Swing into action with a loveable scoundrel
Uncharted: Legacy Of Thieves Collection (PlayStation 5, £44.99)
Verdict: Adventure Playground
ONCE upon a time, game designers wondered: what if Indiana Jones were a woman? Thus was born Lara Croft.
Then, some years later, they thought: what if Lara Croft were a man? And that’s when Nathan Drake came into being.
Or perhaps I’m being slightly unfair to Drake, the star of the Uncharted games and now a Hollywood movie. Over the past 15 years, he’s become his own character: a blue-collar thief with both a heart and a likeable group of friends.
And those qualities have never been better displayed than in the Uncharted: Legacy Of Thieves Collection, which has just been released for PlayStation 5. This isn’t a new game, but rather a union of two previous Uncharted titles, both upgraded for Sony’s latest console: 2016’s Uncharted 4 and 2017’s Uncharted: The Lost Legacy.
These were already beautiful games, full of expressive faces and expansive vistas, so it is a little difficult to work out what the upgrade has achieved.
But if you want to see Uncharted at what is technically its best, that’s what this collection offers.
It also offers, in Uncharted 4, a fine summary of the series’ charms — and conclusion to Drake’s story. It has you, as him, clambering around ruins, shooting at baddies and swinging from one cinematic action sequence to another, in a way that’s more comforting than it is challenging.
But it’s Lost Legacy that is the real draw; a tauter and more audacious experience that stars Chloe Frazer, Nadine Ross and the tree-capped mountains of southwest India.
And it asks a question for the future of Uncharted: what if Nathan Drake were a woman?