Uncharted: The Lost Legacy

 Naughty Dog are the oft-disputed masters of the modern action-adventure video game, and Uncharted: The Lost Legacy might just be the best in the franchise. In an era when progression bars and upgrade systems have a seemingly-absolute grip over singleplayer experiences, it’s refreshing that a prolific franchise from one of the most celebrated developers has so far declined to incorporate them. This absence of long term gameplay systems allows players to better engage in the treasure-hunting thrill ride, unburdened by decisions that last beyond one or two combat encounters. There aren’t too many gunfights in Lost Legacy’s relative short campaign, and each feels relatively unique, fitting into the overall pace well. Early combat sections begin in stealth, with reasonably open spaces offering plenty of cover and grass to stay hidden in. One optional combat area saw me accidentally bring myself close to a machine gun emplacement before being discovered, at which point I was able to take the emplacement and use it to finish off the guards, before wiping out the reinforcements that arrived. I’m half-convinced that was the intended way to finish that section, but it felt the combat scenario escalated towards a natural conclusion due to my failure in stealth. The marking feature still feels a little odd for the series, but the addition of lockpick boxes containing special weapons (including a silenced pistol) add a welcome exploratory element to combat arenas, especially before enemies clue in to Chloe’s presence. There is a little bit of enemy variety, accomplished by foes bearing both weapons and body armour, although it does little to compare to the greats of the genre in this regard. Enemies don’t interact with the player in particularly interesting ways either, and as a result player engagement is largely driven by level design instead. Fortunately, there’s enough variety and smart incorporation of movement opportunities to pull you through the game. Some moments stand out in particularly, especially the fights against enemy vehicles. Three could be viewed as bosses of sorts, although they are not explicitly presented as such. Two of these come in arenas that give the player fun opportunities to mix gunplay, stealth, and verticality. Combat in the train sequence at the end of the game feels more open than its Uncharted 2 counterpart (although it’s been a while since I played that game), and I enjoyed the use of vehicles as it escalated towards the finish. The gameplay feels even more refined and engaging than the PS3 generation of Uncharted, although it still falls well short of the best.

 

Climbing, on the other hand, is as boring and repetitive as it always has been, despite years of experience helping Naughty Dog develop and refine an impressive array of tricks. Uncharted 4’s mechanical additions return. These include semi-manual grapple points, sliding sections, and a piton, but even with these in the mix most of the time is spent watching animations that hint at the potential for engaging gameplay that never will never be realised. The new mechanics do allow for some fun experiences if nothing else, including a cool rope lowering scene. In fairness, the simplicity of climbing means it works very well during combat, but considering the amount of time spent navigating the world outside gunfights, the sheer disengagement it causes can’t be so easily excused. Different opportunities seem like they’re there, ripe for the taking. In another game, Chloe’s adjustments would see players adjusting themselves, looking for the most sensible paths with the firmest footholds. Making platforming more engaging would necessitate introducing real risk, whether in the form of time pressures or non-scripted falls, but Naughty Dog have never felt the need to develop the basic mechanics beyond mostly superficial animations and the occasional setpiece. It would require a lot of work to make platforming into a series of more engagingly interactive challenges (and risk severely slowing the pace), but there’s clearly been a lot of work put into every other aspect already, and beside it the core of the experience often feels hollow and meaningless. Why should I watch such perfectly crafted animations if they don’t support real interactivity?

 

Puzzles fare a little better than climbing, serving as nice breaks from the bulk of the gameplay flow. Brainteasers they are not, although one shadow puzzle was particularly engaging and the third axe-jumping room had me stumped. There’s a nice progression in complexity there, but they remain simple enough to keep you in the adventurer’s mindset. One of the highlights is the broad “open world” chapter, which sees Chloe and Nadine exploring a broad jungle area in their jeep, finding three mechanisms to activate. Alongside these are the optional Hoysala tokens, which unlock a special treasure. While realising that there was an extra objective was initially cool, it added a sense of roteness and routine to the area. Every time I parked the jeep so I could scout out another token challenge, ending with Chloe inspecting it and crossing a spot off her map, I felt like I was checking off the usual checkboxes that come with the monotony of typical open worlds. Alongside this, reliance on the map to navigate meant I was constantly stopping to check if I was on the right track. Ultimately, the implementation of the open area is disappointing, bringing across the checklist style that plagues modern open world games while lacking the quality-of-life features to make the checklist easy. I’m still glad they tried it, and future games in this franchise or style would do well to include more open chapters alongside the more strictly linear sequences. A number of unlockable features are included, including gameplay modifiers, skins and render modes. Bonuses like these have been inconsistently present in recent Naughty Dog games, but here they’re available as soon as the credits roll. A chapter select (with specific encounters separated) rounds out the package. I’d say its about what I expect in additional features from a singleplayer game, although unfortunately many others have fallen far short in this regard in recent years.

 

Polish is the developers’ watchword. All the usual Naughty Dog tricks are here, with a few new ones I hadn’t seen before. Moments when other games might come to a slight halt or expose the grinding of their hidden gears are largely covered up, keeping the experience seamless. Transitions from cutscenes to gameplay and back seemed smoother than previous Uncharted games. There’s a number of little moments that stand out, including the incorporation of Nadine, which seems a step above the use of scripted and semi-scripted companion actions in previous entries. During a routine hunt for five switches, Nadine called out (seemingly randomly) that she’d found and pulled one of them, and there’s several cases where she’ll move the car to speed up the flow. There’s a few weird moments though, including a platforming challenge in the final sequence that seemed to be timed but was actually about positioning. As I outlined earlier, the fact that I can comment on the intended skill test in an Uncharted platforming sequence is a shocking improvement, however, although the struggle to signal intent to the player is indicative of how neglected this aspect of the experience is. The 3D effect on rotational puzzles can sometimes make it difficult to see how they will align, unintentionally increasing the difficulty. The slight hiccups extend to dialogue. Nadine will normally ask Chloe if she found anything upon return from retrieving a Hoysala token, rather rote conversations on the whole (although at least the stops do not pass without comment). Unfortunately, this extends to the one found in an underwater structure beneath what at first appeared to be knee-deep water. Considering the amount of time it takes Chloe to retrieve it, I would have expected a little concern or at least some comment upon return that went beyond the usual confirmation. Especially from the queens and kings of polish, its disappointing.

 

Such polish is only possible with serious investment; of time, of money, of brainpower. At times, old criticisms of the way Call of Duty campaigns were designed and developed came to mind. I think I first heard it expressed in a Zero Punctuation video. Those campaigns, while clearly playing second fiddle to the dominant multiplayer offerings, could afford to cycle through mechanics that had the potential to serve as the core of another, lower budget title. Yet in the biggest of AAA games, mechanics and assets can be discarded as afterthoughts, tossed aside as players progress. Lost Legacy doesn’t discard as easily as others, but the excessive budget is clearly there. Take, for example, the additional multiplayer modes (carried over from A Thief’s End), in which skins exist in the Uncharted 4 engine for a number of the series characters, including Charlie Cutter and Talbot, who only appeared in Drake’s Deception. Compare this to Devil May Cry 5, where it seems the cost of creating character models restricted Kyrie to an entirely offscreen role, including a pivotal emotional beat in the later hours. As an aside note in terms of wastefulness, I’m guessing that having both A Thief’s End and Lost Legacy on my PS4, which share the same multiplayer modes, means a redundant use of space for a largely superfluous feature (I’ve tried the co-op, didn’t like it – it leans into bullet sponges over the strengths that the series’ combat does have). Ultimately, the amount of effort only adds to the disappointment when Lost Legacy fails to even demonstrate interest in the most basic aspects of video game experiences.

 

Much has been made of how the concept of ludonarrative dissonance applies to the Uncharted series. The discussion must have peaked after the release of the third game, perhaps due to the contrast with Naughty Dog’s other franchise The Last of Us, in which combat is much more violent but also much slower. The narrative also addresses the ramifications of violence for these characters and this world, whereas the excessive body count of Nathan Drake could not be dwelled on without weighing down his relatively lighthearted escapades. It’s certainly reasonable to criticise the incorporation of violence in each franchise, although the developers are not oblivious to all complaints. They have referred to the discussion in a tongue in cheek manner, such as by including a trophy in Uncharted 4 called Ludonarrative Dissonance, unlocked by killing 1,000 enemies. At the same time, A Thief’s End also feels like the least combat-heavy Uncharted game, at least until Lost Legacy. Yet combat is when the Uncharted series has always had the most ludonarrative resonance, if you’ll permit the phrase, especially in the PS4 engine incarnation. During combat I’ve always felt relatively well-connected to Nathan, and now to Chloe. They duck behind cover, pulling themselves up to vantage spots, hunt for better weapons and avoid the most dangerous foes, their survival instincts synchronised with my own. The temptation to embrace both characters’ cocky natures and unwavering athleticism is also there, especially in the more open combat arenas, and I’ll hurl them around the environment, scaling obstacles and literally jumping into the fray in a way few other shooters are designed for. Both the “oh shit” and “oh yeah” moments are well realised as natural parts of the combat flow. No, combat is not when the player feels disconnected from the experience. That weakness is most present in the platforming setpieces.

 

One of the core parts of the Uncharted experience is the death-defying stunts that the characters have to pull off to survive, but these have always been strange, uncomfortable sequences which see the emotions of the player and the character completely mismatched. This is particularly unfortunate as these moments are clearly meant to be impactful. They involve the most impressive, generally physically improbable or more likely impossible feats shown in the series, the kind of mildly ridiculous excess that can often work in light-hearted action-adventure stories, although I’d add that they’ve been pushed a little further than they should be. Yet by severely reducing or outright taking away player input, these moments can be reduced to nothing, the raw spectacle lost to the dissonance of player passivity. Chloe’s heart is pounding, she’s not sure if she’ll survive. I’m waiting to tap x and move on to something interesting. How the hell did the franchise make it so far when this is what it does as a climax? The feelings of characters and players are completely mismatched. These sequences are largely too scripted, which means they’re mostly mildly interesting (or mind-numbing) spectacle that does a little to engage the “ooh shiny” bit of the brain and absolutely nothing to engage the “playing a game” bit. When they aren’t fully scripted, the small leniencies allowed to the player are normally of the variety that allows for the player to ruin the setpiece, not to help the character navigate it in a unique way. The example I remember the most is a moment in Drake’s Deception, when Nate prepares to jump from one boat to another, telling himself he only had “one shot at this”. Unfortunately, this moment controls much closer to regular gameplay than most sequences of this ilk do, and I flung him into the sea. Luckily, I got a second shot. That a setpiece allows the player to fail does not make it better, instead further exposing the issues with these moments. Opening up the potential to restart ruins the “cinematic” flow of the experience. Conversely, preventing the player from messing up a sequence means bypassing interactivity, the beating heart of the medium. Either way, the setpieces are dull in their extremity. The immense production value behind them only makes it worse: the games feel as if they have been designed around these climaxes that are entirely divorced from the medium itself, forgetting its strengths and shying from its possibilities.

 

I started this post by saying that Lost Legacy might be the best Uncharted game. Unfortunately, that’s not because it succeeds in giving players a fully realised video game adventure, but rather because the series has failed to develop into that, and despite its many accomplishments it remains an uninspired example of what the medium can do. The formula has been expanded enough to better embody the spirit of Indiana Jones and other influences. The action can move smoothly between fisticuffs, stealth, gunfights, and driving sequences, all of which feel appropriately cinematic if undercooked. Climbing and setpieces are served raw alongside that, but the short length and well-crafted pace means that the most boring moments do not overstay their welcome to the same extent as in previous entries. Ultimately, though, for all the new ideas and continued improvement, Lost Legacy is not the fully realised swashbuckling journey that the series could have developed into by now. Without embracing the strengths and freedom of the medium, it remains a third-person shooter with platforming, an action experience wrapped in the skin of an adventure. The fantasy is stilted, the experience is restrained, and player enjoyment is limited. Uncharted could be great. For now, it is merely agreeable.