Uncharted: Legacy of Thieves Collection only arrived earlier this year on PS5, and here it is already, arriving on PC. That short lead time speaks volumes to the way that Sony is seeing PC as being a second marketplace, and while Microsoft have a clear head start here, there’s a raft of new customers for Sony to court with their top-tier wares.
Uncharted: Legacy of Thieves Collection pulls together the two most recent Uncharted games: Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End, the lauded high point for the series, and its sibling The Lost Legacy. Uncharted 4 is the current endpoint for series star Nathan Drake, while The Lost Legacy centres on Chloe Fraser and Nadine Ross with a similar treasure hunting tale.
They’re both fantastic examples of the action-adventure genre, thanks to their excellent characterisation, star-studded cast of video game voice actors, and enjoyable third-person gameplay that mixes clambering around forgotten ruins with a healthy dose of gunplay. Pulling them together with some visual upgrades is the perfect way to experience them, and now PC gamers can finally see what all the fuss is about.
Like God of War, Marvel’s Spider-Man and Horizon Zero-Dawn before it, Uncharted: Legacy of Thieves Collection on PC offers the chance to not only replicate the performance on consoles, but to surpass it – if you’ve got the hardware to do it. Given the age of these games and their origins on the PS4, you can play quite happily on a pretty old PC. If you want to push for higher resolutions and frame rates, then the Legacy of Thieves Collection offers the choice of either DLSS or AMD FSR 2 resolution scaling to keep the image quality as high as possible while balancing the load on your rig.
There aren’t quite as many ways to tweak your graphical output as we saw in Marvel’s Spider-Man, which is a touch disappointing, though Spider-Man bridged the generation divide with ray-tracing and the like.
The advanced graphical options allow you to tinker with textures, model quality, anisotropic filter, shadows, reflections and ambient occlusion, with a 3060-equipped laptop happily pumping out 1080p at 90fps or 4K at 30fps with most settings on Ultra. If you want to opt for the Ultra level on the texture setting though you’ll need to be packing a decent chunk of VRAM. One minor disappointment is the lack of an in-game frame rate limiter, with the only options a 30fps lock or unlimited frame rate – this is something you can amend with GPU driver settings, though.
Almost regardless of the graphics settings you choose, Uncharted is a spectacular-looking game. Naughty Dog’s art direction is second to none, and the various engrossing environments that Nate clambers around look truly incredible. The character models are similarly highly detailed, really bringing this well-known cast to life.
Let’s talk Steam Deck, because it almost feels as though these PlayStation ports are turning Valve’s handheld into the modern PSP or PS Vita successor many of us daydream about. Both of these Uncharted games run like a dream, reawakening memories of Uncharted: Golden Abyss on the Vita, with Drake’s treasure-hunting adventures working surprisingly well on a smaller screen.
Uncharted: Legacy of Thieves Collection automatically defaults to medium settings on Steam Deck, with the 7 inch 1280×800 screen still providing a detailed and attractive view. There’s a range of options available here to tailor the experience, with AMD FSR 2 scaling allowing you to choose between Quality, Balanced, Performance and Ultra Performance. It’s worth noting that if you push the scaling to Ultra Performance, the actual rendered resolution here is 426×266 – that’s only fractionally higher than a Nintendo 3DS top screen. Quality offers the best appearance and performance to my eyes, locking to 30fps and barely missing a beat.
My biggest problem with the release of Uncharted: Legacy of Thieves Collection on PC is that it’s detached from the rest of the series. Desktop gamers may not have had the chance to play the original trilogy, and while Uncharted 4 and The Lost Legacy are fantastic games, with 4 providing a decent primer to the series’ beloved characters, it’s not the same as having played the original trilogy for yourself. At this point, it would make perfect sense for The Nathan Drake Collection remasters to make their way to PC, so newcomers can get the full story. Here’s hoping Sony see that sense too.
