AI

Uncharted 3 enemy and allied AI knows the battlefield, it knows cover and it knows traversal. It can get around the levels almost as well as the player and this makes for great, unpredictable and most of all exciting battles in the single player. It has that really fantastic feel to it when you can watch you enemies using the zip lines and climbing, jumping and crossing ledges to get at you. It also means that as a player you can pick the right time to throw that grenade, shoot that bad guy and sow chaos amongst your foes. They’ll react to your actions too, so don’t expect alert enemies to behave as dumb as the ones that aren’t aware.

Your allies are also pretty damn good in a fight; they’ll support you and work together to deal with any threats that might come along. They also follow Nathan most of the time, traversing beams and ledges just like him. If they’re blocked by story constraints of course they’ll wait for the player to do something to let them progress rather than just running against a nearby wall for an hour because they forgot the path.

Sound

Each sound effect in Uncharted 3 is spot on, from the gunfire to the swoosh of rockets and rpgs, to the environmental effects in the various locations in Drake’s new journey.

Music

One of our favourite Uncharted scores to date, the third game has a great mix of action and low-key musical themes that combine for a superb accompaniment to the on-screen action and exploration. Nate’s Theme 3.0 is a great remix of the original Uncharted theme for the hero and it really kicks the game off in style.

Voice

Nolan North, Claudia Black and the rest are all on fine form here. The voice work for this iteration of the franchise is sterling and superbly done. The characters have some excellent atmosphere to them and it’s all brought out from every actor involved.

Dialogue

The script is sharp, funny, witty and most of all it’s superbly written.

Multiplayer

Where to start? Uncharted 2 had some pretty cool multiplayer and it wasn’t as fully realised as it could have been, so for 3, Naughty Dog rocked out some more indepth gaming and provided a suite of customisation options that would take its own review to cover. There are custom designs for your characters, emblems that are displayed on walls as you dominate a match. Uncharted TV that shows the best moments from the Youtube video upload functionality in the multiplayer menus and more. As you rank up you earn medals and kickbacks and perks that give you fantastic abilities, like the one that lets you turn into smoke and appear elsewhere on the map.

There’s the buddy system that lets you work with a partner and help each other out, spawning on them, doing cooperative kill taunts and more. There is a plethora of team based and adversarial modes. There’s cooperative play and split-screen play for most of the game modes so you can rock out some fun times with a friend. It is basically so much better than Uncharted 2 multiplayer in every single way. Cinema mode is back too and you can link a lot of the Uncharted 3 stuff with Facebook.

Then there are the matches themselves, either against the AI in a cooperative based treasure hunting mode or against other human players. Uncharted 3 is also smooth in terms of latency and the maps themselves have a cinematic feel with a bunch of special moments that we won’t spoil. Seriously, you have to play the multiplayer to see it for yourselves.

3rd time is the charm?

After playing 3 to completion in a marathon session, we’re really hoping that there’s an Uncharted 4 now and Drake remains one of our favourite game characters to date, surpassing Lara Croft in terms of Tomb Raiding prowess. Drake is also a lot kinder on the fauna of the local area, without needing to murder lots of endangered animals.

Onwards and upwards Naughty Dog.