Uncharted: The Lost Legacy review (A-)

What is it?

3rd Person, Open Level, Cinematic, High Adventure, Platforming, Action-Adventure

What’s good?

Top notch graphics, beautiful landscapes and stunning architecture, engrossing story, intense action sequences and set pieces, more Chloe, more Uncharted, first steps into sprawling open world design in an Uncharted game, easy platinum trophy.

What’s bad?

Although the leads do a more than serviceable job they just didn’t resonate the same way Nate, Elena and Sully did in the original Uncharted games, an amazing open world level rife with opportunities for exploration and mayhem is bookended by hours of on rails gaming, the game length is a little short but considering its a half price game I’m ok with that.

Released 2017	Naughty Dog	Sony Interactive Entertainment
Completed: 2017-09-01	Completion: 100%	Highest Trophy: Platinum

Full Review

Let me just get this out of the way, Uncharted: The Lost Legacy is fantastic, full stop. Now to be fair it has some issues and unlike Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End, which I rate as an A++, I only give this one an A-. All things considered, an A- is a damn fine game and The Lost Legacy is certainly worth the price of admission. Hands down I recommend this game to every PS4 owner and quite frankly if you don’t have a PS4 you need to go out and buy one, like right now, just so you can have the privilege of experiencing anything and everything Naughty Dog has released in the last decade. Without a doubt Naughty Dog is one of the greatest gaming studios of our time.

Now if you’ve never played an Uncharted game this might be the perfect opportunity to jump into the series. I know it seems weird to recommend starting off on the 6th game of a franchise but hear me out. The Nathan Drake Collection which includes the first 3 games is available on the PS4 and although I consider it to be one of the best re-mastered collections available, it really is a whole lot of game for anyone unsure about investing any time in this franchise at all. Not to mention even with the revamped controls in the first Uncharted game they are still fairly shitty by today’s standards which might just infuriate people enough to turn them off. Now Uncharted 4 is a one of the best games of this generation but there is so much story and character development spread across the previous entries in the franchise that much of the story in A Thief’s End would likely fall flat for newcomers. It’s still an epic and beautiful game that I whole heartedly recommend but I can see how it might scare people away.

That’s why the Lost Legacy is a perfect entry point. The main characters were secondary characters prior to this and although they do tie into the overarching Uncharted story, you don’t really need to know anything about that to get into this game and none of the back story really enhances this current adventure. That means you can jump in fresh and experience a really great game in a really great franchise from a really great studio and if you find yourself enjoying the game you might gain the incentive to pick up the Nathan Drake Collection and/or Uncharted 4 to experience one of the most epic gaming sagas from beginning to end.

In Uncharted: the Last Legacy you play Chloe Frazer, one of the two lead characters, who is a smart, skilled and sexy treasure hunter. Basically she’s an edgier and funnier Lara Croft with a much more malleable sense of morality. She makes no apologies about who she is and freely embraces the fact that at the heart of it all she’s just a thief, a badass thief for damn sure. I really enjoyed her character in Uncharted 2 but she gets a lot more screen time here and she most definitely makes the best of it. I am certainly down for anymore adventures with Chloe Frazer. She is full of life and zeal and smart assery. She takes over the role nicely from Nathan Drake as the wisecracking, cliff climbing, ass kicking, guns blazing treasure hunter, and she does a fantastic job filling his shoes.

The second lead character who is non playable is Nadine Ross a tough as nails ex-mercenary. I wish they hadn’t of used her character and simply introduced a new character instead. If you’ve played Uncharted 4 you already know she was the leader of a mercenary army who were the main antagonists in that game and played the role of the oft abused bullet fodder for the Drake’s. She was trying to kill the lead characters the entire game and you really grew to not despise her by the end. It just seems like too much of a forced change in her character motivation and the explanations we are given as to why she’s now working with Chloe just don’t make a hell of a lot of sense. Of course if you haven’t played Uncharted 4 then this should be a non issue for you. Aside from that I found her character fairly annoying. Unlike her partner who is funny and witty Nadine comes off as boring rigid and bland with a macho tough girl attitude. I get that dynamic has been known to work well with the funny man and the straight man like Chris Farley and David Spade in Tommy Boy but at least David Spade is funny as fuck and his sarcasm pretty much makes the show. With Nadine that is just not the case at all. In my opinion Nadine Ross would have been best served as an ongoing villain in the series as she nailed that role so well in A Thief’s End.

As for the story line it’s fairly typical for the Uncharted games which means it’s captivating. In the simplest terms you set off on a mission to find an ancient Indian artifact, the Tusk of Gannesh. I’m no historian and I am not well versed in different cultures but from what I gather the information presented throughout the Lost Legacy is all fairly accurate and as always it’s presented with all the awe, the intrigue and the mystery the franchise is known for. Of course along the way there is another party seeking the same artifact and of course they just happen to have an army behind them so there is no shortage of killing and mayhem along the way. The main villain is Asav an Indian rebel who is pushing for a civil war and to wrestle control of his people. At first I thought he had some sort of bloodline claim to old Indian royalty but now I am not so sure. I am starting to think a lot of his talk and bluster was a lot of hot air and his motivations were for nothing more than a heist to raise funds for weapons. I do have to say that as a villain he was probably one of the better acted villains but unfortunately they don’t give him much to do here and I think it’s a shame that he feels criminally under used.

When you begin the game Chloe finds herself wandering through a busy Indian market with the intent of stowing away on a military vehicle. She is headed deepr into the city to break into Asav’s apartment looking for clues to the whereabouts of the tusk. The city seems to be under some sort of military curfew and there is a civil war raging around you as you make your way through claustrophobic alleyways and precarious rooftops. It is here where you meet up with your partner/bodyguard Nadine before heading out to the sprawling untamed Western Ghats, a mountainous region in India that is rendered so beautifully here. This is by far one of the most interesting sections of all of the Uncharted games. The Western Ghats level is the first truly open world area Naught Dog has created and it was amazing; beautiful vistas, gorgeous waterfalls, intricately detailed ancient temples and dozens of optional hidden collectibles.

There are a number of tasks and puzzles you need to complete before proceeding beyond this area but the game leaves the order in which you do them up to you. This seems like a litmus test by Naughty Dog to see how well received a non linear approach to their storytelling model would be taken and I can say with a resounding hell yes that it worked. In fact it worked so well for me I actually marked the rest of the linear portions of the game as a negative. The Western Ghats level is fairly large but by no means unruly. Naughty Dog certainly weren’t trying to contend for any biggest open world qualifiers with it and that’s perfectly acceptable. For this section of the game you are gifted with a wonderful 4x4 jeep to assist in navigating the abundant wetlands, mudslides, and waterfalls. Having the jeep is great and without it I’d probably be complaining about how long it took to run from objective A to objective B. Sure that would have allowed them to pad the game time but that’s how so many open world games end up being mediocre instead of fantastic. Like shitty filler songs on epic albums. I’ll take an engrossing ten hour game over a sparse and boring twenty hour game any day of the week.

After the Western Ghats level the game goes back to the more traditionally linear Uncharted on rails style and for the first time I found it a little jarring. In a way it makes sense that they narrowed the game field back down as from here on out you are generally in caves, on cliffs, or moving trough ancient temples but somehow after the open and exploratory nature of the preceding level it feels off to have the exploration be so linear. Then again maybe if it had been more open I’d be writing about being annoyed for continuously getting lost or how I spent way too much time fumble fucking around in the wrong area. Or maybe it’s because we only got one level out of nine that left the exploration up to us. I’ll never know for sure but I do hope to have more open world Uncharted adventures in the future. In fact I always found the open world design of the rebooted Tomb Raider games to be a notch in Crystal Dynamics belt. Overall I found the Uncharted games to be superior as they had better characters, better stories, better graphics and a better cinematic quality to them but I always acknowledge the open levels, the exploration, the scavenging and the crafting were all elements that worked really well and in some ways made the Tomb Raider games better.

The gameplay is pretty much identical to Uncharted 4 with only the addition of lock picking and a silenced pistol. The silenced pistol is long overdue for the Uncharted franchise. Especially when playing on Crushing mode, more on that below. The lock picking offers a little bit of character flare and sort of reinforces the idea Chloe is a really just a thief but aside from that it doesn’t bring anything to the table. Uncharted gameplay is sort of a mixed bag and always had been. It was vastly improved in A Thief’s End on the PS4 and those refinements are still here. But unfortunately that’s not always a good thing either. If you are just going to play the game on medium difficulty or below then the gameplay is totally fine and a rip roaring good time. Controls are pretty responsive you get to run and gun, stealth attack, scale impressive landmarks with ease which by all measure is a ton of fun.

My gripes with the gameplay really only materialize when you bump up the difficulty meter to Crushing, that’s when Uncharted has always been a rage inducing motherfucker. Not only is it rage inducing but it really magnifies the shortcomings in the game mechanics and the enemy AI. For example when a single enemy spots you instantly every enemy in the vicinity knows exactly where you are. This happens even if you kill him a millisecond after he spots you, way before he fires a round off or would have had any chance at calling out for assistance. Even if the enemy had shouted out the enemies who can’t see me shouldn’t react like heat seeking missiles and come at me guns blazing from every corner of the map. They should still have to investigate the area and then begin searching unless I’m clearly visible to them. Even when you are completely out of their sight lines and you move positions they still tend to know exactly where you’ve moved to. Making matters worse all of these assholes have dead eye aim and can snipe you with a handgun mid sprint from a mile out. It’s just so utterly demoralizing and frustrating. But again bear in mind if you have no intention to go for the platinum trophy there is no need to ever play the game on Crushing and all of this becomes a moot point. An added note is if you do want the platinum trophy, once you beat the game you can unlock all the weapons and infinite ammo put on auto aim and the game is easy as shit. Although, I guarantee you will still die in many frustrating ways on Crushing with all the cheats on. It really is that soul crushing. Hence the name I suspect.

Outside of Crushing mode the gun play is still pretty weak. I am by no means a pro gamer and although I was a pretty good FPS gamer in my PC days, my skills with a controller are somewhat lacking. I still do fairly well in most FPS games on the PS4 so I don’t think it’s just me when I find it a pain in the ass to aim effectively in this game. In fact most third person shooters are kind of shitty when it comes to aiming but this one seems a little worse. Of course maybe that’s because the dozen enemies attacking me from behind the thick tall grass that I can’t see through and they have no way to see me are still shooting me with pin point accuracy. All I know for sure is Ghost Recon Wildlands had the absolute best shooting in any third person game I can remember and I can only hope that gets borrowed by every developer making 3rd person games in the future.

So that’s it in a nutshell. The game is good, it’s fantastic but by no means is it perfect. It’s certainly worth 40$ and the dozen or so hours you are likely to spend engrossed in an epic treasure hunting adventure are far and away some of the better time you will have gaming. Naught Dog studios stands out for its mastery of delivering explosive action set pieces, clever puzzles, and emotionally charged story telling. Think Indiana Jones films back before the monstrosity known as the Crystal Skull. The Uncharted games are probably as good if not better than any of the Indiana Jones movies and certainly better than any of the National Treasure or Tomb Raider movies. Combine that with the fact that each game at the minimum runs five times longer than any of those movies and the fact that you get to control the action instead of simply being a passive observer and these are gaming experiences no one should pass up.

If you are interested in a overview of the entire Uncharted Franchise you can take a look right HERE as I take a personal stroll through how I came to love this series.

How does it rate...		Other games in that category...
3rd person game	A-	Horizon Zero Dawn, Tomb Raider 2013, Assassins Creed: Black Flag
Open level game	A-	Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End, Journey, Metro 2033, Dishonored 2
High Adventure game	A	Uncharted 2: Among Thieves, The Last of Us, Rise of the Tomb Raide
Action/adventure game	A	GTA 5, Fallout 4, Skyrim, Infamous Second Son

---

If you are curious to see how I have ranked other PS4 games you can see the full list here: https://steemit.com/gaming/@johnquake/current-gen-game-rankings-ps4

---

Putting my money where my mouth is here is my personal Uncharted: The Lost Legacy trophy list: https://psnprofiles.com/trophies/6508-uncharted-the-lost-legacy/Johnquake

---

* Note: These ratings are based on my personally rated games as of the time of this posting. Additions and Alterations made after this date will not be reflected in the written review. For anyone wondering why I include a link to my trophy profile the answer is simple enough, it's an easy way to verify how much of the game I have actually played whereas with most reviews it's unclear if the reviewer had only spent a handful of hours on a game they praise or slam.

---

The best Uncharted: The Lost Legacy Trophy hunters resource:
https://www.playstationtrophies.org/game/uncharted-the-lost-legacy/trophies/