Sony has done a lot to piss gamers off since the Playstation 3’s launch, but they seem to finally be getting their act together by concentrating on fixing the biggest problem – the lack of good fucking games to play. Since waking up at 6am to fight the holiday shopping crowds for a Playstation 3 last December, I’ve used my PS3 very little. There’s a layer of dust over the system that I could draw pictures on with my finger. That’s changed the last month, though, with the release of Ratchet and Clank Future Tools of Destruction and Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune.
Uncharted has been on and off of my gaming radar over the past year or so. I first saw a trailer of the game late 2006. The graphics looked pretty impressive, but I had no idea what the game played like. Other people were immediately slapping “game of the year” and “Sony’s best first-party title” labels on it. Shills they may be, but the hype at least piqued my interest in the game.
Fast-forward one year later and I still had no idea what the game was like. Reading the interweb only gave me the impression that the game was “Tomb Raider, but with a dude instead of Lara’s tits”. Fortunately, the 1200MB demo hit the Playstation Network earlier today, allowing me to finally see if this game was worthy of the hype.
The short answer is yes.
I’ve had a chance to go through the demo a few times and have been quite impressed. The game combines tight, responsive controls with gorgeous graphics, realistic human animations, and challenging (but winnable) combat to create one of the best games I’ve played this year. A simple way to describe the gist of the game would be to say that it’s an amalgamation of Gears of War, Tomb Raider, Prince of Persia: Sands of Time, and Syphon Filter: Dark Mirror. If the full game delivers on the puzzle solving element and continues the solid combat and platforming from the demo, I’ll be ready to proclaim it the best title on the Playstation 3 thus far and the best reason to finally take the PS3 plunge.
Read my detailed impressions after the jump
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