Please be advised that the below post details the entirety of all that occurs during the single player campaign of Uncharted 3. As such, it’s absolutely SPOILER territory!
As Uncharted 3 is probably my most looked forward to game in a long time, and I seem to have engineered lengthy sessions to play it, I can hardly see myself breaking off to write up about it every now and then. So instead I’m just going to document my time with the game as I am playing it – getting my instant reaction at regular intervals throughout the process, which should be fun.
04/11/2011
11:45 am: Game finally arrived. Within minutes inserted into PS3 and the adventure begins!
11:55 am: Cool bar fight. Took me a few seconds to get used to the mechanics of it but, basically, so long as you’re vigilant for pressing triangle then you can’t seem to go far wrong. Picked up my first treasure behind the bar, too! Trophy!
12:00 pm: Nate and Sully shot and left for dead! Shock horror! (I’m sure they’ll be fine.)
1225: pm: Young Drake in a museum! Cool touch, and seeing how Sully and Nate first met was a nice touch. Loved the chase sequence out of the museum – best part of the game so far. Got caught a few times, though – the chase very much came down to a memory test of where to go next. Will be more fun when I know what to do!
12:30 pm: So it was all a ruse. . . although I don’t overly-trust Charlie won’t turn out to be a wrong ‘un further down the line. But nice to see Chloe is back in the mix, already, and with so little fuss. Been a lot of movies so far. . . and only just got my hands on a gun!
12:40 pm: Cool car-key related puzzle. Impressions of the game so far are favouring towards the ‘wow I’m impressed by how it looks and sounds’ but still feeling like I am not really getting into the game. Still haven’t fired a bullet! It’ll come. . .
14:00 pm: Session resumed after various domestic interruptions (honestly, can’t the real world leave me and Nate in peace!?) so time to get back in to it. Have shot some guys, finally. We are up and running!
14:35 pm: First big shootout section, blasting through the London underground. Brought back a lot of memories of Uncharted fights of old, and it felt good. The only gripe I do have is that the new circle button to get in a grapple proved problematic when I just wanted to roll away after doing some running and gunning. Grabbing hold of one guy whilst his mates shoot me to death is certainly something I am going to have to be wary of! I did get a trophy for brawling here, it should be noted!
14:40 om: In Eastern France with Sully. A jungle environment. Looks gorgeous, although so far I am getting the sense that this is very similar to Uncharted 2. Our hero shot at the beginning, a museum heist, shootout in a dark place after climbing around and now wisecracking in the woods with Sully – it’s practically the same!
15:11 pm: Made it through chateau and landed in some kind of cave. I am expecting spiders. Enjoyed the banter between Sully and Nate throughout this. And, also, if it seems like I am going slow here it’s because I’ve been poking around looking for treasures. And stopping to write this. And, also, I took a shit.
15:36 pm: Wasn’t in the cave for long, but it had some cool water effects. Instead I got involved in a couple of major shootouts. No problem for me playing on Normal level, but I suspect they could be a pain in Crushing mode! Just completed a tile puzzle thing which, for some reason, took me a lot longer than it should have to figure out.
15:40 pm: Back in the spider caves again, this time with torchlight . . . I expect my stay won’t be as brief this time!
16:00 pm: Wall tile puzzle. Took forever for penny to drop. . . and there being two spots on the board where the lion could go left me stumped for a bit. Annoying! The crypt having half of the possible location goal is skirting very close to the events of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade too!
16:05 pm: Spider chase! Was fun, but at the same time I felt like I was getting bitten and nearly killed and there really wasn’t any way I could have gone any faster. . . I am presuming the game was doing that for dramatic effect.
16:25 pm: Just got out of the burning chateau sequence. It’s now the new high point of the game. Some of the dizzying camera angles, and the amount of falling through crumbling, burning wood, dangling over inferno-like abysses below. . . Dazzling stuff. Two points to note, though. 1, I got my Run and Gun trophy during the flaming firefights. And secondly, some of Sully’s remarks during the cutscene afterwards made me worry that he might not make it through to the end of the game. Given the focus on his character here, I am wondering if this might be his swansong. . .
16:33 pm: Just a word to say how damn amazing Syria town looks from the viewpoint of me scaling a castle wall. . .
16:45 pm: Cutter (who I thought was called Charlie!) is definitely marking himself out as being the traitor in our midst for me. He and Chloe have been left unattended and surely he told the bad guys about Sully and I at the chateau. I’ve got my eye on that Jason Statham wannabe!
16:49 pm: Trophy! Just got the one for shooting people with grenades and making them drop them.
17:00 pm: Another trophy! Brute beater. Finally killed one without taking a hit. Enjoyed the previous fight, dangling outside a tower before climbing back in and shooting up the place.
17:20 pm: Just completed stealth section. My brain is still rather wrapped up a lot in Deus Ex: Human Revolution at the moment and my stealth tactic skills from that aren’t quite working the same here. . . I notice that Charlie/Cutter keeps pressing ahead and quite happy to leave Chloe and Sully behind. He’s definitely not a team player!
17:30 pm: Interesting. Charlie got hit by a dart that’s made him go crazy and no longer trust Drake, but before that moment it seemed like he was perfectly loyal. Perhaps I was wrong about him? Which also means there still could be a traitor in my midst? Although that villain guy does seem to have some kind of magical powers so I’m not going to be too presumptuous. Now into another cave, carrying a flaming torch. Surely not more spiders?
17:35 pm: Fight with Charlie. . . So far I am not a huge fan of the fight mechanics in this game. They’re a bit of a pain, really. They’re almost like QTEs. Anyway, Charlie got stopped from killing me and he seems back to his old self but I still don’t trust him. I’ve also noticed spider webs dotted around. . . Those fucking spiders are going to be back, aren’t they? Fuck’s sake. . .
18:00 pm: Wow. Right. Well. There were spiders. But it seems I really was wrong about Charlie after a rather moving cutscene saw him save the gang almost at the cost of his own life. He’s now got a broken leg which means escape is going to be tricky – but I quite liked the introduction of the playing card about his person. These villains have some strange sorcery. But I must escape!
18:01 pm: Trophy! Bare knuckle slugger!
18:13 pm: I was wondering where Elena was. Seems her and Nate got married, and then got unmarried, in the time since the previous game. Good to see her again, anyway. And it sounds like she’ll be along for the ride. Though once again there’s remarks about Sully not making this one because he’d do anything for Nate and Nate ought to let it go. . . I am sensing tragedy (but then I’ve been wrong about a lot so far so let’s hope I am about this, too).
18:16 pm: Trophy. Apprentice Fortune Hunter. I suspect I’ve missed quite a few, and there was one in the spider-dam cave I could see but couldn’t get! I should say at this point that Yemen looks astonishing – the sun effects and atmosphere are great.
18:22 pm: The walk through the Yemen market ranks as the most quietly gobsmacking section of the game so far. The chateau fire had all the dazzle and flash but for sheer ‘wow’ this innocuous stroll is superb.
18:35 pm: Brief break just before I drop down a well after having a fight in a fish market (quite liked it, actually, because of the possibilities of interacting with stuff around the place – maybe the fighting thing will grow on me more) as I need to eat. Scoff a pizza and then get back to it. . .
18:55 pm: Getting back to it.
19:15 pm: Just solved two puzzles, both quite fun, with some interesting optical illusion effects thrown in just to make them seem that little bit better. Sure, it basically just involved sticking cogs into one thing and sticking a stick in the right hole for the other, but they were classy presentations of that old style puzzling!
19:23 pm: More spiders! The most exciting encounter yet, though they’re still not all that convincing. More intriguing was Nate asking Sully to just remember the constellation stuff he saw. I fear that not writing it down will be costly if Sully doesn’t make it. . . Should also mention at this point that Elena looks fantastic; they’ve really done good work on her facial expressions that make her seem more realistic than she ever did before.
19:40 pm: Interesting trippy sequence after Nate got darted (would it have gone on forever or was there specifically only one route out as I realised my journey through the market was looping around?). But the cutscene afterwards was better, with Marlowe talking about how Nathan Drake wasn’t even Drake’s real name and how Sully might just be in it for himself. I was actually engaged in the drama there – totally forgot I was watching a videogame. That doesn’t happen often.
19:49 pm: Whoa Just finished an exhilarating extended footchase through the Yemen streets. It was amazing, full of well-choreographed incidents and near-catches before the usual fighting kind of put a dampener on it. Possibly this might have been my favourite set piece of the game so far. The chateau fire was more spectacular, but the footchase was more intense.
20:22 pm: Phew. Just ploughed through a seriously tough battle against some pirates set against a whole load of boats in a kind of dock junkyard. Shooting from the water, whipping up to boats to grab a rocket launcher to take out the machine guns. . . And guys just kept coming from every angle. Sheesh! Great fun!
20:43 pm: Experiencing great irritation. There’s a treasure on a girder of a ship. I can see it. The game knows I’m supposed to go there to get it. But someone didn’t tell the coding people because you can’t climb or grip properly on the girders and so keep falling to your death. Fair enough if this was because the game didn’t want you to go down that route – but there’s a fucking treasure on it! Annoying. First actual genuine annoyance of the game.
20:46 pm: Got the treasure. Now not as annoyed.
20:50 pm: Trophy! Hangman! Earned on one of those really cool vertical shootouts that Uncharted 3 has brought to the party.
21:10 pm: Oh now we’ve just hit all kinds of awesome. A boatyard shootout, a chase and leap onto a boat, and then a leap on another boat because the one I was on caught fire. And that resulted in me rocket launching another attacking boat. Brilliant. The waves and the ocean look staggering and the whole thing is really taking the game up a notch in the action stakes.
21:30 pm: Charging around onboard a big ship. Earned all kinds of trophies for killings with certain guns, and for getting over a hundred headshots. Weirdly, the fight in the ballroom with the chandelier felt like a crucial fight scene during the first Uncharted game, with the way the attacks came from various sides. Those snipers are pains in the arses. This part on Crushing will be a fucker.
21:45 pm: Wife came home in the middle of me trying to escape the sinking, capsizing ship. I thought she might sit there, impressed, but she didn’t. And so I had to turn it off, mid-escape, which was a bit of an atmosphere breaker. Maybe when she goes to sleep I can pick it up again.
23:15 pm: Wife in bed, the adventure continues. Back into the heart of a sinking ship!
23:20 pm: Now washed up on a beach. That all worked out. It was a spectacular set piece, overall, though given I had heard about it beforehand I can’t say the sinking ship level blew me away as much as I thought it would.
23:25 pm: Trophy. Skilled Fortune Hunter, for some treasure I found on a crate in a hangar of the airport I am sneaking around in.
23:34 pm: Another trophy for a set number of kills with a grenade!
23:50 pm: Just boarded an aeroplane courtesy of Elena, a jeep and the landing gear. Really cool moment. But given that Uncharted 3 has artwork all over the place that shows a crashed plane in the desert I suspect the coming down part is going to be a lot more spectacular than the taking off!
23:59 pm: Ha ha! Gloriously dumb. The crash landing plane happened sooner than I thought, with a bit of hanging out of the back of a plane action (like in The Living Daylights) before everyone got sucked out of a big hole. What was gloriously dumb was how Nate managed to grab a hold of a crate with a parachute attached in mid-air and drop to safety. Although ‘safety’ is a loose term considering I am now in the middle of the desert. . . Oh but it does look beautiful!
00:34 am: A little bit of desert fatigue; playing this bit has made me thirsty! Stumbling through the desert (really well done, totally sold the desperation of the situation) and then into an extended shooting fight, which just about felt like it was going on too long and then the cavalry showed up. Another section to dread for Crushing level. . . Glad the riding around on horseback seemed shortlived, though – I wasn’t a fan of that!
00:44 am: Spoke too soon, I’m back in the saddle!
00:57 am: I take it all back. The horseback sequence was exhilarating stuff; fast-paced, lots of shooting, and it seems I am reunited with Sully! Yay! Definitely a high point of the game, though probably the footchase through Yemen was still the bit that I thought was the best so far.
01:17am: Time to call it a night. I’ve just made it through a really quite difficult section in a sandstorm with snipers and bullets flying everywhere, and have now found shelter in some huge building. It feels like I might be drawing towards the end of the game, too, so I’d rather come to that fresh.
05/11/2011
12:18 pm: Back on it for a bit, whilst I have a pie in the oven for lunch!
12:25 pm: Nice reveal behind the massive doors of the ancient forgotten city. Now I just have to work out how the hell I get down there!
12:28 pm: Me looky at Atlantis in the Sands with me eyes widey open in absolute amazement.
12:31 pm: OMG. Wonderful cutscene with dramatic consequences. . . Sully was shot. Is this permanent? I can’t help but hope that somehow, some way, there’ll be a way to bring him back from the dead – maybe a form of immortality power that the baddies are after? Either way I’m now angry but got pasted by some strange bad guys that can teleport in flames. Oh man, talk about a bad day.
12:40 pm: Heck of a fight, but there was something quite exhilarating about fighting the flaming heads. There was a sense of balance and challenge about it all that really worked well – with a good environment to run around in.
12:57 pm: Excellent surprise hallucination, calling back the beginning part of the game very nicely. The fight with the flameheads I just had was tough going, though. The trick is to keep moving, I feel. And use the TAU Sniper or the T-Bone. Anything sniper. That tends to work pretty sweet.
13:05 pm: Break for lunch!
13:19 pm: Back into the fray.
13: 22 pm: Sully is alive. . .? It was the water, not the gas? Well, I’m willing to believe Sully for the moment but I am still keeping back a little bit of reservation that there isn’t some kind of rug pull headed my way.
13:31 pm: Just got a trophy for being a headshot expert for killing five enemies in a row in the head. Which is nice.
13:40 pm: Trophy for kills with the SAS Shotgun. They just keep racking up.
13:55 pm: Well, so far it seems like I am at the climax of the game and it all does feel very much like Uncharted 2. Still, Marlowe appears to be dead so that just leaves one very angry Talbot remaining. I suspect he’s going to be the final boss, but then he always was going to be. I wonder what form of fight it will take. The game could do with a really spectacular finish to cap it off, though for now I have a run across a crumbling ruin to traverse.
14:05 pm: Well, that all ended sooner than I expected. Firstly, it did bring the spectacular. The running and jumping across the platforms looked utterly amazing. No question. Shame that the final battle basically came down to another brawling thing, though – and whilst on harder levels it may be a pain in how fast you get killed it does basically come down to how fast you react to pressing triangle. Ah well. That’s really the only negative I have.
I do have a criticism of the narrative. I have no idea really what the big plan was for the baddies, nor what they were and why some of them seemed to have magical powers. That was all rather glossed over as far as I could tell. . . unless the magical powers were all based around the hallucinogenic properties they had? That’s my best guess (it does explain the flaming head warriors, which is a cool touch).
As Uncharted 3 is probably my most looked forward to game in a long time, and I seem to have engineered lengthy sessions to play it, I can hardly see myself breaking off to write up about it every now and then. So instead I’m just going to document my time with the game as I am playing it – getting my instant reaction at regular intervals throughout the process, which should be fun.
04/11/2011
11:45 am: Game finally arrived. Within minutes inserted into PS3 and the adventure begins!
11:55 am: Cool bar fight. Took me a few seconds to get used to the mechanics of it but, basically, so long as you’re vigilant for pressing triangle then you can’t seem to go far wrong. Picked up my first treasure behind the bar, too! Trophy!
12:00 pm: Nate and Sully shot and left for dead! Shock horror! (I’m sure they’ll be fine.)
1225: pm: Young Drake in a museum! Cool touch, and seeing how Sully and Nate first met was a nice touch. Loved the chase sequence out of the museum – best part of the game so far. Got caught a few times, though – the chase very much came down to a memory test of where to go next. Will be more fun when I know what to do!
12:30 pm: So it was all a ruse. . . although I don’t overly-trust Charlie won’t turn out to be a wrong ‘un further down the line. But nice to see Chloe is back in the mix, already, and with so little fuss. Been a lot of movies so far. . . and only just got my hands on a gun!
12:40 pm: Cool car-key related puzzle. Impressions of the game so far are favouring towards the ‘wow I’m impressed by how it looks and sounds’ but still feeling like I am not really getting into the game. Still haven’t fired a bullet! It’ll come. . .
14:00 pm: Session resumed after various domestic interruptions (honestly, can’t the real world leave me and Nate in peace!?) so time to get back in to it. Have shot some guys, finally. We are up and running!
14:35 pm: First big shootout section, blasting through the London underground. Brought back a lot of memories of Uncharted fights of old, and it felt good. The only gripe I do have is that the new circle button to get in a grapple proved problematic when I just wanted to roll away after doing some running and gunning. Grabbing hold of one guy whilst his mates shoot me to death is certainly something I am going to have to be wary of! I did get a trophy for brawling here, it should be noted!
14:40 om: In Eastern France with Sully. A jungle environment. Looks gorgeous, although so far I am getting the sense that this is very similar to Uncharted 2. Our hero shot at the beginning, a museum heist, shootout in a dark place after climbing around and now wisecracking in the woods with Sully – it’s practically the same!
15:11 pm: Made it through chateau and landed in some kind of cave. I am expecting spiders. Enjoyed the banter between Sully and Nate throughout this. And, also, if it seems like I am going slow here it’s because I’ve been poking around looking for treasures. And stopping to write this. And, also, I took a shit.
15:36 pm: Wasn’t in the cave for long, but it had some cool water effects. Instead I got involved in a couple of major shootouts. No problem for me playing on Normal level, but I suspect they could be a pain in Crushing mode! Just completed a tile puzzle thing which, for some reason, took me a lot longer than it should have to figure out.
15:40 pm: Back in the spider caves again, this time with torchlight . . . I expect my stay won’t be as brief this time!
16:00 pm: Wall tile puzzle. Took forever for penny to drop. . . and there being two spots on the board where the lion could go left me stumped for a bit. Annoying! The crypt having half of the possible location goal is skirting very close to the events of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade too!
16:05 pm: Spider chase! Was fun, but at the same time I felt like I was getting bitten and nearly killed and there really wasn’t any way I could have gone any faster. . . I am presuming the game was doing that for dramatic effect.
16:25 pm: Just got out of the burning chateau sequence. It’s now the new high point of the game. Some of the dizzying camera angles, and the amount of falling through crumbling, burning wood, dangling over inferno-like abysses below. . . Dazzling stuff. Two points to note, though. 1, I got my Run and Gun trophy during the flaming firefights. And secondly, some of Sully’s remarks during the cutscene afterwards made me worry that he might not make it through to the end of the game. Given the focus on his character here, I am wondering if this might be his swansong. . .
16:33 pm: Just a word to say how damn amazing Syria town looks from the viewpoint of me scaling a castle wall. . .
16:45 pm: Cutter (who I thought was called Charlie!) is definitely marking himself out as being the traitor in our midst for me. He and Chloe have been left unattended and surely he told the bad guys about Sully and I at the chateau. I’ve got my eye on that Jason Statham wannabe!
16:49 pm: Trophy! Just got the one for shooting people with grenades and making them drop them.
17:00 pm: Another trophy! Brute beater. Finally killed one without taking a hit. Enjoyed the previous fight, dangling outside a tower before climbing back in and shooting up the place.
17:20 pm: Just completed stealth section. My brain is still rather wrapped up a lot in Deus Ex: Human Revolution at the moment and my stealth tactic skills from that aren’t quite working the same here. . . I notice that Charlie/Cutter keeps pressing ahead and quite happy to leave Chloe and Sully behind. He’s definitely not a team player!
17:30 pm: Interesting. Charlie got hit by a dart that’s made him go crazy and no longer trust Drake, but before that moment it seemed like he was perfectly loyal. Perhaps I was wrong about him? Which also means there still could be a traitor in my midst? Although that villain guy does seem to have some kind of magical powers so I’m not going to be too presumptuous. Now into another cave, carrying a flaming torch. Surely not more spiders?
17:35 pm: Fight with Charlie. . . So far I am not a huge fan of the fight mechanics in this game. They’re a bit of a pain, really. They’re almost like QTEs. Anyway, Charlie got stopped from killing me and he seems back to his old self but I still don’t trust him. I’ve also noticed spider webs dotted around. . . Those fucking spiders are going to be back, aren’t they? Fuck’s sake. . .
18:00 pm: Wow. Right. Well. There were spiders. But it seems I really was wrong about Charlie after a rather moving cutscene saw him save the gang almost at the cost of his own life. He’s now got a broken leg which means escape is going to be tricky – but I quite liked the introduction of the playing card about his person. These villains have some strange sorcery. But I must escape!
18:01 pm: Trophy! Bare knuckle slugger!
18:13 pm: I was wondering where Elena was. Seems her and Nate got married, and then got unmarried, in the time since the previous game. Good to see her again, anyway. And it sounds like she’ll be along for the ride. Though once again there’s remarks about Sully not making this one because he’d do anything for Nate and Nate ought to let it go. . . I am sensing tragedy (but then I’ve been wrong about a lot so far so let’s hope I am about this, too).
18:16 pm: Trophy. Apprentice Fortune Hunter. I suspect I’ve missed quite a few, and there was one in the spider-dam cave I could see but couldn’t get! I should say at this point that Yemen looks astonishing – the sun effects and atmosphere are great.
18:22 pm: The walk through the Yemen market ranks as the most quietly gobsmacking section of the game so far. The chateau fire had all the dazzle and flash but for sheer ‘wow’ this innocuous stroll is superb.
18:35 pm: Brief break just before I drop down a well after having a fight in a fish market (quite liked it, actually, because of the possibilities of interacting with stuff around the place – maybe the fighting thing will grow on me more) as I need to eat. Scoff a pizza and then get back to it. . .
18:55 pm: Getting back to it.
19:15 pm: Just solved two puzzles, both quite fun, with some interesting optical illusion effects thrown in just to make them seem that little bit better. Sure, it basically just involved sticking cogs into one thing and sticking a stick in the right hole for the other, but they were classy presentations of that old style puzzling!
19:23 pm: More spiders! The most exciting encounter yet, though they’re still not all that convincing. More intriguing was Nate asking Sully to just remember the constellation stuff he saw. I fear that not writing it down will be costly if Sully doesn’t make it. . . Should also mention at this point that Elena looks fantastic; they’ve really done good work on her facial expressions that make her seem more realistic than she ever did before.
19:40 pm: Interesting trippy sequence after Nate got darted (would it have gone on forever or was there specifically only one route out as I realised my journey through the market was looping around?). But the cutscene afterwards was better, with Marlowe talking about how Nathan Drake wasn’t even Drake’s real name and how Sully might just be in it for himself. I was actually engaged in the drama there – totally forgot I was watching a videogame. That doesn’t happen often.
19:49 pm: Whoa Just finished an exhilarating extended footchase through the Yemen streets. It was amazing, full of well-choreographed incidents and near-catches before the usual fighting kind of put a dampener on it. Possibly this might have been my favourite set piece of the game so far. The chateau fire was more spectacular, but the footchase was more intense.
20:22 pm: Phew. Just ploughed through a seriously tough battle against some pirates set against a whole load of boats in a kind of dock junkyard. Shooting from the water, whipping up to boats to grab a rocket launcher to take out the machine guns. . . And guys just kept coming from every angle. Sheesh! Great fun!
20:43 pm: Experiencing great irritation. There’s a treasure on a girder of a ship. I can see it. The game knows I’m supposed to go there to get it. But someone didn’t tell the coding people because you can’t climb or grip properly on the girders and so keep falling to your death. Fair enough if this was because the game didn’t want you to go down that route – but there’s a fucking treasure on it! Annoying. First actual genuine annoyance of the game.
20:46 pm: Got the treasure. Now not as annoyed.
20:50 pm: Trophy! Hangman! Earned on one of those really cool vertical shootouts that Uncharted 3 has brought to the party.
21:10 pm: Oh now we’ve just hit all kinds of awesome. A boatyard shootout, a chase and leap onto a boat, and then a leap on another boat because the one I was on caught fire. And that resulted in me rocket launching another attacking boat. Brilliant. The waves and the ocean look staggering and the whole thing is really taking the game up a notch in the action stakes.
21:30 pm: Charging around onboard a big ship. Earned all kinds of trophies for killings with certain guns, and for getting over a hundred headshots. Weirdly, the fight in the ballroom with the chandelier felt like a crucial fight scene during the first Uncharted game, with the way the attacks came from various sides. Those snipers are pains in the arses. This part on Crushing will be a fucker.
21:45 pm: Wife came home in the middle of me trying to escape the sinking, capsizing ship. I thought she might sit there, impressed, but she didn’t. And so I had to turn it off, mid-escape, which was a bit of an atmosphere breaker. Maybe when she goes to sleep I can pick it up again.
23:15 pm: Wife in bed, the adventure continues. Back into the heart of a sinking ship!
23:20 pm: Now washed up on a beach. That all worked out. It was a spectacular set piece, overall, though given I had heard about it beforehand I can’t say the sinking ship level blew me away as much as I thought it would.
23:25 pm: Trophy. Skilled Fortune Hunter, for some treasure I found on a crate in a hangar of the airport I am sneaking around in.
23:34 pm: Another trophy for a set number of kills with a grenade!
23:50 pm: Just boarded an aeroplane courtesy of Elena, a jeep and the landing gear. Really cool moment. But given that Uncharted 3 has artwork all over the place that shows a crashed plane in the desert I suspect the coming down part is going to be a lot more spectacular than the taking off!
23:59 pm: Ha ha! Gloriously dumb. The crash landing plane happened sooner than I thought, with a bit of hanging out of the back of a plane action (like in The Living Daylights) before everyone got sucked out of a big hole. What was gloriously dumb was how Nate managed to grab a hold of a crate with a parachute attached in mid-air and drop to safety. Although ‘safety’ is a loose term considering I am now in the middle of the desert. . . Oh but it does look beautiful!
00:34 am: A little bit of desert fatigue; playing this bit has made me thirsty! Stumbling through the desert (really well done, totally sold the desperation of the situation) and then into an extended shooting fight, which just about felt like it was going on too long and then the cavalry showed up. Another section to dread for Crushing level. . . Glad the riding around on horseback seemed shortlived, though – I wasn’t a fan of that!
00:44 am: Spoke too soon, I’m back in the saddle!
00:57 am: I take it all back. The horseback sequence was exhilarating stuff; fast-paced, lots of shooting, and it seems I am reunited with Sully! Yay! Definitely a high point of the game, though probably the footchase through Yemen was still the bit that I thought was the best so far.
01:17am: Time to call it a night. I’ve just made it through a really quite difficult section in a sandstorm with snipers and bullets flying everywhere, and have now found shelter in some huge building. It feels like I might be drawing towards the end of the game, too, so I’d rather come to that fresh.
05/11/2011
12:18 pm: Back on it for a bit, whilst I have a pie in the oven for lunch!
12:25 pm: Nice reveal behind the massive doors of the ancient forgotten city. Now I just have to work out how the hell I get down there!
12:28 pm: Me looky at Atlantis in the Sands with me eyes widey open in absolute amazement.
12:31 pm: OMG. Wonderful cutscene with dramatic consequences. . . Sully was shot. Is this permanent? I can’t help but hope that somehow, some way, there’ll be a way to bring him back from the dead – maybe a form of immortality power that the baddies are after? Either way I’m now angry but got pasted by some strange bad guys that can teleport in flames. Oh man, talk about a bad day.
12:40 pm: Heck of a fight, but there was something quite exhilarating about fighting the flaming heads. There was a sense of balance and challenge about it all that really worked well – with a good environment to run around in.
12:57 pm: Excellent surprise hallucination, calling back the beginning part of the game very nicely. The fight with the flameheads I just had was tough going, though. The trick is to keep moving, I feel. And use the TAU Sniper or the T-Bone. Anything sniper. That tends to work pretty sweet.
13:05 pm: Break for lunch!
13:19 pm: Back into the fray.
13: 22 pm: Sully is alive. . .? It was the water, not the gas? Well, I’m willing to believe Sully for the moment but I am still keeping back a little bit of reservation that there isn’t some kind of rug pull headed my way.
13:31 pm: Just got a trophy for being a headshot expert for killing five enemies in a row in the head. Which is nice.
13:40 pm: Trophy for kills with the SAS Shotgun. They just keep racking up.
13:55 pm: Well, so far it seems like I am at the climax of the game and it all does feel very much like Uncharted 2. Still, Marlowe appears to be dead so that just leaves one very angry Talbot remaining. I suspect he’s going to be the final boss, but then he always was going to be. I wonder what form of fight it will take. The game could do with a really spectacular finish to cap it off, though for now I have a run across a crumbling ruin to traverse.
14:05 pm: Well, that all ended sooner than I expected. Firstly, it did bring the spectacular. The running and jumping across the platforms looked utterly amazing. No question. Shame that the final battle basically came down to another brawling thing, though – and whilst on harder levels it may be a pain in how fast you get killed it does basically come down to how fast you react to pressing triangle. Ah well. That’s really the only negative I have.
I do have a criticism of the narrative. I have no idea really what the big plan was for the baddies, nor what they were and why some of them seemed to have magical powers. That was all rather glossed over as far as I could tell. . . unless the magical powers were all based around the hallucinogenic properties they had? That’s my best guess (it does explain the flaming head warriors, which is a cool touch).
What was Marlowe talking about, Nate not using his real name? What was with the playing card left on Cutter? The first question, potentially, is just something they've seeded here to discuss in future instalments of the game so I can kind of live with that, though I wish they'd just answered questions they'd raised here rather than sow the seeds for future revelations.
End sequence was nice. Kind of moving, in a way. I did like how they’d handled the break up of Nate and Elena – leaving aside the details and just allowing us to make our own ideas up about what went on. Good stuff. And I am pleased that Sully did make it to the end – it would have absolutely been too sad to have him killed!
So, game finished on Normal run through with 34% trophies obtained. There’s certainly a lot more to go at, but maybe whilst I have some time I might go and check out the online stuff. . .
Great game. Need more time with it to fully digest and appreciate and decide if it’s better than the 2nd. It’s certainly better-looking and with bigger wow moments, but was there a level better than, say, the train one from Uncharted 2? Not sure. But either way it’s close – both of them are truly excellent games and it’s been a blast to play from start to finish. I mean, look at how intensely I’ve been playing this one! Few games can hold me like that.
End sequence was nice. Kind of moving, in a way. I did like how they’d handled the break up of Nate and Elena – leaving aside the details and just allowing us to make our own ideas up about what went on. Good stuff. And I am pleased that Sully did make it to the end – it would have absolutely been too sad to have him killed!
So, game finished on Normal run through with 34% trophies obtained. There’s certainly a lot more to go at, but maybe whilst I have some time I might go and check out the online stuff. . .
Great game. Need more time with it to fully digest and appreciate and decide if it’s better than the 2nd. It’s certainly better-looking and with bigger wow moments, but was there a level better than, say, the train one from Uncharted 2? Not sure. But either way it’s close – both of them are truly excellent games and it’s been a blast to play from start to finish. I mean, look at how intensely I’ve been playing this one! Few games can hold me like that.
0 comments:
Post a Comment
Thanks for leaving a comment. If you would like to add me as a Friend on PS3, my Username is: AngeloComet. Please notify me - either here or on PS3 - of your request so I know not to ignore!