Why Uncharted 3’s 3D Eats Your Eyeballs (And Face)

Sorry, forgive the silly title (especially if you’re you know who) but there’s a serious matter beyond the ridiculous headline – Uncharted 3’s 3D is rather good, and, quite rightly, squares up nicely against our claims that the game itself is the best thing on PS3 right now.

If you’ve got a 3D TV (and you can still find those glasses) then you need to get Uncharted 3.

Well, not need, that’s rather indulgent and ignorant.  You need water, peanuts, Scrabble and Suede (hi, Brett), but if you’ve got £40 spare and you weren’t already convinced by my ramblings on Monday afternoon, then allow me to explain why you at least want to pick up Uncharted 3 purely for its top quality stereoscopic stereo vision-o-vision.  Official terminology, that.

[drop2]For starters, it doesn’t feel like it’s making the console cough up its last breath at every turn.  Sure, it’s having to draw twice the polygons (let’s not forget the need to render Drake’s beautiful body again), twice the textures, twice the shadows, but by subtly dialing down the special effects and the resolution the thing actual still moves quite smoothly.

It’s not perfect – there are frame rate drops and some minor detail is lost – but it’s nothing too serious.

And I mean, I’ve got better things to do than (and a complete lack of the skill required to) count pixels, so it might well be running in resolutions that would make the Amiga buff out its chest, but it doesn’t look like it from where I’m sat. And whilst somehow Resistance 3 managed to look even blurrier in 3D than it did in 2D (a feat indeed) Uncharted doesn’t suffer from the same problems – it’s still sharp, still crisp, and still utterly gorgeous.

There’s a ‘3D strength’ bar which acts a bit like the one on the 3DS (although doesn’t instantly make you sick when you move it past about 20%) and whilst the game doesn’t compensate for the fact that you’re wearing glasses by brightening the display – something that all games should do – it doesn’t really make a huge amount of difference.

Third person shooters don’t normally benefit from the added depth of 3D (Gears of War 3 certainly didn’t, in my opinion) but Uncharted manages to succeed because the game sports plenty of rich, expansive environments that play with close up objects just as much as they do with things in the distance.  Vertiginous drops, long range battles, close quarter brawls – they all work nicely.

It doesn’t get it right all the time, though – a few of the spaces still feel a little flat, especially ones with lots of middle range stuff, and it’s only when Naughty Dog really push the tech that it has that wow factor, but that’s the same situation with most of the best 3D games, only really drawing your attention to it when absolutely necessary.

Smartest of all is keeping Drake in the centre of the 3D field, so you’re never straining or fighting against any ghosting when you’re focusing on him.

Again, we’re not going to spoil anything, so no detailed discussion of which chapters look the best in 3D, suffice to say that there’s a couple that really come alive, and it’s normally the set pieces that work the best.  Yes, running it in 3D has its own drawbacks in terms of detail and fidelity, but overall this is probably the best example of 3D in a game since MotorStorm Apocalypse.

If you’re still looking for that game to show off your new television, this is it.  If your new television is a black and white 14″ shit-o-tron, it’s probably not.