Uncharted 4: A Thief's End – Can It Be One of the Best Action Games of Recent Years?

When centuries ago Sony revealed that the Naughty Dog studio was working on Uncharted: Drake's Fortune, the malcontents only saw it as a poor man's knockoff of Tomb Raider. Since then, however, much has changed. Today, it’s a series with an established position, and its fourth edition is one of the most anticipated productions of the upcoming months. The creators of the cycle are apparently aware of this fact, because they've been drumming up the hype by releasing new top-notch gameplay every once in a while. This is what they did in the recent case of showing off our protagonist traipsing through a jungle; now they’ve repated this tactic at E3. The developers came to Los Angeles armed with an extensive demo of their latest work, part of which was presented at the end of Sony’s conference. The rest of the thrilling sequence we saw yesterday behind closed doors of the quiet rooms of the Convention Center. This time, the frantic escape of Drake and Sully from an armored vehicle didn’t end on the bridge, but lasted for a solid several minutes.

This presentation for the chosen few was hosted by Bruce Straley and Neil Druckmann, the two most important people behind the project. Although the featured episode was heavily scripted, it was hard to look away from what was happening on the screen. From beginning to end I was truly enraptured with the entire sequence – it’s precisely this kind of action that makes us drool in anticipation for Uncharted 4. What's really pleasing is that the transitions from the fragments leaving us more freedom to the strictly planned scenes seemed completely natural. With no pad in hand, it was sometimes difficult to sense where the game ended and a well-directed show began. Naughty Dog studio already surprised us in this way many years ago, but I feel that with the release of A Thief's End the bar will be set even higher.

You'd probably like to know what happens to Nathan after the scene of launching a rope on the bridge, which crowned the presentation at Sony’s conference. Basically, our adventurer finally lands "safely" on the ground, but the excitement doesn’t end there – he’s then being brutally dragged by a rushing tug. Drake slowly manages to climb onto the back of a lorry, where he can shoot at his opponents for a change. Later, our hero decides to change the vehicle to have a better chance of escaping the armored van that hasn't stopped the chase. This fragment goes on for a solid several minutes, but we won't reveal its conclusion, as it would mean seriously spoiling the plot.