IDK man, I call a spade a spade. Yes, at the top level Uncharted 3 is an action/adventure romp, but that classification is so vague. Tons and tons of games are "action/adventure." If we're breaking it down in an Uncharted thread, I need to be specific, and for a lot of the time you're playing an Uncharted game, it's a shooter. "Action" is equally vague, so that can mean anything, but "shooter" has a very specific definition: You shoot dudes with projectiles....a lot. Not kinda sorta shooting people with pew pew powers in Skyrim, or kinda sorta shooting people with splish splash water in Mario Sunshine, but really for real real shooting groups of enemies for hours. That can be a hybrid of whatever other genre(s), but it's still very much a shooter.
The whole point of this is to say that combat matters. If I'm going to spend a significant amount of time in said combat, and that combat is of the shooting variety, it's 1,000,000% valid for me to criticize and put a spotlight on "dem shooty parts." It's your main method of interaction with the HUNDREDS of enemies, it's pretty much the only part of the game where failure feels like a legit outcome, and it's the only part of the game the player has total ownership of how to proceed. If the game gets in the way of my enjoyment during these numerous shooting sections, I'm going to call it out.
Now wait a minute, I never said I don't appreciate details and small touches, but those things you're talking about are
minor. Minor details, minor moments, minor parts of the game that can't make, or make up for, the actual systems I'm using to play the game. It's like people that praise GTAV like it's the second coming of Jesus, and VIDYAGAMES WILL NEVER BE THE SAME AGAIN HALLELUJAH PRAISE GODSTAR. But I'm sitting there just thinking "Yeah okay, they have a lot of small details in the game, but it still mostly feels like junk to PLAY it." Those peripheral details eventually lose their wow-factor, and all you're left with is the core gameplay, in the case of Uncharted that being lots of shooting, undemanding traversal, and a bit of puzzle solving. I want to see the details in THOSE areas of the game.
Now here's another difference, you call the combat in Uncharted 2 a chore, but for 90% of the game I don't feel that at all. Uncharted 3's combat felt INFINITELY more like a chore to me which is what blows my mind about these discussions. Uncharted 2 had more interesting setups, more restraint within combat, more polish in the player vs. AI dynamic, more polish in the gunplay, and a less tedious melee system. What actually irritates me normally, though I won't go as far as to call them "a chore," are the parts you praise; "Drugged Drake," and most instances of forced slow walking. I'm not against pacing but most of the time these sections do NOTHING but harm replayability. Abusing the "Hold Up and slowly follow this strict path in one direction" design makes me mentally check out. Like, The Last Of Us has FAR too many of these scenarios and it dulls the impact of the moment when you've been restricted SO many times before.
BTW, those scripted slow or explosive sections aren't even what I'd deem "cinematic" which seems to be the vast majority takeaway from Uncharted and what people mean when they use "Uncharted" as a descriptive word. Most of the time, they're exactly what they are: scripted moments. This is another discussion for another thread (which I've already had) and there's a handy set of videos that pretty much states how I feel on that matter:
Part 1,
Part 2,
Part 3
The way I see it: the better your combat mechanics, the less you have to do to be "showy." Max Payne 3 didn't have to be as showy as it is because the combat is so detailed and punchy, and the physics are so reactive. They could've left well enough alone and just crafted interesting spaces to have shootouts in. The responsibility to make things interesting beyond that is then left on the player to use bullet time and shootdodge as a way to spice up combat. This is not excusing a dev from creating fun scenarios, but Max Payne doesn't need to be Uncharted in terms of buildings falling over and jumping out of planes.
These posts are getting long.