps being trotted out to go showjumping has the problem Layden complains about. I agree with his point that 50-80 hour RPGs that are as wide as the ocean and as deep as a puddle are an issue. The idea of a 12-15 hour campaign in single-player games offers the ability to complete more games. Uncharted started out at my preferred length of 8-10 hours, and A Thief’s End is bleeding out into 15 hours.

I mentioned in the video last Thursday that this pacing attempts to go for Naughty Dog’s other PS3 hit, The Last of Us. It is a vague misunderstanding of what mature storytelling happens to be. Instead of just telling its story, it’s prolonging itself with the mysterious notion that pregnant pauses and drawn-out cutscenes show maturity. The issue is none more apparent than the scene where the known mass murderer we’ve been controlling for umpteen hours sits on the couch with his wife and eats dinner. It throws the Uncharted tone of violence out the window for no good reason. These are two people who don’t actually communicate as a married couple.

It is the same story, the same beats, and everything is all in place, but the pacing has shifted to account for adding on another 5-6 hours. Mostly the cutscenes are tiresome. To make mention of the video again, I started that with a long pause before I suggested the bloke in the cage said the Age of Empires 2 quote, “Start the game already!” It wasn’t just a joke about a dead bloke in a cage, but one about feeling bored in that first half of A Thief’s End. “It gets better later on,” they all do, that’s the staple of Uncharted, the mental and mythological nonsense kicks in then.

I’d like to know who was the person that thought the Panamanian prison handcuff scene early on was at all worth the time to craft. Was that just leftover scenery for the two prison breaks that happen early on, and someone wanted to add another two minutes to the run time? A 5-10 second cutscene would have sufficed, but clearly, Jeff thought otherwise while bored on a Friday afternoon. It is small nonsense such as that, which kills any excitement I may muster, and makes me abhor this “cinematic gameplay” thing that is attempted.

If you’ve ever seen a student film or Chris Chibnall’s Doctor Who, there is this common mistake: The lover gets in the car and closes the door. The car starts backing out the driveway, taking the left turn off their street, merging onto the highway, stopping for gas, and getting the ticket to park at the airport. They ask the cop where gate 17 is, run three miles to get there, and get stopped by the TSA. Their partner walks out the baggage claim, there is a long embrace, then they walk back to the car while followed by security. They get in the car, talk for a while, possibly kiss, and finally start the car. After 25-minutes, they go off into the sunset. Why did I subject you to that? That’s what these walking scenes do, waste your time with something you already know.

“It is cinematic!” I hear fans cry, but I’d like to bring up things like Miss Congeniality, all American comedies that go on the road, or any Edgar Wright film. They all do that montage with establishing shots and music. Some do it better than others, and Edgar Wright does it better than all, but this is an exhausting attempt to bring down the pacing with needless scenes to elongate the runtime. It is not cinematic. Why do we keep trying to be like something else with fewer dimensions? As much as I’ll say that films shouldn’t utilize games as their latest material, games shouldn’t attempt to be something they are not.

I would like to get to the “gameplay” but I’ve done it already. I’ve spoken about three Uncharted games before this and as I said last time, each release incrementally refines but doesn’t expand or experiment on anything. That is unless you count the prison walking simulator an expansion of the concept. There is the scene early on where Nate attaches some cables from a crane to a trailer like he’s a marshal at an F1 track, but I also wouldn’t call that an expansion on gameplay. You run around nostalgia galleries, shooting galleries, and whatever you’d call the world’s simplest puzzles.

The most significant change I’ve noticed is that everything looks ten times more gorgeous. It is a linear series of events with ramshackle “open” elements that will shout at you for looking the wrong way. If there is one thing I could say Naughty Dog does well, it is adventurous locations that look stunning for that generation the game is released in, and that’s what I am comparing A Thief’s End to. I’ve played all the PS3-era games on a PS4 with a rather large 4K TV where I can see the cracks. While there are some if you go looking, A Thief’s End at least looks 8th generation.

In a few years’ time, it will wrinkle and find younger audiences asking what was so impressive, and that’s the problem with the shift to “photo-realism” as it is called. A Thief’s End still looks like a game, even with a touch of shallow focus and an improved photo mode. However, I would argue the cartoonish visual style alongside the conventional Uncharted tone has disappeared. I’m not begrudging it, in fact, I’d welcome it if it weren’t for being the fourth in a series of games. That’s where my criticism hits its point.

God of War (2018) shifted mythology to grow up and tell the story of dads with anger management. Uncharted has done none of that work, and it has had none of that separation. We’ve got a slightly different character, but none of that attachment because Nathan isn’t someone you could connect to. He is a mass-murdering sociopath with a penchant for quipping his way to the wrong side of my shoe. He isn’t likable no matter how much Sony thought Tom Holland would get them more money. The obvious casting would have been Chris Pratt (someone punchable).

Diverting back onto the game itself, I think the only reason I’ve been more interested here than previous iterations of Uncharted is simply how unlike itself it happens to be. None of which makes it a better game because all of those tired “cinematic” elements hangover into A Thief’s End. It is an exhausted franchise by all means, but taking it out of the Uncharted context for a moment breathes some slightly fresher air into the musty lungs of the series. Too bad the way of getting out of the Uncharted context here was to pull the focus from an adventure onto Nathan himself.

At least with previous games the “character” work (what little there actually is) was left in the background and you could at least jump around non-sequiturs with some enjoyment. Retcons to have this more introspective sociopath bounding across the screen shooting South Africans and swinging from a rope doesn’t fix that problem I had. The truth of all my anger and hatred towards Uncharted is that it has never been about the technical or mechanic side, as those portions are often rock solid. This is where I get to pull out the fact that on the standard PS4 rather than the PS4 Pro, performance very clearly isn’t a priority. Unless you believe the lie that 24 frames per second is more cinematic and thus makes a game better.

Ultimately, I was never going to drop to my knees and pledge my undying love for a man I’d rather see swinging from the end of some rope in another fashion than we have him here. The Uncharted series and A Thief’s End were never for me. I already drop to my knees and beg the lady Croft to hit me a little harder and spit in my mouth. Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End takes far too long to cross the finish line, though would be a spectacularly fine racehorse if it knew it could be one. The trouble is it wants to be glue, stuck with the same characters and set pieces in an attempt to sell more consoles.

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Uncharted 4: A Thief's End

6

Score

6.0/10

Pros

• An improved photo mode.
• Something of charm, despite Nate being unlikeable.

Cons

• Start the game already!
• Technical issues causing frame rate drops on the PS4