Uncharted: Drake's Fortune Preview

Many deadly traps and enemies await Drake on his adventures, but, thankfully, he won't be alone. Elena will be there to help him out, along with a crafty, old treasure hunter named Victor Sullivan. Both characters are crucial to your survival and if they lose their lives it means game over, you'll have to restart from the last checkpoint. Mind you, characters like Sullivan cannot be fully trusted. You'll notice that Sullivan is self-centered and has his own motives, so there's no telling how long you can rely on his assistance. Uncharted puts a lot of emphasis on the narrative.

To bring all these characters to life, the development team, consisting of 80 employees, worked hard to establish a proprietary animation system. As a result, the characters will move and act convincingly. Facial animation was also regarded as a separate challenge for the developers. The idea is to make the expression of each character believable, so players can easily relate to them. The whole game will have a cinematic feel to it. When Drake jumps over rifts for example, the viewpoint will change, the camera will pan around the main character and make way for a classic Hollywood moment.

Veteran developer Naughty Dog (known for the Jak & Daxter series, Crash Bandicoot games, etc.), is determined to perfect practically every aspect of Uncharted: Drake's Fortune. Initial demonstrations of the game indicated that controls needed to be tweaked somewhat. With recent presentations showing that this aspect of the game had been improved considerably, the crew at Naughty Dog are also concentrating on balancing the weapons, since it was reported the pistol is more powerful than, say, an AK-47. Appreciatively, they also promised to fix such drawbacks by the time the game hits retail.

To summarize, Uncharted: Drake's Fortune is another promising title PS3 owners should be on the lookout for and is right up there with upcoming games like Metal Gear Solid 4, Devil May Cry 4, Gran Turismo 5 Prologue, Kane & Lynch: Dead Men and so on.

Once again, Naughty Dog seems to be playing things safe without experimenting too much with the gameplay mechanics. Instead, they opted to merge as many familiar gameplay elements from popular titles as possible. Surprisingly enough, they appeared to have pulled it off and from what was revealed thus far, this was, without a doubt, the right thing to do.

The game hits US stores on November 20. The European release is also likely to take place during November, but we're still waiting for an official confirmation on that.