PLATFORM: PS5 | RELEASE DATE: 28TH JANUARY
As one of Sony’s most widely-acclaimed and best-selling exclusive series, the Uncharted games need very little introduction. Nathan Drake’s action-packed Indiana Jones-style adventures take him and his pals across the world in search of lost civilisations filled with traps, treasure, mysterious legends and rival hunters eager to stop Drake at all costs. It might have only been a few years since the release of Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End and its standalone expansion, The Lost Legacy, but now – to warm us all up for the release of the upcoming Uncharted movie – both games have been remastered, making use of the PS5’s more advanced hardware to add a slick layer of polish to what were already two undeniably great titles.
The most noticeable improvement for most players will be the graphical boost afforded to both games, with a range of performance options available to suit most modern TVs. If you’re able to run things in 120fps, the option is there, but even the jump to 60fps makes a big difference to how smoothly Drake and co move around the various environments they find themselves in. New lighting and textures make everything look cleaner than before, and 3D audio is also now on offer for those with fancy speaker systems. While these might not make for any sort of earth-shattering difference, and the “haptic feedback” (where the PS5 controller reacts to your movements by grinding and rumbling away in your hands) does still feel a bit gimmicky, overall it’s a welcome upgrade for what seems to be Nathan Drake’s last hurrah.
Very few games consistently hit their marks quite like Uncharted, and the fourth game is undoubtedly the high point of the series so far. It’s like playing through a light-hearted feelgood buddy movie full of exhilarating set pieces across a variety of stunning vistas, lavish mansions and crumbling crypts, and its follow-up, The Lost Legacy, starring Chloe Frazer (she’s everything Lara Croft should be but isn’t) in place of Nathan Drake, reaches most of the same heights (it’s just much shorter, which isn’t always a bad thing). Whether it’s worth shelling out for the remaster if you own the originals is very much down to how much you enjoy the games, but if you’re new to the series then there’s no better place to jump in, making this collection an absolutely essential purchase.
