Uncharted: The Nathan Drake Collection

I don't get it. I don't get the acclaim surrounding this series at all. The mechanics are clunky, the gameplay is repetitive and frustrating, and the story lines are iffy at best. The game at least looks pretty good and has some spurts of cool high-energy action scenes, but other than that there isn't much here for me.

What I liked
1. Now, I never played any of the originals on the previous Playstation platforms, but Naughty Dog must have done a pretty good job at remastering these because they look pretty damn good, and it only improves (naturally) with each game in the series.
2. Uncharted actually has you traveling through different areas of the world that present some interesting changes in scenery for you to play in.
3. A lot of the game is actually historically accurate in it's references and it's fun to at least learn a little bit about history as you play through.
4. Uncharted actually does a really good job at handling the ammo/weapons system. I played on Normal difficulty (I can't even imagine the frustration of dealing with Uncharted's mechanics on a harder level) and there was plenty of ammo to go around. While this game does have a stealth element (sort of) it mostly encourages a high-tempo play style with plenty of different weapons dropped/placed that are available for you to pick up as you play. All the weapons are viable and I always found myself using different combinations throughout all 3 of the games.
5. Between escaping a sinking ship and evading an attack helicopter by running through a doomed train, there are actually a good amount of much needed sweet action scenes to spice up the gameplay a bit.

What I didn't like
1. This game is repetitive. Like, really repetitive. This goes for all three Uncharted games in the collection too. The basic routine is use your inhuman freak climbing and jumping ability to find a secret entrance to an otherwise inaccessible area, play a game of match the picture (between your journal and the game screen), and then fight the main antagonist's unlimited army as you try to escape from said area. It seriously got to the point where I could predict almost exactly what was about to happen in the game and when I had to start searching for the nearest ledge I could start my climbing adventure on.
2. The actual fighting mechanics and gameplay aren't that great. It's pretty obvious they didn't put a whole lot of emphasis on the fighting because more often than not it's the same combination of dodges and punches (the 3rd one actually did a better job at this [except for the over sized guys where every encounter was literally the same]). The shooting part is okay, and like I said i really like the weapons and ammo system, but part of the reason so many weapons are viable is because a lot of the weapons more or less act the same. Although I probably would enjoy the current system over all the weapons being more unique than necessary and actively trying to get rid of some.
3. This game is really frustrating at times. There are scenes where the impossible spawn location of enemies combined with their retarded weapon power and health totals makes getting through some areas super grind-y and unrewarding. This game thrives with more of a casual tag attached and some of the more (read: WAY more) difficult areas than others give the game a weird difficulty balance that isn't always warranted (I'm looking at you 1 & 2 final boss fights..). Oh yeah, and trying to figure out where the hell you're supposed to go/what you're supposed to trigger to advance is surprisingly difficult for a linear game. It's not always clear what's climbable and what's not so you better get used to trying everything in sight (which will also result in you dying a lot).
4. A lot of the plot of these games is based around solving a series a puzzles and acquiring certain clues to get to the final "treasure." The clues aren't what I have an issue with (they're actually fairly interesting at times), it's the puzzles. It would be cool if a lot of the puzzles were intuitive or fun to solve, but more often than not it involves referring to Drake's omniscient journal and just trying to match what you see in the journal to what you see in the game. The puzzles very quickly begin to feel like more of a chore than a fun mind game.

I played all three of the games in the collection with a few weeks in between them, but if you start to feel like the first was getting repetitive I would wait longer than that if you're not in a rush and don't want to get burned out. Uncharted has a clear formula here that they stick to so don't expect anything wildly different between the games so if you like one, you'll probably like the others.