Naughty Dog cashed their creativity cheques and traded their booty for broad appeal with the mediocre Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune. Instead of pursuing the refined, appealing control schemes that characterised their prior output, Uncharted settles for a painfully generic over-the-shoulder cover-shooter control scheme, interspersed with by-the-numbers Prince of Persia–style platforming.

The story is a bland pastiche of treasure-hunter tropes thrown together with little care: a bit of Indiana Jones here, a bit of Romancing the Stone there, and a dash of Lara Croft in between. It stars one of the most obnoxious characters ever committed to polygons—Nathan Drake—who feels like a progenitor of the 2010s obsession with smirky, wisecracking protagonists entirely deprived of wit or charm. He is completely overshadowed by his compatriot Sully, who comes across as an older, wiser, and genuinely funnier version of him, making it actively painful when the game sidelines him so early in the story.


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