Before I finally touch on the Prince of Persia dynamic of gameplay, I'll quickly go into some of the other minor action sequences the game will throw at you. In a true Indy fashion you'll find yourself behind the trigger of a huge jeep mounted machine gun. I don't have to explain how a wild chase through the jungle with Elena behind the wheel and dozens of jeeps, trucks and bikes loaded with mercenaries at their tails pans out, do I? You also get to drive a vehicle yourself, with Elena closely latched on at your back. Before you get any ideas, I'm talking about riding a jet ski through a flooded city ruin and later on upstream. The second part had me scratching my head especially, since apparently half of the world oil production gets used to fill barrels which then float down the river itself. Hardly realistic and at times frustrating I know, but this is just one of the examples where gameplay is put before realism.
So, with that out of the way, let's discuss jumping and handing from high places. It's true, Uncharted has quite a lot of both, but neither is as fleshed out as we were led to believe. In fact, in comparison to all the shooting action, the game is quite starved when it comes to platforming. But, what there is of it, it is all pretty good. Following the standards set by Tomb Raider Legend and the Prince of Persia series, grabbing onto ledges isn't that hard, so most of the time all you have to do is figure out where to move next and not actually worry about falling to your death trying to get there. And unlike in PoP where you never were sure if you were taking the right route, or if perhaps that switch on the other side of the room should be pressed first, you'll always know where to go in Uncharted, due to the fact that there is only one route to take at any given time. Is there a huge vine in front of you? You can be sure you’re supposed to climb it. Is it blocked by debris? Well, you probably need to burn the debris down and then climb it. Bottom line is, you'll never ever have several directions you can go in. At most you’ll come upon dead ends that were set there to give the illusion of non-linearity.
Ok, so we now know the action parts as well as the exploration/suicidal hanging over bottomless pits parts work fairly well. But how do they combine? Pretty good I have to say. But (you knew it was coming, didn't you?), that's not saying much considering the roughly 80/20 distribution of both. If both were more equally represented I fear the game would have grown repetitive pretty quickly, since we all know how much fun hanging from high places can be if there isn’t much challenge in it. So, those 80% of shooting save the game? Well, in a way they do. I've yet to be bored in a good shooting game, and placing the whole GoW fighting mechanic into ruins and jungles made Uncharted amazingly original and fun. So yes, the game is more shooter than it is an adventure action game, but that just saves it from becoming repetitive and tedious.
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