whatevermort
Member
Papercuts said:Just finished. If you're not able to take any negative opinions, I'd stop reading this post now. Pre-warning.
Overall, I have a ton of gripes with UC3. First, the things I liked/loved.
The OST here is my favorite in the series, for sure. It fit the pace of all the action happening, and even in Multiplayer it adds a lot. I always liked the uncharted theme but the rest is usually forgettable, but this one stands out.
The graphics, as usual, are nuts.The jungle in France looks INSANE, even over Uncharted 2. I loved the water, the entire ship level with all the objects rocking around, and being inside that big room with the sideways chandelier while you look out the window and see the ship half underwater looked incredible. Visually the game is a nonstop feast.
I liked where they were going with the plot.This isn't a total "like" though, as I feel like the story had way too many forced moments, like Drake just KNOWING that the piece of the ship he needed had to be in Marlowe's secret library, the entire section of no plot movement with ramses, and the pretty anticlimatic ending of Marlowe in general.
Characterization is as good as ever, Sully, Drake, and Elena were all great here. Even Cutter, who I thought based on the fairly generic appearance would either be a traitor or just get killed off, ended up being a great addition for the parts he was in. I genuinely felt bad in the scene where Sully got shot, with the way the faces all reacted. Chloe is the odd one out, she had no place in the game and really didn't seem like Chloe. She also looked like crap.
Puzzle wise, the ones in UC3 are pretty damn good. I think it's the best of the series here, BUT one of my biggest gripes is also about this same point. The game has 22 chapters, the last puzzle is in chapter 11. So yeah, about that pacing...
The game starts out very slow, there's a ton of maneuvering, you don't shoot your first gun until chapter 4 or so, and even that is only on a lock. It takes awhile to ramp up--and that was perfectly fine with me. I loved soaking it all in. For me, the game quickly peaks at the Chateau which is chapter 7 and 8, I think?This was the most Uncharted part of the game to me, just you and Sully making wisecracks in a gorgeous locale, a good mixture of puzzles, traversal, and gunplay, topping off with a giant setpiece that combines traversal and gunplay well. It was an amazing sequence to me. After this, the game still kept holding up alright with me. Syria wasn't all that interesting, but it started moving plotwise when Cutter gets hit by the hallucigen, and to me PERSONALLY, I got really interested in the way Talbot nearly vanished after this, and later got shot but wasn't affected. Sadly, that kinda never gets explained, sooo yeah. I also really liked the levels up to chapter 11, which had good old fashioned tomb raiding and puzzles with some combat.
Chapter 12 is where the game gets sketchy for me. I know people keep heralding 12-15, and I do think they were interesting, but at the very least 16 on the game gets BAD. Not even sugarcoating it.The locales around the water where you can dive in, swim around, and grab people was very neat. But after this, all the combat encounters start becoming clusterfucks. It's not even about the aiming at this point, it's literally just the game throwing way too much at you at once, without giving Drake anything new to compensate. OKay, sure, you can now throw grenades back, but the AI literally just runs straight at you. While you get ready to throw a grenade, chances are a shotgunner is damn near in your face, there's more often than not some variant of a sniper, RPG user, or hammer user. It gets old, quick. It gets cheap in many cases, which I'll specifically touch on in a minute.
The cruise ship sinking was neat looking, but it doesn't come close to the chateau for me. It's visually amazing, but there's one room with some combat, which isn't really affected that much, and the rest was just standard platforming(with seemingly no time limit, I felt far more rushed in the burning building, though I have a feeling there's no time limit here either). Then the airport. Oh my god, the airport. This area is horrible. The one room here to stealth through is just mindboggling, how the fuck do you take out the 2 at the end stealthily? I tried 2 quick headshots, even though the other guy had no time to react, they still "alerted" and here comes a giant wave from BEHIND, the area I just cleared out. Come on. Then you die and actually redo the stealth part...which it didn't let me do in the cruise ship ballroom. So now, when I actually want to not redo the stealth stuff, I have to anyway.
This time I try throwing a propane tank, shoot it and kill them both at the same time. Doesn't matter, alert, here comes an armored shotgun guy from the back, and a guy with a hammer on top of a container somewhere. Yay!
Now the plane. The plane is great looking, but is EXTREMELY SHORT. Just another generic big guy beat up, a shooting sequence redoing the sliding stuff from the boats, boom. That's it. Then, as visually stunning as the desert is, you just walk forward for 10 minutes and then after a few flashes around you're now at chapter 19. Then the game ends oddly similar to UC2 in a lot of respects, and it just left me underwhelmed.
To be more specific, the pacing is basically ALL combat with some mixed traversal after a certain point, and the game for me completely lost what made the combat in UC2 fun. Fixing the aiming will help, but the actual encounters are just frustrating in so many ways. The new melee system is at odds with the "WHAT IS COVER? LOL" enemies that run right at you. It accomplishes the same thing UC2 did but takes three times as long, and never on its own accord is even remotely difficult, it just adds more visual flair at the impact of gameplay. Aside from 4-5 pure fist fight encounters throughout the game, it's only even really used on the big guys which are literally the EXACT SAME FIGHT, and it must happen atleast 8-10 times. I don't see them and go "yay!", I think "...another one of these?".
There seems to be more ways to tackle each fight, but in the end that doesn't mean much to me. If anything it meant I would stumble around until I died a few times, eventually I run to an area and realize there's an RPG just sitting on the ground which then makes the fight a breeze. That isn't interesting to me, any third person shooter can do stuff like that. I want tiers of elevation in more fights, play to Uncharted's strengths!
Three especially bad segments are in Chapter 14, 20, and 21.The ballroom in the cruise ship...oh my god. Two snipers, a guy with a hammer, two armored shotgun guys, and other generic guys in a fairly small area. Really? It's easy if you get the hammer and take out the shotgun guys while running at the top so the snipers can't see you, but any other way I tried to tackle this fight was just frustrating as hell. Getting stunned by the hammer meant instant death.
Chapter 20 has a sandstorm, which could provide a cool stealth segment. Oh wait, the enemies have perfect fucking clarity, and the moment they turn hostile I immediately get two grenades thrown directly at my feet, and sniper sights aiming right at me, even though when I pick up a sniper you seriously can't even see these guys, you just have to shoot where the laser sight was. In that case, how to do they see ME, who is giving off no signal? While this is happening, a bunch of machine guns are perfectly aimed at you and the cover is spread out just enough to make it insanely annoying as you wait to regen health while getting pounded by grenades and a few enemies make their way behind you.
Then chapter 21 has these great fire guys that don't seem to care about bullets shooting them. One of these fights is against ~4 fire guys, while there was water on both sides of me. Well these guys teleport, sometimes behind your cover, meaning you have to GTFO, but they shoot you immediately, and I would basically instantly die if this happened because I can't kill them quickly enough without a hammer/rpg, and the other enemies on the other side of the cover shoot me once I try to move. Talk about great. They also have an instant kill move that would hit me off screen a lot, like they would charge up fire or something and hurl it like a grenade that explodes on impact. Fun.
I just have no idea what on earth happened to the combat in this game. Spawns are all over the place, you can instantly die on a whim and redo the entire encounter, stuff is just out of whack. People may find some way to enjoy that stuff, but to me it was just insanely frustrating. My jaw would drop at some of these deaths, and considering the game is just non stop combat near the end it just got insanely old.
Oh yeah, and about the endgame stuff...the horse segment didn't really do much for me, that convoy stuff just felt like UC2 retread to me. Then the whole city collapsing, climbing the rising gears(ice cavern), etc. The boss fight, if you want to call it that, is better then Lazarevic's shitty one, so that's something.
This post is pretty unfocused and messy, but I'm really just insanely disappointed with this overall. I didn't even go into it expecting much, I didn't think it had a snowball's chance in hell to match UC2, but it not only didn't come close, it completely messed up something I never even was worried about. I'll dabble in MP and hopefully find enjoyment in the co-op stuff, I'll give the game another shot with the aiming patch, so I guess I'll see what a second play entails.
Oh yeah, and even though I already knew about no unlock modifiers, it still bears repeating on how disappointing that is. On top of that, there was quite a few oddities I noticed near the end of the game that didn't have the attention to detail ND usually has.I picked up the pak80 or whatever in the desert town, and drake made no sound whatsoever. Footsteps crunching on the sand, completely silent. How did they miss that? In chapter 22(maybe 21), I saw a stream of water as I was going down a staircase. I have a knack for always rolling in water and soaking drake, so I did. Then I see...I just rolled in sand? WHAT? I waited and tried it a few more times, and every time I rolled in this water drake got covered in sand. Oh, and opening the door to the city near the end, I climbed the ladder and dropped off the right side for the treasure, then dropped down and reclimbed the ladder. As I did this, Sully apparently climbed the ladder then started climbing down, blocking me. He kept going down and ended up launching drake through the floor and I had to restart.
I also had a weird thing with my guns on the last two chapters, where I would reload, the animation would finish, but the gun didn't reload. This happened atleast 5 times here, and wasn't something that happened to me in other spots in the game.
The forced cinematic stuff also got in the way a couple of times. One moment that stands out to me was at the end of the airport, before the gate where Drake tells Elena to leave. You need to jump from the roof onto a ladder, which has a cool camera view of the plane as you climb down. When I first came here, I saw boxes below me, held onto the ledge, and dropped below. Instant death, how dare I not take the ladder. I also had a moment where I was fighting in the Chateau, dropped down onto stairs from not a very high distance and just died, despite taking much bigger falls perfectly fine.
Which this isn't a glitch, I also feel I should point out how stupid the Sully rescue in chapter 20 is. When he actually jumps onto the main convoy and is getting strangled by the big guy, I ended up getting onto a raised piece of ground(don't know if that happens to everyone or not), but from this spot I COULDN'T jump to the convoy, so I did the obvious thing, took out my gun to shoot the guy. Then I see a black reticule specifically not allowing me to fire my gun...why? Why can I not shoot the guy strangling sully right next to me? Because then I would miss the cinematic brute fight!
Oh, and I also though it was dumb the way Chloe and Cutter vanished out of the story, and how Salim & co. mysteriously vanish in the sandstorm but show up at the end of the city anyway. I'm sure someone will call me bad at the game for this post, but I played UC2 on crushing just fine, and can see the significant ways the combat here changed(for the worse/blatantly cheap). A reply insulting me is as predictable as me fist fighting another copy and pasted brute in UC3.
I still have a few things to mention but I really need to just end this post already. Drake is always insanely unlucky in these games, and I really felt like I was channeling his horrible luck with some of the insane bullshit deaths I witnessed in some of these fight sequences.
Agree with pretty much all of this. Only, I"d also factor in that it got pretty dull. Definitely my least favourite of the three. (Not saying it's the worst, as it's probably a better game than 1, but I enjoyed that more then than I enjoyed this one now.)
