Let me just get this out of the way, because I know it has been mentioned a lot already in reviews...Uncharted 4 is extremely repetitive mechanically, to the point where it just leaves a bad taste in your mouth by the middle. Another crate. Another boost. Another thing to lift and move out of the way. Another time that I died because the camera couldn't understand which way I wanted to jump even though I'm pointing my analog stick in what should be the right direction, intuitively.
Things like the grappling hook and the winch get a free pass from me, generally, since they were only introduced in this game. But crates and boosts were used SO OFTEN in The Last of Us already that I can't get over it. It just screams a lack of creative thinking that seems so at odds with what the rest of the game is trying to do.
I was wrestling with the controls throughout the entire game. Gunplay was really floaty, though that's been a staple of the series, and clearly is a design choice, but it feels terrible nonetheless. Especially with how many guys you need to take on in any given encounter, it wouldn't hurt to tone down the recoil a little bit. Then there's the jumping, reaching, and general struggling with getting Nate to go where I actually want him to go, on a regular basis. This becomes magnified when you're in stealth sequences and being able to get where you want is essential to staying hidden in brief moments of opportunity when soldiers aren't looking your way.
This has become a common complaint with me in Uncharted games, really since 2 found the "right" balance, in my opinion, but this game focused too much on traversal puzzles, and not nearly enough on intellectual puzzles. In all of the sequences where I had to figure out the mechanism to progress through an area, especially by using clues I had put together from the environment, or my journal, I was loving the game. Those areas were so much more fun that the jumping, swinging, and climbing traversal puzzles for me. I also wish the game had some more long-term meta puzzles, where you had to go back to notes you otherwise wouldn't have thought were necessary from earlier in the journal. Instead, the answer to any of the journal puzzles is always right on the page you open up to on that current encounter. Give the player a little more credit, we can think long-term, and apply knowledge we found much earlier in the game.
It may seem like a pithy complaint, but the 30 fps frame rate combined with the constant motion blur applied whenever you swerve the camera (which is ALL THE TIME if you're looking for collectibles) make the game look much worse than it would otherwise. I hope to see a 60 fps version of this game in the future.
But, on to the biggest problem for me, which was that I never bought into the relationship between Nate and Elena in this series. I think a lot of that is probably due to never playing Uncharted 1. Starting with Uncharted 2, I was definitely a fan of the dynamic between Chloe and Nate. Their personalities seemed so much more in sync with each other. So, basing this game largely around Nate and Elena's relationship, especially when she is cast in the role of the generic "girl holding back guy who wants to do cool stuff" was very grating.
The entire 3rd act of the game is one long marriage counseling session. Sure, it's counseling with jeep rides, mass murder of PMC's, and discovering lost pirate havens, but...let's just put it this way. When Nate and Elena get to Thomas Tew's mansion, and see the INCREDIBLE scene in his dining room, which clearly has enormous historical significance, and the writers decide that Elena's reaction would be to begrudgingly admit that it's "pretty amazing" because she can't get over her desire to punish Nate even more than she already has, for hours, for ditching her to save his long-lost brother...it was just the last straw. I couldn't help but to hate Elena's character after that point. I found her completely unrelatable after that.
The only thing that could redeem those hours of grating relationship turmoil would be a huge payoff in the end. And, sure, the epilogue WAS THAT, but it didn't make up for the hours of slow, plodding, nagging, nerdy jokes, and generic, generic dialogue between Nate and Elena. Sure, it's a different dynamic, but compare the things Nate and Elena fight over to the philosophical split between Ellie and Joel in The Last of Us, and Uncharted 4 just comes up short in almost every sense for me. At no point was I ever as emotionally moved as I was in multiple scenes in The Last of Us.
In the end, Elena decides that they "over-steered" in their attempt to live a normal life, and they find a balance, but man, the game would've been a lot more enjoyable if they had figured things out somewhere around the half-way point of the game, and just been an awesome tag-team through the last third. Instead, that dynamic apparently only comes about in the years after the end of the climax of the game, and before the epilogue.
I would totally play a new Uncharted game as a grown-up Cassie. I think Troy Baker did an absolutely fantastic job throughout the game as Sam. The Goonies tribute that is the end-sequence of the adventure was incredibly fun in all the right ways. Rafe was a very hateable, yet relatable villain, and the sword fight was an example of a QTE event used in the best way possible. But, it didn't have that wandering through the desert moment from Uncharted 3, or the ice cave with Tenzin in Uncharted 2. And like others said, the best action/chase sequence in the game was already released, in its entirety in videos prior to the game coming out.
