Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception Review

Scene for scene this is the studio at its most virtuosic. The chateau burns in real time while you climb through it, the cargo plane sequence hands you a genuinely disorienting freefall, and the capsizing cruise ship turns the floor into a moving surface for ten unbroken minutes. The sand and water technology was the best anyone had on the hardware, and the Rub al Khali stretch is quietly one of the most beautiful things on a PlayStation 3.

The plot is where it wobbles. Marlowe's order is a vague threat, the hallucination subplot arrives and evaporates, and several transitions between chapters simply skip the connective reason, so the game moves from spectacle to spectacle without an argument holding it. The combat also regressed at launch, with aiming that Naughty Dog patched afterward and melee sections that stop the shooting to play a scripted brawl. The Drake and Sully flashback material is the best writing in the trilogy. Uneven as a story, breathtaking as a ride.