Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception – Review – Playstation 3

Sic Parvis Magna (Greatness from small beginnings) – Sir Francis Drake

Story:  Ubar, The City of Immense Wealth, Iram of the Pillars, Atlantis of the Sands were names of a missing city in an Asian desert.  Sir Francis Drake was hired by Queen Elisabeth I to travel to what is known as Yemen today, to find Ubar, what he uncovered was so unsettling that he covered it up by making up a story that he went to the East Indies.  There is a cypher that his descendent Nathan Drake has uncovered in a museum in Columbia.  We continue Nathan’s journey through life 14 years ago in Cartegana, Columbia.  He goes into the museum and finds a ring and cypher that belongs to his family, though he gets booted out of the museum because they do not like loiterers.  He comes back at night time, and is about to reclaim what is his, when another treasure hunter, Katherine Marlowe and her goons, Talbot and a couple others catch him.  He escapes from them at the last second and is chased through the rooftops.  At last he is cornered by Marlowe’s men and at the last second he is saved by a man who he had pickpocketed earlier, Victor Sullivan.  They became good friends. Cut to present day, Talbot makes a deal with Drake to get the ring from him, but Nathan outsmarts him and switches the ring.  Sullivan and him decipher the code on the cypher and find out Sir Francis’ deception. The race is on to find the City of Immense Wealth!

Gameplay:  The game combines a third-person shooter and a puzzle game.  They added a feature to help with the puzzles and clues. Drake’s notebook contains pictures of things he has run across in his adventure so far.  As you progress through the chapters, you will probably see all of them in one way or another.  The aid that is available is that if you wait for a minute or two a the puzzle, you will have the option to solve it for you.  Nathan is the modern relic hunter, taking over for Lara Croft, so you are doing a lot of jumping, swimming, shimmying, and parkour, though it does not have outrageous flips, etc like Tomb Raider had.  There are 101 collectables to find, some are out in the open but others you have to seek out or destroy things to get them.  There is a fighting system as well, it uses quick-time events to go against people.  The story mode is 22 chapters long, which is longer then the first 2.

Graphics/Sounds: Nolan North (Nathan Drake), Richard McGonagle (Victor “Sully” Sullivan), Claudia Black (Chloe Frazier), Graham McTavish (Charlie Cutter), and Emily Rose (Elena Fisher) all reprise their roles from previous games, and Robin Atkin Downes, Billy Unger, and Rosalind Ayres join the cast as well.  There are no load screens and no installs to hard drive, and each level transitions into the next with no problems.  The locales of the game include: Jungles of France, Yemen desert, the high seas, a cargo plane,  and London, England.  At some points in the story, the characters might fall through scenery and get stuck.  Some of the backgrounds are breathtaking.

Multiplayer:  There are 9 different modes to multiplayer, 3 of which are co-op.   Team Deathmatch, Plunder, Team Objective, Three Team Deathmatch, Free For All, Hardcore, co-op arena, co-op hunter arena, and co-op adventure.  Plunder is a match where the objective is to bring back the idol to your base, kind of like Capture the Flag.  In Team Objective, you get a certain objective and have to do it before the other team does, it is best out of 5.  Hardcore is a match where you dont use modifiers medal kickbacks, or boosters, basically the bare minimum for a match.  Arena is like horde/firefight mode, though you have objectives each round, which include: gold rush (bringing the idol back to your base) siege (protecting a marked off area), and survive (eliminate all hostiles).  You have up to 2 team mates  Hunter Arena is the same thing but they put 2 teammates on each team along with bots.  Adventure is doing story mode over with 2 partners.  There are 75 ranks and you need to finish the round before your points are added to your rank.

Overall:  Naughty Dog hasn’t wavered in its attempt to continue to win Game of the Year!  If you loved either of the first two games in the series or Tomb Raider I would recommend this game.

Pros:

• story
• multiplayer
• puzzles (pros or cons)

Cons:

• minor graphic problems

Score: 9 out of 10

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