Last Thursday at around 2:00, we felt a strange sense of relief. This wasn't your standard Thursday afternoon meetings-are-done-for-the-day nap time relief, but the kind that only comes when something you've been worrying about for a long time improves. In this case, it was the confirmation that
Uncharted's gunplay is no longer silly and awkward.
In previous press showings, the game seemed to be fighting its animation system. Enemies would recoil when shot and not be able to take a second or third hit until they finished an animation, and the game seemed to want to show off how smooth its platforming animation was at the expense of responsive controls, somewhat like the original Prince of Persia games.
Now, we're not saying this issue has completely disappeared. There are still instances where the character physics will feel a bit off as you move around the environments, or you'll jump straight up instead of forward like you intended, but the important stuff -- the hand-to-hand combat and gunplay -- is so much better than it was that we're ready to make bold hyperbolic statements about the game's potential (later in the article, anyway).
The secondary relief about having the controls working well is it gives us a chance to focus on the rest of the game -- specifically, the vehicle stages where players take on a jeep and a jet ski. We had a chance to play through these to get a sense of how they mix up the standard on-foot gameplay, and they seem to do a nice (but brief) job there.
The jeep level is one of the prettiest stages we've seen in a PS3 game to date. You take the turret on the back instead of the driver's seat, so the section is on-rails, with the game shifting your view from the back to the side of the vehicle over the course of the level. At any given point you have a small cone field of view where you can aim.
While the lighting is great in much of Uncharted, it's especially notable here, as the sun beams down through the trees while you fly by -- and you knock over some of those trees in the process. Also, unlike in many games, where the developers put in so much effort to create a vehicle segment that they feel the need to reuse it a few times, Naughty Dog tells us there will only be one jeep level in the game.
There will be other vehicle levels, though. In two parts of the game, you'll hop on a wave runner -- this time as both the driver and the gunner, as you maneuver through canals like any water racing game as Drake and control Elena with a grenade launcher on the back seat by pulling the camera angle in and aiming. In the first jet ski scene, the game forces you to take things at a very slow pace, picking off enemies off in the distance once you spot them (which you usually do by driving until you notice they are shooting at you, then stopping and firing), and though we didn't get to try the second segment, Naughty Dog tells us it will be much faster-paced.
Though entertaining, the vehicle segments look to be short breaks in the action rather than a central part of the game à la something like Halo. It's the treasure hunting story and on-foot sections of Uncharted that will make or break the game, and from the little we've seen on the story and the lot we've played of the on-foot parts, it's all looking extremely promising. There's a level of detail here not seen in most games. Look closely at the cut-scenes and how Drake's hand perfectly wraps around the steering wheel, or how lifelike the facial expressions are and how characters interact with each other, and you'll realize how much attention was paid to the details most titles skip.
While games like Resistance and Ratchet have come close, Uncharted has the most potential we've seen yet to be PS3's first true breakout game. We're not sure it will be that game, since there's plenty of story and pacing stuff we haven't seen yet (and Drake himself still seems to be spending too much time in the mirror), but it has moments that reach and hit that bar already, so it's really up to the rest of the game to see if it can match that quality.
Originally Posted by NonBorn
Εννοείται...!! Και λίγα λες...
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