Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End

“It’s not my first lost city,” protagonist Nathan Drake says to his brother at a certain point in Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End. This is a gorgeous but ultimately safe sequel that offers familiar set pieces, locales, and characters: it’s a game that tries very hard to marvel the player with its visuals and spectacle but, just like Nathan, we’ll nevertheless feel like we have seen it all before.

A Thief’s End, after a brief action sequence, opens with a flashback that shows the relationship between a young Nathan and his brother, Sam, while they’re in an orphanage (their bond is built around trust, but also around abandonment and loss). Nathan appears to greatly admire his brother, who encourages him to sneak out of the orphanage and even teaches him parkour moves while they climb the roofs of the place. Sam appears to be much more than just an inspiration to Nathan, he’s laying the whole groundwork for the man the adventurer will eventually become, acting precisely as Nathan will do later. When Nathan asks his brother if he knows where he’s going, for example, Sam’s answer couldn’t be more Drake-ish: “Eh, more or less.”

In the present, Nathan is trying to live a normal life with his wife, Elena. However, he still yearns for adventure, feeling out of place in that ordinary world, as an early scene reveals: when Elena starts to talk about her day, trying to bond with him, Nathan’s mind drifts away when he looks at a picture of an island. Therefore, when his brother comes back from the dead and reveals that he’s in big trouble, Nathan quickly embarks on yet another quest: he must search for the lost treasure of pirate Henry Avery if he is to save Sam’s life.

A Thief’s End’s narrative is pretty simple in terms of structure and plot. Nathan travels to many countries in search of Avery’s hidden treasure and finds only clues to the next place he must visit. Players will soon become very acquainted with the elements of his search, as they are repeated quite often – Uncharted 4 turns anyone able to recognize the statue of St. Dismas in the blink of an eye, for example.

One of the central conflicts in the story is that Nathan is lying to Elena about his adventures. He had agreed to retire and live an ordinary, safer life – even though he hates it – and so can’t bring himself to tell her the truth, fearing her reaction. Nathan doesn’t have the guts to tell Elena that he has hidden the existence of his brother from her all this time, too, and one lie starts to stack on top of the other: Nathan may be fearless when it comes to exploring dungeons and climbing steep cliffs, but he’s a coward when it comes to relationships.

For this reason, Nathan will be stuck with his brother most of the time. The problem, however, is that Sam is not a very interesting character: he is just Nathan Drake 2.0. When they are adventuring together, both will say the exact same things and react in the exact same way. He is practically Nathan’s double. They both love to live dangerously and so, after each incredible and dangerous stunt, they will tell each other how they thought that was amazing and exhilarating: “That was fun, right?” they both like to say after nearly dying. Sam being so like Nathan is clearly the point, as the protagonist’s brother is shown to be the reason for Nathan being the way that he is. However, in practice, it is like watching two copies of the same character talking to each other the whole game: it can become repetitive and tiresome.

Near the end, there is a plot twist involving Sam, but one that is utterly predictable and fails to change their relationship for too long. They’ll still love each other, protect each other, and sometimes abandon each other: that is how their brotherhood works. Elena is the character that stands out the most, then: if, at first, she appears to be an obstacle in Nathan’s true path, later she demonstrates how that is only his fault. She understands his wild nature, after all, but will not let him off the hook for his lies and deceits.

The villain, on the other hand, acts precisely like the previous ones: he is one-dimensional, seeks the treasure because of “power, fame, and fortune,” will kill everyone on his path, and so on. There is a mercenary called Nadine, who appears to have more common sense than her partner and shows great potential, but she ends up being just a wasted opportunity, with little screen time to really shine.

The gameplay remains almost the same. Some brief “sliding sections” were added, which function very similarly to the ones in God of War: Ascension: while sliding down a small cliff, the protagonist avoids debris by moving sideways and jumping when the time is right. Besides that, there is a “grappling hook” that can be used to push objects, jump over huge gaps, or slide down mountains. The rest remains the same: Nathan will be climbing a steep cliff and a stone will break, making him fall suddenly but still be alright, and then later he’ll shoot hundreds of bad guys or take them down silently, and things like that. The level design is much more open now, to make up for this, and we even get some driving sequences over some very large landscapes, for example. Sometimes, there will be some caverns and optional buildings to explore as well, but the rewards for doing so are not that great.

These exotic places that Nathan visits sure are pretty to look at, but they are not as awe-inspiring as they used to be. The problem is that this time the designers decided to take a much more grounded approach not only when it comes to the story – there are no more supernatural undertones, for example – but when it comes to the environments as well. There are no impossibly huge statues to climb this time around and the “lost city” looks just like a lost city would in real life: just a huge amount of forgotten ruble. There are some eccentricities along the way – like an enormous revolving puzzle beneath an island – but these are few and far between. A Thief’s End is still a gorgeous game to look at, but it has lost some of its sense of wonder and magic nonetheless.

Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End is supposed to be Nathan Drake’s last adventure and it is a good one. It has exciting set pieces, some good character development, and a very impressive presentation. But it just feels like this has all been done before.

March 07, 2025.