Maroo: Ok, here we go again, another “search through the ruins of a forgotten civilization in South America only to find the Spanish conquistadors, who didn’t in fact leave the place hundreds of years ago, have risen as monsters under a curse to fight you for trying to steal their treasure” game… tell me that hasn’t been done before. All right, so it has a somewhat original storyline. And by somewhat I mean ever so slight twist of lime flavour in a glass of ice water type somewhat. It’s given this game a slightly different taste to others within its genre.
Story goes so far: you (Drake) are the rugged and handsome treasure hunter following clues left by your long dead ancestor, none other than the legendary explorer Sir Francis Drake, which leads you to the final resting place of his… gasp… empty coffin!?! Well I was surprised… However, this was obviously just as Drake suspected. Retrieving the journal of old Drake leads you on your quest for the elusive lost golden city of El Dorado.
From here the game takes you through similar game play experiences involving shooting, hiding behind walls and shooting, climbing, leaping, climbing and leaping, climbing and shooting, jet skiing, jet skiing and shooting and oh we can’t forget running for your grey screened scrap of a life to find cover because you’re nearly dead again.
This of course is mixed up by the addition of a number of fun to use weapons (I found the shotgun and the miniature hand cannon the most satisfying) which made for an entertaining few hours of picking particularly inappropriate weapons to get the job done because you didn’t want to run around with the AK-47 all game. I would have to say that I regret there weren’t more moments you could sneak up behind unsuspecting enemy to perform immoral and shameful (if not rather inelegant) acts of silent killing. What seems like a lot of effort went into creating this ability is only used in one instance of the game. The rest it seems that the enemy has the heads up on your whereabouts from a tracker sneakily placed in your underpants while you weren’t looking. Occasionally they’ll throw in a puzzle to solve as an obstacle for moving through the story line too fast. The camera angles only very rarely annoy the crap out of you.
The addition half way through the game of a jet ski adventure up a river lead to a couple times where my friends would enter the room and state “Where the bloody hell did you find a jet ski in a jungle river… ruins” and I would turn to them and say “Well obviously I… I have absolutely no idea – it was just sitting there” convenient really.
Lets just say that the monotony of game play is ever so slightly hidden behind a variety of well designed environments like the jungle, the ruins, the jungle ruins, the waterfalls, the jungle waterfalls, the ruins waterfalls and the list goes on. I’ll give it to them. A lot of effort went into making this scenery look good. I did stop every now and then to explore and appreciate all parts of it (and not just to check if I’d missed a treasure anywhere). It’s just a real shame you have to run past most of it.
I’ll tell you one thing I really admired in the game (whether or not the game designers intended it or not) is that when the twist in story occurred (not giving away any plot points here), there was a distinct change in my style of playing the game. It moved quickly from repetitive cover to cover, aim and shoot style playing, to just plain run and blindly shoot around you. It really became a “no time to think about anything, blast away the neverending spawn of enemy until you solve the puzzle… somehow” type game.
Cutscenes-a-plenty in this game and overall the experience felt like I was running through a movie, and todays screening was Indiana Jones and the Jungle Ruins Filled with AK-47 Wielding Baddies.
Being relatively new to the whole “console gaming” experience, the push the right button or die reaction sequences tend to give me a little trouble, where failing meant that you would be required to sit through the previous cut scene all over again. As they didn’t appear very often through the game, this inevitably meant you were never ready for them and were doomed to experience the bad side of things before you got to see the good side. The PS3 controls aren’t brilliant for shooting but I think the game gives you a little leeway with the controlled hidey-shooty style of game play. Generally the wall hanging/leaping is pretty intuitive. If you can leap in a direction, you were probably meant to. The save at any moment option helps with the whole fitting the game in around a… ahem… hectic lifestyle.
I’m still not entirely sure of what the go with collecting the treasures around the place is. Something about unlocking different costumes for your characters?!? I’m sure it will all become clear in a not so distant future.
Now I don’t have particularly high standards when it comes to games or movies… or anything…. But I quite enjoyed this one. Overall – not nearly as frustrating as Mirrors Edge.
Popularity: 80%
