How can you love Uncharted's platforming elements? It's so automatic and magnetic. Just like the PS2 Tomb Raiders. I see climbing and jumping from ledge to ledge as a chore. There's no real challenge or complete control. That's what made the real Tomb Raiders so good. You were completely in charge of every move you do and being in control and working your way through the levels by lining up jumps and making sure you hold on to ledges was one of the key factors what made Tomb Raider the game it is. I dislike every game that minimalizes or automatizes basic gameplay elements.
I kind of get what you mean, I think they went too far with the procedural animation stuff, making it 'look' organic, rather than actually designing lots of fun platforming -- but it did look amazing, the mechanics felt sound to me, and there were one or two moments in the first two Uncharted games that certainly had potential and were fun (to me) while they lasted. I'd be okay with that kind of look and feel if the levels I traversed, and the monuments I scaled, were significant enough... if there were more leaps from precipitous vantage points and the skill/timing required was more tight. Uncharted has some great moneyshots in the form of vistas when you reach certain parts of some stages -- and I'm not against that. I guess what I mean is that I wish ND had spent more time on all of that kind of stuff rather than the gunplay.
My favourite feeling in the old TR games was going into a tomb and finding some broken relic that I had to fix in order to advance, or entering somewhere that was so untouched and abandoned that you wouldn't really know what wild animals or shocks you would find inside. I enjoyed getting the feel of a cohesive whole as I go from one area to the next, many rooms and many puzzles around a theme that required you to know something beforehand. Like the Greek storytelling puzzles in TR1 -- ATLAS, Haphaestus, Damocles etc. Those were easier if you knew something about the stories. Likewise with the statue of Midas. There were a few central villains to dispatch - not an island with an army of them.
If the discoveries and puzzles you can find on this new island are similarly intelligent, then the game may win me over... but I'm not a fan of the tonal shift yet, or the hollywood action movie bombast they've amped up. I don't particularly want Rambo Lara. The only reason I am tentatively excited about the reviews is -- can this many people be wrong?
