Story. After three previous games in which he found and lost the treasure he’s seeking, Nathan Drake has finally settled down in respectable domesticity. When his long-lost brother Sam comes back into his life Drake is drawn out of retirement and into the search for a long lost pirate hoard. Developer. Naughty Dog have developed all the Uncharted games as well as The Last of Us and the Crash Bandicoot series. Format. Uncharted 4 is a Sony exclusive, available only on PS4, and costs around £40 or $60. A PS Plus account is required for online play. Duration and Difficulty. Uncharted games have main campaigns lasting between eight and eleven hours, dependent on player ability, rising to up to twenty hours to find every secret. Uncharted multiplayer has been extremely popular so could extend the lifespan of the game considerably longer as server’s remain lively. Themes. The Uncharted series’ themes are those of straightforward adventure fiction: the loyalty between good guys, the need to defeat the bad guys, and the struggle between normal life and the call to adventure. While A Thief’s End promises to go to darker places than previous instalment, these themes remain the same, with Drake torn between a peaceful life with his Elena wife and adventure with his potentially nefarious brother and father figure Sully. As in other action fiction, there’s a tension between the warmth and humanity of the hero characters and the mercilessness of some of the violence: Drake can be quite charming with his quips, but he’s also a white guy who runs around exotic places gunning down hundreds of people, often neither white nor English speakers. Add this to the stabbing, spilling of blood and neck snapping and there’s a danger of the violence eclipsing coherence of both the entertainment and starring characters. Though it touches on mystical themes with the dangerous artefacts Drake searches for, the series adopts the same agnosticism as the Indiana Jones films it draws from - the artefacts of many different faiths ‘work’, but the story doesn’t take a side. There’s also usually an element of pseudo-science to each macguffin, suggesting that the unusual events might be lost science or unknown natural phenomena rather than magic. Why people play:. The Uncharted games are blockbuster adventure romps with spectacular action scenes, exotic places and strong stories delivered with great dialogue and acting. They’re a lot of fun and high-end entertainment, even if the frequent pauses for cover-based gun battles can sometimes become more of a slog than a joy. Uncharted 4 offers more of the same, with an extra level of character angst and, as the title hints, a possible end to the series. Like his predecessors Professor Jones and Ms Croft, it’s hard to imagine Drake’s supposedly final adventure being anything of the sort..