Uncharted: The Lost Legacy Review

Cutting Drake loose turned out to be liberating. Chloe is a thief with an actual internal conflict about her father, Nadine is a mercenary with contempt for improvisation, and their friction gives the dialogue somewhere to go that another Drake and Sully pairing could not have found. The Western Ghats chapter is the structural experiment: a wide valley with a jeep, four optional towers and no prescribed order, which lets the puzzle solving breathe in a way the linear games never allow.

It is short, roughly eight hours, and that restraint is a feature, since nothing here is filler and the pacing never sags in a middle act. The final train sequence is a knowing echo of Among Thieves rather than a bettering of it, and the villain is thin even by series standards. Combat inherits the refinements of the fourth game, including stealth that actually works and rope traversal used with purpose. As a coda to a fifteen year run it is confident, unfussy and better than a spin off had to be.