Well, I just sent Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception back to Gamefly. I didn't beat the game, but I sent it back anyways..
Followers of my reviews (of which there are none) will know that I don't view the Uncharted series in the same light as some other people who seem to herald it as some major achievement in gaming. While I'll be the first to admit that the games are good, I'd have to say that they aren't so good as to
throw a fit when reviewers don't give it a perfect score. Still I went into UC3 as I did with any of the games, with decent expectations of fun and cinematic quality. While the game certainly delivered on the latter, it didn't do so well with the former.
My first problem is with the combat, both the gun and melee aspects of it. I remembered reading about how some people were complaining that there were aiming issues with this game but I honestly did not expect them to be as bad as they were. I tried both aiming settings and with both I found the game refusing to register my hits on numerous occasions. And for the record, I've played numerous 1st and 3rd person shooters so I think at this point I know how to aim properly. I know the loose controls certainly don't help matters, but all I know is that I didn't have as many problems in the previous 2 games as I did with this one.
The melee combat was significantly better in that is just merely bad. Now to be fair I only played through the first half of the game so maybe it gets tougher later on, but basically every fight could be won by mashing the square button like you're trying to squash a spider on your controller and then making sure you hit the proper QTE to counter or break a hold. However the room for error in hitting these QTEs is so great that you'd have to be completely ignorant to them to not hit them properly. It reminded me of Batman, Arkham Asylum if the combat had been turned back to preschool level.
One thing I can say is that unlike most games like this, the AI is actually rather intelligent. Unfortunately though it seems like they're too smart for their own good to the point where it just gets annoying. For one they seem to spawn out of seemingly nowhere. I lost count of how many times I'd be in the middle of a gun battle only to have my focus broken by some goon that punched me in the back of the head because somehow I missed them during the combat. I would also run into them frequent times while I was moving into a new area, like we were trying to recreate that door hitting scene from the beginning of Laverne and Shirley. Finally, the stealth gameplay continued the problems of the second game, where killing 1 guy (or attempting to kill 1 guy) would alert every baddie with a gun within a 5 mile radius. And of course, most of these guys will be behind cover at distances of nearly 50 yards, leaving you to try and kill them over a long distance with a pistol or a machine gun, forcing you to drain about half your ammo just to hit them, while they seem to have the accuracy of the Vietnamese girl at the end of Full Metal Jacket with those same guns.
The final straw came in Chapter 12: Abducted where I was forced to run around some old abandoned shipyard with little more than a pistol and a tommy gun against 30 some-odd armed men in, of all things, a water level. After dying for about the 5th time when some guy came out of nowhere and started melee combat in an open area that caused all the bullets to turn me into swiss cheese, which then lead to said guy laughing at me as the game faded to black, I threw my controller and asked myself 2 important questions:
Am I having fun playing this? NO.
Do I care at all about what happens to Nathan Drake/Tim Tebow and his ragtag gang of friends? NO.
That's not to say that UC3 is all bad. As I mentioned earlier the game continues the tradition of great acting and imaginative set pieces, and the gorgeous visuals created by the PS3 help significantly with the immersion factor. Unfortunately though that just leaves us with a game that looks great but plays badly. I'm sure if I really tried I could pass Chapter 12 along with the rest of the game, but all that would do is just lead me to more parts of the game I wasn't going to enjoy anyways. Besides, if I really find myself dying to know how the story ends, I can just fire up Youtube for that.
In conclusion I would still recommend UC3 (and the entire UC series in general) to anyone who has a PS3, but unfortunately this one did not warm up to me as much as it would give me the cold shoulder whenever I tried to get into it, like the hot girl you're trying to get with but is ignoring all your advances. And that's UC3 in a nutshell for me. It's an extremely attractive girl who looks hot in all the right places, but once she opens her mouth you quickly see that she is not one for the long run. I give it a C-.
