Pixel Shed

Video games, they're kind of a thing to us.

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Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain is just downright fantastic

I wouldn’t call this a review, because I’m only halfway into the story and about 60+ hours in at this point, so it’s one of those things.

Sometimes when I come around to writing about a big video game release, I’ll start these things with a “I’m not sure where to start” paragraph or sometimes, I’ll do what I’m doing now and explain my thought process to opening that tough introductory paragraph. Other times I’ll just state the name of the game or whatever it is and move on from there. Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain is sort of like this, in a way. It opens as any other Metal Gear does, with a hefty amount of time with the controller in hand, eventually to the desk and finally, back into the hands as I go against my physiotherapist’s orders to not sit back like a slob. Once it gets out of that comfortable Metal Gear angle, it leaves it all behind.

The Phantom Pain is still, very much so, a Metal Gear game. It edges on self-seriousness, aligned with absolute self-awareness and spoonfuls of social stuff that feels incredibly in place, but for all the wrong reasons.

I come to Metal Gear for equal parts story and game. I think Metal Gear Solid 3 is one of the pinnacles of single player experiences and that 2 is a heaping pile of trash that people only remember fondly for about a quarter of the game. Peace Walker is the apex of co-operative play and 4 is an absolute gem, even if it does wreck a majority of the supernatural elements in the lore.

Though, what about Metal Gear Solid 1, where all this nuttiness truly started? Well, we’ve actually come back around to it. Whereas 2 and 4 leap off of the edge into Animeland, for better and for worse, 3 and Peace Walker take you into new territory - with the added condition that you put up with the anime parasite that resides in the back of it all - MGS1 is fairly grounded in some kind of reality that makes sense.

A super soldier must take on terrorists alone and save the day. It’s Hollywood, through and through. Your suspension of disbelief is safe as Solid Snake takes on a tank single handedly with grenades or a weird floating Russian man in tight leather is a psychic and you need to stop him by swapping the controllers over. It makes some kind of logical sense.

The Phantom Pain brings this back, following the first Solid game’s note of allowing the ‘Metal Gear’-ness to take a step back through story and blossom through gameplay.

On the most recent edition of The Giant Bombcast (08/09/15 - 09/08/15), Jeff Gerstmann put it well that we live in the universe that built off of shooting ice cubes into pieces in MGS2. The Phantom Pain, as weird it gets (and I’m sure as I continue through, it’ll draw from the stone that I know and love), it still resides in a logical, grounded world, even with all the weird illogical systems in place.

A prime example is the fulton recovery system, which is my favourite mechanic from Peace Walker. It allows you to kidnap enemy soldiers that will then be brought back to your base and work for you in future. But in Peace Walker, which in all honesty, was like “What if Big Boss was Superman?” the Video Game, it didn’t need that much explaining. The drop to PSP allowed for a lot of shortcuts to be just taken as they are. The Phantom Pain however, takes place in 1984 and in a far more realistic world, such a world that you can’t not have an explanation for why such a system is in place. Sure, Batman used it in The Dark Knight, but that’s Batman and not semi-realistic soldier man kidnapping the entire Soviet army posted in Afghanistan. So you hear over dialogue from enemies that it was dropped due to being too dangerous and that whoever is still using it must have an expert pilot on their hands.

That’s it. That’s your angle for ‘realism’, regardless if you’re attaching balloons to trucks full of soldiers. Doesn’t it make sense now?

It’s fascinating to see Metal Gear go back the way it came and do what it’s known for through other means. Cutscenes that would have taken an age in previous titles, are condensed into short bursts at the end of missions. A scene where Big Boss hands back a necklace to a child isn’t filled with slow motion and overly dramatic dialogue between the characters. It’s a subdued, quiet and filled with more punch than say, 2’s revelation that Raiden has been a pawn in the system all along.

Here’s the thing, the story beats that have appeared in The Phantom Pain are still very much in line with Metal Gear. There’s whole scenes dedicated to confusing the fuck out of you or making you cringe through the dialogue. It’s why I love Metal Gear, because I’m a person who loves seeing miserable, melodramatic soldier men talk about how they’ve each lost something or how they’re already demons.

The thing that’s maybe an issue is Big Boss himself, now equipped with the new voice of Kiefer Sutherland. His rugged tones and genuine miserableness screams Big Boss. It’s not as jarring as hearing him in Ground Zeroes and over time, I’ve actually come to like this Big Boss voice. It would have maybe been nice to hear Richard Doyle reprise his role from MGS4, but Sutherland is incredibly well suited. Though, the issue stems from the fact he doesn’t talk all that often. Swaths of conversation feel like they need that classic Snake interjection to level things out a bit, but instead Kaz and Ocelot will stop and explain anyhow. It’s more jarring to not hear him now than it is to actually hear him.

It’s not a massive issue though. In fact, Big Boss in this game has everything around him go on and there’s no real need to have him question stuff anymore, because - as Steve Burns from Videogamer.com put in the most recent podcast (9/9/15) - he’s the Boss. He’s a very different Snake, with the world carrying on around him because it makes sense for it to. How his actions affect the world and the story that plays out, is through you, the player.

See, MGSV is all about giving the player the utmost control, as any Big Boss should have. Mother Base is completely customizable to an extent, either relying on Kaz’s decisions for staff or managing the hundreds of people you’ll gather on your Ocean Clubhouse for Men (and some ladies) into an assortment of teams.

There’s no real “choice” in how the story plays out, but your actions in missions will dictate what you get from the story at large. Extracting someone that you were supposed to kill and earning even more information or a better member for a unit is amazing. Having a couple soldiers spit out pieces to a larger puzzle of where a convoy is coming from and then that last guard tells you there’s a document with it all on, saving you the hassle of figuring out which road they’re going to come on.

In other games and even other Metal Gear games, this would be dumped on you through story or linearity. In The Phantom Pain, it’s up to you to figure it out, instead of Big Boss going into a cutscene and doing it for you.

Your actions in the world might not affect the story at large in deep ways, but how the mission is handled can go either completely perfect or your expert plan to snipe the dude being dropped off goes horribly wrong as you miss and draw the attention of a whole airport to your whereabouts.

I’ve described it almost as if the actions of the player don’t even bother anything really, but they do, because in some really, really pretentious way, the stories are what you make of it. How you handle a mission and the story you tell after it, is where Metal Gear Solid V is infinitely better than anything at the moment.

The moments that are stripped away in the story that Metal Gear is known for, is still there, but no longer in the story as such, but within the game itself. It’s embedded forever.

All this pretentiousness comes from The Phantom Pain’s absolute freedom it gives the player. It never says no to something you might want to try out and it’s up to your to find where the line ends.

The basis of most of the game is infiltration, similar to Far Cry 3, except, while Far Cry 3 laid all the cards on the table through what’s available inside the base or making it clearly obvious, MGSV hangs back a little bit. It’ll give you what the objective is, but Kaz will reassure you that you’re in complete control.

Sure, I like to play a lot like I did in Peace Walker, but when taking out a tank, why am I going to shoot a rocket at it, when I can easily shroud myself in smoke and take it for myself with a balloon?

MGSV doesn’t hide stuff from you, it wants you to experiment with just about everything it has to offer. There’s a particular mission that’s a sniping battle with the new character, Quiet. I couldn’t get close and I didn’t want to shoot her, in case it resulted in her not being recruitable. So I dropped a supply drop on her head a couple times and was awarded for it.

Other open world games claim to be a sandbox and in technical terms they are, but not like this. Grand Theft Auto is a sandbox, as is Far Cry and as so is for instance, Halo. You have options on how to do things and a certain amount of freedom. The Phantom Pain is another step above. Sure, once you understand what limitations there are, you’ll fall into a certain routine, but the fact that I can play a tape of a man shitting out loud in a toilet and guards will go away when investigating it, is the lengths the game goes to.

Though the game has flaws, mostly within the character Quiet. For a game that allows you to play as the very few female soldiers you have recruited (sans Peace Walker’s codec of “Awwwriiight” from Kaz) in the identical role that Snake would assume, Quiet goes against a lot of the stuff Metal Gear had almost worked out. The entire thing is because of how she’s designed, how the camera is directed and her actions. Even against another group of female characters at a later point, the camera lingers on their introduction by panning across all their boobs. The default camera position whenever Quiet is on screen seems to be her chest, even in the helicopter and you zoom in first person, it automatically goes there. She stretches with her arse to you and lays about Mother Base, occasionally showering or suggestively sauntering around.

It’s a huge issue, because Quiet is an incredibly cool character, with a fantastic mystery behind her and she’s an excellent partner on missions. She decimates entire camps at the drop of a hat and everyone treats her like they would any other scary, disappearing lady who can see and calculate things like no one else. Yet as with any other Metal Gear game, no one stopped the design team and Kojima from perhaps looking at another way to do this.

At some point, they had design meetings about this character and this is what passed.

Now, I know the fictional reason for her lack of clothes, but that doesn’t make it any better. She’s a brand new, fictional character and the entire world was Kojima Production’s bandana wearing oyster. A fictional character can be presented and fit however you want, yet this is what we’re given.

That’s my experiences so far with Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain. It’s an absolute delight and a fantastic note for Kojima to leave the series on, even if his departure comes with a sad rain cloud over it. 

After all that’s said about this, I don’t want another Metal Gear game. We’ve reached the climax of the series, both in story and gameplay. I don’t need to know about anything else in the lore - unless Platinum are up for doing Rising 2 - and I don’t need another game like this churned out by Konami at a later date.

Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain is the perfect Metal Gear game. Instead of hiding it within story and giving me snippets in gameplay, it makes sure it’s always Metal Gear, all the time.

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Yoshi’s Woolly World Review

BY JOEL LOYNDS

There’s something spectacular about Yoshi’s Woolly World, with the looks and oh-so-good Yoshi gameplay, that you start to forget about the insidious nature that backs it from Big House of Nintendo.

Woolly World once again follows the Yoshis as they chase down a Magikoopa who has gone and unravelled them, spreading their bits and pieces throughout the land in some hope of something or other. It’s unimportant, but what is, is the fact that you can now collect many different Yoshis to play as, including a Panda themed one.

The game mostly follows the typical Yoshi’s Island formula, with you hovering, aiming eggs and collecting stuff in hopes of getting 100%. Though, it’s not some kind of cake walk because of the appearance, like Kirby’s Epic Yarn and it’s not a ruthless platformer, but getting everything and finishing some of the later levels can harken back to those older Mario games.

It also doesn’t help that everything is either hidden or has to be acquired in some particular way. Woolly World knows what it’s doing and instead of rushing on through, I found myself stopping to search an area or look at what’s in front of me before jumping straight in. Of course, searching an area is mostly jumping around into walls in hopes that it’s a secret passage.

Yoshi’s Island is perhaps my favourite Mario game aside from Sunshine (I know), with a perfect mix of nostalgia and genuine love for what it did. Woolly World gives me the exact feeling that the first game did. Each level is open to explore and vastly different from the last, with some ideas coming and going as fast as you’ve learnt them.

You’ve probably noticed the aesthetic is wool. It’s in the name. It’s glorious to play in. You start to notice all the little details, like bobbles of wool on the ground and I absolutely adore the way that they’ve taken everything I once knew and given it this brand new look. Seeing things I grew up with in a new fashion is bobbydazzler.

Yoshi’s Woolly World is like a nice jumper that you’ve had since it was that bit too big for you. Now at 20 years old, it fits just right and every time you put it on, it’s a small reminder of the time you spent in McDonald’s beating up Baby Bowser or getting your GameBoy confiscated in class for playing under the desk. The main problem is with Yoshi’s Woolly World, all the marvellous ideas, looks and wonderful feelings it brings to my brain, is that I’ve done this before.

I’ve done this before and I’ve done it too many times, but because of Nintendo’s lacking release schedule for the Wii U, by the time something comes around from them, I’ve forgotten that I’ve just done it.

This is the dark side to Yoshi’s Woolly World, disguised in a lovingly crafted world of cute, cuddly and squeaky dinosaurs.

If we go back to what I said about the game, you can apply that nearly any Nintendo game that has gotten high scores, praised or loved. Practically the whole Wii U library from Nintendo themselves is made up of this. You’ve seen their lows trying to grab onto those feelings with New Super Mario Brothers and you’ve seen the absolute highs on the original Wii with Super Mario Galaxy 1 and 2.

Nintendo is the absolute master of their system, the grand masters of creativity and giving us something that we want from a video game. Maybe not in the fashion that we always expected, but there’s always a reason to bet on Nintendo. Yoshi’s Woolly World is this embodied.

It gives me the carefree nature of Kirby’s Epic Yarn and the fantastic graphical style, along with that good ol’ Nintendo magic in platforming and I get another Yoshi game that isn’t total shit. But, imagine what they could have done. I haven’t played Splatoon yet, but you look over at it and what it’s doing, what it’s sold, why it’s done so well for itself and it’s this stark reminder that sometimes Nintendo can do something new that isn’t just refinement or evolution on something I’ve already played.

Yoshi’s Woolly World is a more refined Yoshi’s Island with a different style to it. It’s nothing new and while I don’t mind not playing ‘new’ things in that sense, because lord almighty, go look at what everyone else is doing and you might think I’m a hypocrite for claiming The Witcher 3 is perhaps one of the best games of all time, even though it’s another AAA, massive open-world role playing game with a white protagonist. But it’s different to what Nintendo do.

See, with everyone else, I’m garunteed something I’m familiar with and sometimes it’s a complete knockoff of something I’ve obviously already played. Just go look at the PS3/360 library around 2008 to 2011 and count how many cover based third person shooters came out on the tail of Gears of War. But at least, through all the ripoffs and all the samey-same games, I was perhaps given that developer’s particular flair or take on a genre. There was perhaps some excitement from a critical perspective to see what this particular game did differently to try and separate from the crowd.

With the indie scene, I see so much. I see stuff that Nintendo introduced to the world done in a million other ways that completely subvert expectations or play right into them with that kick of flair that sometimes is missing from a Nintendo product, ala New Super Mario.

At least a majority of what I played and continue to play, is mostly different from each other through their worlds, looks, takes on gameplay and so on and so forth. With Nintendo and the Wii U or 3DS, I already know what to expect. I knew Yoshi’s Woolly World was going to be a good video game, much like the recent Yoshi’s Island game on 3DS. It was a good game, just horrifically dull.

The lack of excitement that I get from something I’m enjoying so much, is the constant knowledge that Nintendo could have done something so different. Yet they don’t. I look at Splatoon and see the future, with something that is more Splatoon. There’s nothing wrong with sequels improving on what we have already, in fact, sometimes much like that big jumper or whatever, it’s comforting to be in an environment you know.

But this is Nintendo’s entire mantra. It’s something they do over and over, you’ve heard this rant a million times before. They’re masters of what they do, but Yoshi’s Woolly World? Something we’ve been doing since 1995. I played this in a different skin back in 2002. It was fantastic. Thirteen years on? It’s still fantastic.

That’s the insidious nature of Nintendo. They get away with it and there’s nothing we can do to stop them, because why get out the jumper when you’re pretty comfortable already?

[joel-is-at-superprofessional]

Pixel Shed do E3!

Here’s the best videos we did for E3! I hope you enjoy it!

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Someone uploaded Gears of War HD to Xbox DVR. Uploaded here in case the original gets pulled:

https://xboxdvr.com/gamer/ElitistPath05/video/2080951#

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This week’s podcast is filled with talk about everything that’s on fire!

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Joel sat down with Peter Molyneux to discuss things.

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Jacob gets his wish, as we all play Hearthstone for a bit!

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News time! 

Ouya are in trouble, Hatred is actually getting released and there could be a new Final Fantasy XV demo!

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Pixel Shed TV returns for a second episode!

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Miyamoto visits Pixel Shed on the podcast!

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Jacob, Joel and Oli have a look at some balls being smashed in Mortal Kombat X.

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Horror is in the closet

Survival horror and just horror in general in video games is very much alive and well, it’s just hidden in places you wouldn’t expect.

Horror games have lost their touch in recent years, but they’re slowly making a comeback in the most unlikely of places. It’s not the people in the expected big companies and nor is it the old masters of the genre, like Shinji Mikami and so on. It’s the indie developer and teams that you’d never expect.

When horror was introduced to video games way back when, the issue that was brought up was how do you make a game scary? How do you make the user feel terrified of what’s to come?

Well the first thing you do is make the player at a disadvantage. In Alone in the Dark from 1992, you must solve puzzles and a significant amount of enemies cannot be defeated in a direct confrontation. The Clock Tower series actively has you run away from the main antagonist and then when Resident Evil and Silent Hill came about, they allow the player to fight against the various creatures, but things are in very short supply - if you’re not careful.

This is what made survival horror games fantastic. They took things away that you were used to, especially in a time where being limited in something was uncommon. They worked against the grain, making you actually fight to see it to the end of just a hallway in a way that games didn’t really do back then.

But that mentality comes crashing down once you leave 2005. On the Playstation 2 and GameCube, you had Resident Evil 4, Silent Hill 2 and 3, among others and they are the absolute pinnacle of survival horror. Resident Evil 4 brought with it new foes to fight, with zombies being replaced by mutant villagers and a masked chainsaw wielding madman. Silent Hill 2, with Pyramid Head.

While Resident Evil 4 brought with it a more action orientated method of dealing out scares through sheer tension and the unknown, giving players the ability to blast foes away with a shotgun, it still delivered that primary thing:

Scares.

But everything kind of went south after this. Resident Evil lost what made it scary in 5 by amping up the action and Silent Hill went the way of ‘what is even going on anymore’ that long video game series go through at some point.

Then Dead Space came along. Dead Space, the game with so much hope behind it, jettisoned off into space to stop the asteroid from hitting the horror genre in the face, lost power to thrusters and died horrifically - on the first outing.

Now yes, the first half of Dead Space is terrifying, for the same reason that Resident Evil 4 was. The unknown. These new enemies, ‘Necromorphs’, threw a curveball into the mix by having to be dismembered to neutralize them. Though Dead Space doesn’t do anything new over the whole course of the game. It’ll pit you against the depths of space, with fantastic sound design, but doesn’t do anything new past the first few hours. Creepy aliens popping up while pretending to be dead can only be so scary for so long and the sequels got worse in quality, while pumping out more of an action orientated thing.

So with horror skewing towards leaving its audience in the dust for chasing the mainstream, what even happened? Well, the indie developer happened.

In 2010, Amnesia The Dark Descent appeared. The developer had already made several other horror games, but this was different. It channeled something of old, that defencelessness and pure horror. It broke what we were used to again. Hiding and running away is a big thing, you have no way to fight the beasts chasing you and the world is very vague through the deteriorating mind of the character.

It’s scary. Constantly. This is where horror came into the mainstream in the right way.

Of course, with the success of Amnesia, came copies and they all provide the same type of thrills, but it was the varying quality of each one. Resident Evil 6 came and went like a loose fart, while Silent Hill: Downpour tried to recapture the original horror aspects to middling results.

The indie developers are the ones that grew up on these games we revere as horror classics. They know what makes them tick and what’s the best way to do it. Even though games like Outlast and of that ilk sometimes don’t match the quality expected, they’re sometimes far more frightening than anything before it.

If the big businesses can’t get it right, especially Konami, who recently killed Silent Hills (a Guillermo Del Toro and Metal Gear’s Hideo Kojima making it) the ‘little’ men and women are going to do it for them. But where else is this leftfield revival of horror? Through From Software.

From Software is a developer known for incredibly niche titles like King’s Field, Armoured Core and eventually, the ‘Souls’ series. It’s these ‘Souls’ games and its spiritual successor, Bloodborne, that horror now lives on in a way.

Brutally difficult and filled with nightmarish visions in a fantasy world, Demon’s Souls and Dark Souls give the same tension that horror games used to give. You can most definitely defend yourself and they give you the tools to master the world, but it’s a very tough world to be in. You’re constantly in danger of just dying due to the unknown and while fans of the series might see them as just tough role playing games, in my eyes they do provide that aspect of survival horror that was lost until the indie developer came about to rectify it.

It’s these games, that encompass what horror in video games is. There’s no way to scare the player in the same way movies do. That’s passive, in a video game you must make it active. They’re in the world you’ve created, now make them fear for their virtual life. This is what the Souls games do so well.

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Jacob and Joel take a look at Cities Skylines!

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PIXEL SHED GO LIVE!

With a terrible video game.

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Joel, Oli and Jacob shot the shit for a bit over The Last of Us, a game that has Joel a little confused.

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This week’s podcast is a humdinger, as everyone and their cat turn up!

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NOTHING CHANGES

For a few months now, I’ve been bashing my head against Naughty Dog’s Playstation 3 titles like no other. I’ve forced my way through three Uncharted games and have come out the other side of Nathan Drake’s various globe trotting adventures a bitter man.

Naughty Dog have crafted some of the most excellent stories in video games, with natural dialogue and actually some really cool moments. It will always be a more extravagant - just due to being able to create whatever you want within a video game - rip off of Indiana Jones, but what’s there is above and beyond what most video games provide story wise.

It’s just that, Naughty Dog have created three games in which you shoot a lot of dudes all at once and they don’t fall over when shot in the head. In fact, in the first game, sometimes you’ll shoot a dude in the head and waste half a magazine of an AK-47. This issue seemed to vanish slightly in the second, but was far more prevalent in the third game, as they ramped up the encounters to something on a genocidal scale.

It’s not only the bullet sponge enemies that you have to deal with on a ridiculous basis, but the sheer amount you have to kill gets tiring. When your game isn’t a fantastic shooter to start with, the large numbers of enemies constantly pouring into the very obviously set up arenas start to tire you out. You know what it isn’t? It isn’t ‘fun’.

It’s a shame really, because Uncharted presents itself as and has been widely considered as a fantastic, award winning series. It knows it’s ‘good’, there’s no denying it. It’s just that the stories are so good, the characters - especially Nathan Drake - are so much fun to be around, that it’s a shame I have to wade through the copious of urination of a game to actually get anything from it.

This isn’t to say that the game isn’t without its merits. In Uncharted 2, it pulls a fast one on you by removing your ability to run around an area, by having Drake stranded on a sign. You maneuver Drake around the pole and sign to avoid bullets, while dispatching enemies. It’s a clever way to subvert your expectations of what could have been another bland, shooting gallery of thugs.

There’s just not enough moments like this. There’s only so many times that the game can ‘shock’ you into a false sense of security by having something collapse underneath me as force Nathan to clamber up another unlikely structure to be lead into a small stealth section that’s easier to just shoot through than deal with.

So after sitting through three Uncharted games, I thought I’d better give Naughty Dogs rather different direction, The Last of Us a try. Gone is the light hearted humour and fast paced action, with a plodding, somber experience in its place.

Now, I’d already ‘tried’ The Last of Us on the Playstation 3, but now I was on the latest console, it was maybe time to give it a proper go. You know, to see what the fuss was actually about rather than sit on the first three hours as my whole time with the game.

What you get is some weird, confusing and downright janky game, that seems to progress in quality as time goes on. It doesn’t outright say it, but the feeling that you’ve to take into consideration each life that you’re taking, especially with the companion, fourteen year old Ellie, making comments, as you blast away someone with a shotgun that suitably matches up with the experience of seeing someone get their head blown clean off with a shotgun, is lost.

Naughty Dog fall foul to putting enemies into areas that aren’t just big circles or squares filled with cover found in the Uncharted games and having you just repeat what you’ve been doing in their last series, but on a much more restricted scale.

You won’t be shooting thirty grunts in about ten minutes, but over the course of the game, my statistics for enemies killed was nearing the two hundred mark. For a game about survival and making a fuss that items aren’t readily available, I was never truly worried, because the game forces you through areas rather quickly. With new areas, comes new people to kill and new areas to search for more items. It’s never a worry, as long as you enter a new area, there’s always going to be something new to kill with.

This is the problem with The Last of Us. Its best moments are when you’re alone, with no one to fight and just the pressing weight of this world ravaged by selfishness and a deadly virus. Instead, Naughty Dog can’t let go of what they ‘need’ to provide the usual gameplay experience that any random person would ‘enjoy’.

But maybe this is a looming thing over video games as whole. Where are we, really? I’ll throw up my hands and admit I love a good, mind-numbing shooter. I enjoy mowing dudes down very quickly and in large quantities. Tarantino said it in that one famous interview, that violence is fun. Though it’s not always fun in every case.

It’s sometimes something you need to let go of, something to use sparingly and not because you feel like you need to keep your audience engaged. There are other ways to engage an audience outside of introducing the stress of minimal resources to a fight. Yes, The Last of Us is very different to say, Deus Ex or a Metal Gear, but those games know when to let go of violence - not just because they’re stealthy games - but because they want to encourage to player to deal with the world they’ve found themselves in, in a different manner.

The Last of Us falls into the trap that Naughty Dog have set for themselves with Uncharted, by not giving any other option but to fight. That’s why The Last of Us, while it provides a fantastic story within a video game medium and the gameplay itself did grow on me, isn’t a ‘great’ game. It loses itself. It loses the aspect of survivability it so desperately tries to cram into your face during loading screens when you die.

It’s a game that wants to be something, but cannot let go of its heritage. You must kill to survive and cannot deal with anything in any other way. There’s two sections of the game, in which protagonist Joel goes to rescue Ellie and proceeds to murder everyone in his path for two hours. Everything else is written so that everyone is hostile towards you without even a glimpse into maybe seeing another side to these people outside of their idle dialogue before they - almost routinely - split up and look away for you to stick a shiv in their neck or engage in a firefight.

Violence works on this mass scale in Uncharted, because of what it’s trying to be. Indiana Jones and many adventurers in other mediums in a similar scope massacred their way through people. It’s a different type of game, obviously, to The Last of Us, yet Naughty Dog seemed insistent on including countless fights in a world that it doesn’t fit right. It could have been so much more, but decided to fall into a safety net, after presenting itself as something far more risky.