Broadening The Horizons Of Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End

After his many misadventures and countless near death experiences, you’d forgive Nathan Drake for settling down and taking an office job, but when his brother, Sam Drake, walks back into his life, he’s whisked off on another adventure. It’s not all about the promise of riches, but about their brotherly bond.

This time around, Drake’s chasing after the lost treasure of Henry Every, a rather interesting historical character. He rose up in mutiny to captain a ship and embark on a life of piracy in 1694, but his career only lasted two years. Despite that, he became the most wanted man on the high seas after bringing together a group of pirate ships to stage the piratical equivalent of a heist, attacking a scheduled sailing of the Grand Mughal’s fleet and managing to make off with treasure to the value of $400 million in modern day terms. Every and much of his crew managed to disappear and escape the law, with their treasure disappearing with them.

Sam’s tip sees him, Nate and Sully make a trip to Madagascar on Every’s trail. It’s a location that was featured during one of the game’s handful of public appearances, albeit with a bustling market place making way for combat and a chase scene with Nate and Sully in a Jeep. It turns out that this is going to be more than just a fun little aside for one or two set pieces.

Instead, you’re give free rein to explore the “wide linear” levels that make up a Madagascan savannah. Certainly, there’s still a start point, an end point and key moments in between, but as you hop behind the wheel, how you connect those dots is up to you. In a lot of ways this design feels like an extension of the exploration that you can do on foot. You won’t necessarily know how to get from A to B, and so you splash up stream a little before you reach an impassé, or head through the tangle of paths in a slightly different way, just as we saw in the 4×4’s reveal video with the interwoven roads and paths heading down the hill. You’ll likely bump into dead ends, but there might be one of Uncharted’s tiny glinting treasures for your troubles.

The Jeep controls almost as you’d expect, with a really nice weight and ease of handling to it – perhaps Naughty Dog were actually working on a karting game? – and it affords them a vehicular spin on Drake’s ability to clamber around the environment. Sully might complain in the incidental dialogue about how much he had to pay to hire the 4×4, but it’s worth it when you encounter a muddy slope and have to inch your way up, finding grip on the dried mud and rocks, as opposed to sliding around on the shiny, slick mud.

There’s some familiar beats to this though, with the weight of the vehicle giving you more than a few of those jump scares, equivalent to when a little ledge starts to crumble as Nate clambers along the side of a cliff face. Similarly, there’s a few light puzzles to engage in, making use of another feature of the car that Sully begrudgingly paid for: the tow cable. The points where you can attach it are quite clearly signposted, but it’s a beautifully authentic touch to have to step out, grab the cable, walk all the way round a tree and then hook the cable back onto itself to secure it. Not to mention having to unhook it once after you’ve finished dragging the Jeep up the slope.

Driving around also gives Naughty Dog plenty of time to play around with fleshing out the story. These are moments of downtime, where you’re able to soak in the incidental details, with some nice back and forth and banter between the three characters in the car. It’s almost surprising how much Sam and Nate sound like relatives, with Troy Baker behind the older brother’s accent.

Quite excellently, if you step out of the car while Sam’s giving you some of Every’s backstory, he’ll go, “Hey! Where are you going?” and pick up where he left off in that story when you return amidst some mumbled apologies from Nate. It’s a beautifully simple touch that just lends an air of realism and fluidity to how the story is told.

The peace and quiet can only last so long in Uncharted. Our trio of roguish characters are in competition to reach the treasures before the Shoreline PMC. The wide linear motion manifests itself here in a number of different ways, giving this particular encounter around a ruined tower more of a sandbox feel to it.

Starting in Uncharted 2, Naughty Dog have gradually embraced a stealthier approach to combat, and it continues to expand on those ideas here. Where it was often a prelude to a gunfight and waves of enemies, they’re now catering to those who prefer to covertly take out enemies all the way through, if not skip certain encounters outright.

Helping you to do that is the new ability to mark enemies with a click of the left stick when aiming – seemingly at the expense of being able to switch shoulders – but the environments and AI lend themselves better to a stealthy approach. Long grass makes it easy to stay out of sight and catch people out, but you’re also given a little leeway with awareness indicators that shift from white indifference to yellow suspicion and red alertness and gunfire. Sometimes your AI partners can step in to save your bacon quietly, marking a step up from the way that they would always let you do everything in The Last of Us.

Of course, you don’t have to go in stealthily, and I could just as easily have made a loud entrance in the jeep, instead of sneaking up to the sniper at the top of the tower. With enemies spread out across the area, it’s then easy for them to catch you unawares and from different angles, especially when another wave of Shoreline troops appear.

What makes this exciting and invigorating is the ease with which you can drop in and out of the fight. Breaking the line of sight sees the enemy head toward your last known location to try and hunt you down, but you’re given the opportunity to get the drop on them once more. It’s a trick that stealth games have been pulling for decades, but it’s the fluidity and ease with which you can go in and out of combat that makes this feel that little bit more special. And, of course, that’s juxtaposed with the sheer bombast of swinging from a grappling hook point and into a flying punch.

With the power of the PS4 backing them up, Naughty Dog have really been allowed to broaden and expand on so many aspects of the game. Uncharted 4 goes well beyond looking fantastic, and whether it’s driving, platforming or combat, there are new ideas and more possibilities throughout. There’s a lot of expectation on Naughty Dog to deliver something truly remarkable with Uncharted 4, and from what I can see, they don’t look like they’re going to disappoint.