@tatermoog:
It's amazing how they made the combat feel ever worse than U1. One of the more boggling issues I've seen with a Naughty Dog game.
General theory is that the plot was wrecked by internal conflicts on the story side and that the gameplay was screwed up by this being the first game ND made while running two teams simultaneously (A-Team was on TLoU).
I guess it's a good thing then that there aren't as many combat segments in this game (or at least it doesn't seem like there are as many). That said, this is the most frustrating combat I've experienced in Uncharted game to date, to the point I felt like throwing my controller in anger. And again, I was playing on Easy. I think Yahtzee from Zero Punctuation pretty much hit the nail on the head that the combat is really just trial and error, memorizing what and where all the bad guys are and finding the best vantage points to hide from and attack them.
Anyway, I completed the game yesterday and, aside from the combat issues, this is probably the weakest Uncharted story thus far. It does some cool things like showing us young Drake and building and expanding on his relationship with Sully, but man these stories are just getting really repetitive. Once again Drake searches for a lost treasure and/or ancient city, following a series of clues and logic leaps that I barely have the capacity to understand or care about, while some evil European person with a seemingly endless army of goons who will gladly throw their lives away for seemingly no reason, also searches for the treasure for nefarious purposes. Last time it was an Eastern European warlord who wanted blue goo that turns people into super men. This time it's Margaret Thatcher who wants some water that I guess makes people have a bad acid trip. And, in true Tom Cruise fashion, Drake undergoes insane physical stunts, surviving only through sheer, practically implausible, luck and the fact that he apparently never runs out of stamina, making him effectively immortal (I say that, but I probably died about 10 quadrillion times during my playthrough). But I digress.
All the old "favorite" characters are back, some practically just out of obligation, as well as one or two new ones. As I said before, Sully is pretty much the main focus as far as the side characters, exploring his history with Drake and the nature of their relationship, and that is probably the strongest point of the story. We also get introduced to Charlie, who is honestly a pretty interesting character, but then he gets dropped halfway through the game and is never mentioned again. And of course original bae Elena returns, whom I'm now suspecting is just a really bland character. C'mon Elena, get you and your corn husk hair out of here and give us more Charlie! Oh yeah, and Chloe's back and she's just sort of…there. Seriously Naughty Dog, don't put characters in the story unless you have something for them to do. I mean, at least Indiana Jones and James Bond knew to change up their female leads. And speaking of James Bond, that battle in the cargo hold of the flying plane is lifted straight from The Living Daylights, but again I digress.
Okay yeah, it does sound like I'm being really harsh on this game, but I still did have fun playing it. The scenery and locales are gorgeous, the puzzles are fun to the solve, and the story, trite as it is, is amusing enough. But yeah, not just this game, but the Uncharted series as a whole, does have a lot of flaws that's probably going to keep it from becoming one of my favorite video game franchises. I still intend to keep playing, but once I've gone back and gotten all the treasures, I think I'm gonna take another break from the series and finally play Breath of the Wild before moving on to Uncharted 4.