Uncharted: Drake's Fortune Review

Everything the series became is visible here in outline. Nolan North's Drake is immediately likeable, the writing trusts characters to interrupt each other, and the wet jungle foliage was doing things with vegetation and water that nothing else on the hardware attempted in 2007. The traversal is generous rather than demanding, a rhythm of climbing and gawping that sets a pace later games would learn to vary. Then the combat happens, over and over.

Enemies soak an absurd number of rifle rounds, the cover system is sticky, arenas repeat their layouts, and the back half in particular becomes a corridor of waves with a supernatural twist that turns competent men into sprinting damage sponges. The final act is the low point of the whole series. What holds it together is charm and confidence: the tone is set, Elena and Sully are already the right characters, and you can see the studio realising in real time what it has. Historically important, occasionally tedious, and considerably better as the first act of a trilogy than as a game on its own.