Perfect timing for this thread as I just completed the game yesterday. Overall Im feeling conflicted. Ill admit Im not the biggest Uncharted fan. The first game is dated, the second is the best but I do think its overrated, and I honestly dont remember 3 that much. Halfway through the game I thought that ND had finally perfected the formula. I didnt mind the slow pace at all. Hell, I found the previous games to rely too much on combat and appreciated that UC4 felt confident enough to simply let Drake wander around interesting locales without needing to get into a shootout every two minutes. I was engaged by the story and genuinely enjoyed travelling the globe with these characters in search of Averys treasure.
However, as the game continued the illusion faded and I started to realize that the game was largely an interactive movie. Outside of combat encounters youre largely just pushing forward through the clearly marked climbing paths while listening to banter between Sam and Nate. Occasionally this is broken up by a puzzle where youll have to wander the environment in search of button prompts. If you cant find the item youre looking for within a minute or two then your partner will just find it for you. Maybe then youll have a short shootout and then climb some more stuff afterwards, which will surely break and lead to a thinly disguised quick-time event where youll have to throw your rope or jump to some rocks jutting out from a cliff-side. All of these complaints could be lobbed at any other Uncharted game, but because 4 spent so much time with the non-combat elements the tropes of the traversal system became really apparent to the point of making it mundane. This could have been solved without the need for more combat encounters though. More puzzles, better puzzles, incentive to explore beyond meaningless trinkets, something else to make the non-combat sections not feel so samey and monotonous. It feels like they wanted to make a quieter, slower Uncharted but werent willing to change the formula at all in order to service the type of game they wanted to make.
At the same time, I cant fault an Uncharted game for being an interactive movie too much as thats largely what theyve always been. This game offered me a fun few days and a satisfying narrative about Nathan Drake hunting treasure, which is pretty much what I was looking for. Its not a masterpiece by any stretch, but its not significantly worse than any other Uncharted game, if worse at all.