Uncharted 4: A Thief's End - Review

 Drake's final adventure.

Console: PlayStation 4 game played on a PlayStation 5.

With how successful Naughty Dog's Uncharted series was on the PlayStation 3, arguably being the series that started the PS3 rise to the top. It was only natural that Sony would try to continue this success on the PlayStation 4 with Uncharted 4.

This game had, without a doubt, the most tumultuous development of all the Uncharted games. Even more turbulent than Drake's Deception, which was made with roughly only half the team, as the other half was working on The Last of Us. From the original director and writer leaving the studio midway through development to a near-complete rewrite of the story and a brutal crunch period to meet the deadline, the fact that Naughty Dog managed to get Uncharted 4 out of the door in a playable state is a small miracle.

But their hard work paid off. The grand finale to Nathan Drake's story became the best-selling entry in the series, lauded by players and critics alike, and became the near-quintessential Uncharted game. I stress "near-quintessential" because, while a great and impressive title, I have some grievances with Uncharted 4: A Thief's End that keep me from calling it 'the definitive Uncharted experience'. 

Let's dive in.

Several years after the events of Drake's Deception, Nathan is happily married to Elena and has retired from a life of treasure hunting yet secretly yearns for more adventure. When Nate's thought-to-be-dead brother, Sam, shows up, he learns that his brother is in big trouble. The dangerous drug lord that busted Sam out of the prison has tasked him with finding the treasure of notorious Pirate Henry Avery or be killed. With the threat of Salazar hanging over Sam's head and their former associate, Rafe, and his mercenaries also in pursuit of the treasure, Nathan goes on one last treasure hunt.

The story of Uncharted 4 is the most in-depth narrative this already story-driven series has ever had. It's a very character-driven story that successfully tackles themes such as brotherly love, obsession, ageing, and more, while still providing a classic and light-hearted enough Uncharted adventure. From the action set pieces to the treasure hunting to Nate's quips, it's all here, and that's good to say.

With Neil Druckmann taking over as director, I was worried that he would hijack the game with his own style, so to speak. While his fingerprints are clearly visible in the heavier tone, for instance, it's still very much an Uncharted experience. There's a lot to love about the way the narrative is told, but what I want to highlight are the characters themselves.

Our main cast, Nate, Sam, Sully & Elena, are well-written and wonderfully performed characters who give so much more meaning to everything that goes on. Diving into the two brothers, the most important characters, Nate’s self-reflective journey of the man he was and the man he is now is interesting. It’s him facing his character flaws and learning to let things go. Sam is a character whose inclusion is ripe with retcons and logic leaps but thanks to the writing and Troy Baker's performance, he grew on me to the point that I think he's the best character the game has. 

The bond and love between the Drake brothers is a big part of Uncharted 4. 

Not everything is perfect though, and my grievances come in with the bland bad guys and the ending. 

Your view on the villains might be different, but I found I don’t find them engaging. Rafe is an obsessed rich boy whose most memorable moment is your final confrontation with him. I get the point the narrative makes with him, but I think he would’ve been a more entertaining villain if they had shown him cracking under his repeated failures a lot sooner. 

Nadine is a hard-as-nails military type who becomes increasingly tired of this hunt and whose ending is very unsatisfying. I don't see how Nadine would go from secondary bad guy to deuteragonist in 'The Lost Legacy,' but I'll find out how they’ve handled that soon enough. 

In regards to the ending, while I respect the team's decision to give a definitive ending to Nathan Drake's story, I don't agree with that decision. I think that with it and some of the character development needed for that ending, some of the magic of the Uncharted series is lost. They could've written a more open-ended final that would've left the door open for Nate to go on other adventures, for other developers to pick up the baton. 

The gameplay of Uncharted 4 follows the tried and true saying "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." Uncharted 4 remains a globetrotting action-adventure game. We have gunfights, stealth, dedicated action set pieces and lots, and I do mean lots, of climbing and an occasional puzzle. A winning combination, as history has told us, one where all these pieces are now more seamlessly integrated.

In previous games, each different gameplay aspect was rather separate. You fought, you climbed, but I can't recall Nate using his spider monkey abilities in combat. Here, that is the case. You have enemies shooting at you while climbing, requiring you to multitask. Arenas have a lot more verticality to them, meaning that climbing and using stealth mechanics are a larger part of combat encounters. Said stealth mechanics have also been expanded, with lots of different things to hide in and new takedowns that make them more versatile.

The enemies also have improved AI, are smarter, so taking more care in your approach and smartly using climbing, hiding, and determining which bad guy to shoot at first is all the more important as well.

Combat itself is the same as it always was, though stripped down, sadly. While you still punch, shoot, and take cover while taking out the bad guys, you can't throw grenades anymore, and there are no riot shields and such for you to pick up. I missed those, and the more involved stealth of this game didn't make up for what was lost with their exclusions. It made those longer fights themselves feel more of a chore since I was missing options I used a lot previously. 

As you can read, there are plenty of changes made to the formula, but none of them are really all that big. It’s growing the formula rather than innovating on it, and that's perfectly fine in my book. In this case, the more ambitious and larger game design the PS4 hardware allowed for is enough to make this game feel like a step up from the PS3 trilogy.

The better graphics are immediately clear. There's a lot more detail in characters, environments, and all that jazz that makes the environments all the more stunning. I did encounter a fair bit of graphical glitches like clipping and textures flickering, but those are small potatoes. Just like some of the random controller gimmicks that randomly pop up only and thus feel out of place. They are forgivable artefacts of the game's troubled development. Those graphical issues were shorted out in the PS5 remaster so there’s a fix to it if you don’t want to encounter those during your playthrough. 

What I find more interesting is what the extra horsepower does for the game. With more power, longer draw distances and such, we get much larger areas and more involved action set pieces. They take a small page out of the open-world book here. We have areas such as Madagascar that are, in essence, large sandboxes. There is a direction the game nudges you in, but you don't have to follow this path at all. You can just wander around these areas, finding small artefacts to collect for bonuses, talk to your companions to get some more dialogue and find your own path to your goal. All paths lead to Rome, you know? 

Oh, and if I may go on a little tangent here: those collectable artifacts still don't have any descriptions informing you of what they are exactly. An opportunity to teach the player about history Naughty Dog just keeps on missing.

With this greater sense of freedom also comes a much grander scale, grander even than my beloved boat graveyard level from Drake's Deception. Since areas can be so much bigger than the developers could dream of before, the scope of it all can be, and is, so much larger. When exploring an island, you can really feel how big it is. When climbing a mountain, you can just feel how high up you are and the danger that comes with that through what's on the screen. It's truly a great feeling to behold.

Just look at the sense of scale that's achieved here. It's breathtaking. 

Now that I have looped back to the climbing, I do have to get something off my chest about it. Mainly, there's too much of it here. The grapple hook that you can use to swing big gaps, the sliding sections, and the rock pick are nice additions, but with how much climbing you do, it wasn't enough to hold my interest. By the time the game tested you by chaining sequences together and giving you multiple ways to climb to your goal, I was already tired of it all. I felt like I was doing the same thing for the umpteenth time in a row. 

This is in contrast with the big action set pieces, which I feel the game held back for too long. The amount of them is fine, but for the first half of the game, there really aren't any big or noteworthy ones, only for the second half to cram multiple of them close together. That could've been handled better, but that's my only issue with the set pieces. Thanks to the power of the PS4, the set pieces are larger and a lot more stunning. From the long but never tiresome chase sequence that starts in the centre of town and goes all the way down to the harbour to escaping a falling tower. It's all thrilling stuff straight out of Hollywood blockbusters, music, and all.

Said score is a bit of a letdown if I'm honest. Composed by prolific Hollywood composer Henry Jackman, quality-wise, the orchestral score is top-notch and does the job, but it's also rather generic. Jackman very much imposes his own style on the score, sadly losing that unique sound, that bite, the score Greg Edmonson gave the other games. The music played during the big car chase is really nice but not as distinctive as the Among Thieves track it’s a cover of. 

Last and least: there is a multiplayer. However, I didn’t play it. Multiplayer isn’t my thing and even if it was, I couldn’t find anyone to play it with me. As such, I can’t tell you anything about it other than what is on Wikipedia. 

Conclusion

As the concluding chapter of Nathan Drake's story, Uncharted 4: A Thief's End is a worthy send-off. Thanks to the more powerful PS4, the game is the biggest and most ambitious Uncharted game yet, with a sense of scale and freedom the games on the PS3 just couldn't achieve. Coupled with an emotional, character-driven story that is just as gripping as the bombastic and stunning action pieces, you get a blockbuster title of an adventure game that, for good reason, is the most-bought game in the entire series.

I have my grievances with the game both big and small, from the ending to the stripped-down combat, that does keep me from saying that it truly embodies that Uncharted magic. It just misses a bit too much for that. Even so, that does nothing to lower the quality of this excellent game.