--Karl Schafer, Uncharted: Among Thieves
The three Uncharted games of the Nathan Drake Collection have wildly varying levels of quality. Only after the first game did the series develop more substance beyond telling an overly conventional treasure hunting story that is fairly short, thematically shallow (it does not even explore history particularly well, much less deeper subjects than mere historical events like metaphysics and epistemology), and full of woefully horrendous controls. Drake's Fortune is at best an often terrible game that sometimes rises to mediocrity and very rarely to anything wonderful, though its early reveal that El Dorado is a statue and not a city was a clever idea. The sequel Among Thieves is where the series really leaps into better characterization, stakes, and general production values. Drake's Deception, the third game, returns to Sir Francis Drake, but this time with far more developed storytelling and gameplay than the first game built around Francis Drake.
Production Values
The quality of these games significantly increases past the first entry on almost every level. Drake's Fortune features character models and environments that lack much of the detail that even other PS3-era games such as God of War III have. Vegetation can appear suddenly as you walk closer to a given point. There is a general lack of diverse colors--which would not be an aesthetic hindrance if the graphics were better. Yes, Drake's Fortune is a fairly old game at this point that debuted early on in the life of a console from two generations ago, but the difference in the visuals between the first game and Among Thieves is very sharp. More than just improving the graphics, the sequel gives its characters much stronger, more defined personalities that shine through more than they ever did in Drake's Fortune. Nathan Drake and Elena get even more development in Drake's Deception, the third in the trilogy, and also the one that most seems like it might have been directly influence by Indiana Jones (especially by The Last Crusade). It is also at this point that the more blatantly personal, tender sides of certain characters come to the surface, and these flashes of regret, determination, and vulnerability are among the best parts of all three games.
Gameplay
Across all three games, the same core elements surface over and over, honed to better quality in the sequels. There is plenty of climbing and leaping in the numerous platforming segments, which do feature environmental variation over time instead of having Nathan scale only fortresses or mountainsides. Standard caves, icy caverns, a house, and more are seen and climbed or navigated in different games. When Nathan is not platforming, there are two main gameplay routines: combat or puzzles. The former is often a very conventional approach to taking cover and shooting enemies. Ammunition can be capped at abnormally low amounts in the first game, even as enemies might act as bullet sponges, but this is one of many things that is leaned away from later in the series. As for puzzles, many involve turning statues or otherwise orienting different objects within the environment. Nathan can access his notebook during these sections, in which he has conveniently written or drawn clues as to how the player proceeds. Most of the puzzles are either incredibly easy with these hints or are complicated enough to where some trial and error is still needed.
Besides some of the puzzles generally becoming less surface level in the second and third game, only the platforming significantly evolves from one entry to the next. The very generic scope of the first game does eventually give way to a much grander, more elaborate form of environmental navigation, as can be seen as early as the opening train sequence of Among Thieves. There are also more diverse environments to match the more thorough characterization and storyline. All around, Among Thieves is a far superior game. This kind of more sharpened and cinematic kind of gameplay is also seen particularly in the plane level of Drake's Deception, where Nathan accidentally triggers the crash of an entire plane. Other levels like the horseback ride to rescue Sully in the third game, with Nathan leaping from horse to vehicles and back to his horse again, are splendid examples of what the adventure genre can produce in gaming.
Story
Drake's Fortune follows Nathan Drake and his mentor Sully as they seek El Dorado, prompted by a diary found in the once-submerged coffin of Sir Francis Drake. This leads the duo to a stranded German submarine with Spanish gold. Sully's debt to another treasure hunter brings a threatening kind of outside interest in this quest, but reporter Elena Fisher gets more and more intertwined with the ordeal as El Dorado, not a city, but a large idol, awaits.
Among Thieves starts with Nathan wounded in a derailed train with his car dangling off of a cliff. Flashing back to an earlier time, the game shows how he was brought into a scheme to find the Cintamani Stone, an item Marco Polo wrote about, for a mysterious client with hopes of subjugating the world through its power. Eventually reunited with Elena, who is now a former lover of his, Nathan travels to Borneo and Nepal as he discovers more historical clues about the resting place of the Cintamani Stone: the city of Shambhala.
Drake's Deception focuses again on the historical or pseudo-historical pursuits of Sir Francis Drake, who was tasked by Queen Elizabeth I to visit Arabia and find the Quranic lost city of Ubar, or "Iram of the Pillars." The city is called a desert Atlantis. A flashback to a much earlier time in Nathan's life reveals how he met Sully and his ties to the new villain, Katherine Marlowe, a member of a centuries-old secret society. In the present, Nathan faces greater resistance from his own allies as he proceeds to find Ubar, finding himself once again encountering Elena.
Intellectual Content
One of the only consistent themes that these three Uncharted games explore, be it in a very incomplete way, is what historical legends are true or might be exaggerated, distorted descriptions of actual events, places, and objects. Like Lara Croft in the newer Tomb Raider games (which outclass the Uncharted trilogy at their best), Nathan Drake makes assumptions about metaphysical possibilities, looks to sensory experiences instead of reason to form his worldview, and has trouble accepting that certain stories and ideas are at least possibly true even after seeing some very unusual things in his adventures. Not addressed even slightly is the fact that historical evidences at best support the mere seeming historicity of specific past events. Evidences like texts and artifacts make some events seem probable, which is far from the same as being true by logical necessity or knowable. There is not a historical event other than the creation of the universe that is philosophically provable (and this is only because it is logically impossible for an infinite series of past moments and events to ever give way to the present, for an endless number of things cannot have ever elapsed to reach this point in time)--every battle, coronation, birth, death, betrayal, scientific discovery, conversation, and expedition only has hearsay or possibly misleading evidences to point to them.
Conclusion
Uncharted as a series is similar to Borderlands: the first game was a bad to mediocre game with flashes of brilliance, and the second game is where the franchise really takes off. In spite of the eventual trend towards improvement, the trilogy of games in this collection are not as good at storytelling or worldbuilding as Indiana Jones or as strong of a game series as the reboot Tomb Raider trilogy. Uncharted 4: A Thief's End is where the best of the character drama and broader philosophical exploration is found. Yet, Uncharted 2 and Uncharted 3 progressively deepen various aspects of the series, making sure that the inexcusable superficiality of the first game does not return. Relics of an older period of gaming history, this trilogy has made a significant cultural impact despite being of very uneven quality. The fourth game, which benefits from some of its characters being in previous titles even if they were sometimes squandered, is by far the best of the main series, both improving on and standing on its predecessors.
Content:
1. Violence: There is brawling and shooting, which does draw blood, throughout the games.
2. Profanity: Words like "shit," "damn," and "bastard" are used.
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