Exploring The Uncharted Trilogy Once More In The Nathan Drake Collection

For PlayStation owners, the Uncharted trilogy was undoubtedly one of the highlights of the last generation, as Naughty Dog pushed against the limits of what the PS3 could do while honing their own expertise in storytelling and gameplay.

However, with Uncharted 4 on the horizon and the potential for Naughty Dog to set a new high water mark for games on the PlayStation 4, Sony will have been quite aware that millions of newcomers and console family switchers won’t have experienced the first three games. Much like jumping into a TV show half way through its run, there are characters and relationships they won’t know, gameplay they’re unfamiliar with and simply three of the PS3’s best that they will have missed out on.

The oddly named Nathan Drake Collection looks to fix all of that, with a simple, one stop solution to getting that trilogy of games on to the PS4. There are certain cutbacks in the process, and it’s a real shame to see the multiplayer and co-op modes getting the chop from the second and third games, but what remains are three great single player adventures with quite impeccable presentation.

Bluepoint have worked wonders with their ports of the three games, with a flawless looking 1080p60 presentation that marks a quite significant improvement on the 720p and often inconsistent frame rate of the originals. In particular, the original game suffered with a lot of screen tearing, which has been banished in the update.

Flitting between the three games, you can quite clearly see Naughty Dog’s craft advance and improve over the course of the trilogy, with leaps and bounds being made in the lighting and the quality of the character models as well as improved performance capture and better animation techniques that use this raw data. There’s a huge leap between the first and second games, to go with much improved storytelling and characterisation.

However, Bluepoint haven’t rested on their laurels with a simple upscale and have looked to improve upon each game’s assets as and when they can. Though level geometry remains the same and you can see the progressive step up that each game took on the PS3 through some of this, Bluepoint have been able to then make use of the higher quality character models from cutscenes and more detailed textures, as well as pushing the draw distance further out and making tweaks to lighting and various effects. All together, it brings the visuals during gameplay just that much closer to the pre-rendered cutscenes.

Of course, in keeping with this generation’s trends, Bluepoint have also added a new photo mode with which you can try to capture some of the best scenes and moments from the game. Once enabled in the menus, pressing down on the D-pad in most situations freezes the game, letting you move the camera around freely and tweak things like the depth of field or apply filters. While you can easily grab some good looking shots, it’s not quite as flexible as that of Driveclub, for example. Applying filters and effects depends on the use of the triggers, which simply aren’t capable of letting you shift up or down by a single percentage point, and there’s no visual indicator in the game world of where the focal point of your depth of field is.

You can also see and feel the natural progression of Naughty Dog’s gameplay mechanics as you go through the games, just through the opening tutorial-like levels of each game. Where Drake’s Fortune centres around combat, traversal and environmental puzzle solving, the first hours of Uncharted 2 and 3 demonstrate a stealthier approach to combat and show off a more fluid form of brawling respectively. The fundamentals of traversal and combat remain the same throughout, though.

Though partially down to DualShock 4’s tighter analogue sticks, gunplay feels just that little bit easier to get to grips with, and I found myself much more able to pull off headshots in The Nathan Drake Collection than when I went back to the PS3 originals and my ageing DualShock 3. Bluepoint have tweaked certain aspects of the gameplay as well, to give a slightly more unified feeling to the controls and gunplay. These apply most heavily to Drake’s Fortune, where tilt motion sensing has been banished and things like the aim down sights grenade toss have been brought back from the later games, though it remains the roughest of the trilogy.

Newcomers to the series are the most likely and most obvious audience for this game to target, but a handful of features do also help to appeal to series veterans. A new Brutal difficulty mode sits above Crushing as the new pinnacle which, when Crushing is already ludicrously hard in some places, will be a particularly stern test. Thankfully, though you do need to complete each game on Crushing before you can play on Brutal, it is unlocked from the very beginning. You can also add a speed run timer to keep track over the course of an entire playthrough.

I don’t really find playing on those high difficulties particularly fun, though. Yes, they’re a challenge on the path to a platinum trophy, but they also mean that every combat encounter is a case of trial and error, as the game throws waves of enemies at you while you cower behind a rock waiting for colour to return to your view. It highlights some of the weaknesses in the gunplay, with generally ineffective feeling weaponry going up against enemies that can take far too many bullets, unless you nail a headshot with the minimal aim assist and somewhat sluggish controls.

Instead, the Uncharted games are best played at lower difficulties, with Crushing and Brutal reserved for those who want to go for the platinum trophies. It’s here that you can enjoy each of these games for what they are: an action-filled romp in the vein of Indiana Jones and the 1930s matinée serials that inspired that character.

With an excellent trio of ports from Bluepoint and the fourth game on the way in March, there’s never been a better time to play these games, whether a newcomer to the series or someone looking to relive some of the PlayStation 3’s best games.