Uncharted: The Nathan Drake Collection Review

Remasters are usually a resolution bump and a trophy list, and this one is closer to restoration work. Bluepoint rebuilt the lighting, replaced character models, reworked textures and held a locked sixty frames across all three games, which changes how the shooting feels far more than the marketing admitted. Aiming that was mushy at thirty on a PlayStation 3 becomes crisp, and the platforming reads cleanly because you can finally see where the next ledge is.

Playing them back to back is also the clearest lesson available in how fast Naughty Dog learned. Drake's Fortune is a competent third person shooter with a great cast stuck in too many jungle firefights, and then Among Thieves arrives an entire generation ahead of it. The omission is the multiplayer, cut from all three, which mattered to people who lived in the second game's lobbies. The disc also cannot fix the encounters themselves, so the bullet sponge marines and the supernatural final acts survive intact. As a way to own this trilogy it is close to definitive.