Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End is the rare blockbuster that trusts its own quiet moments. Naughty Dog’s fourth main entry in the Uncharted series puts down the gun long enough to ask what the gun is for. It is a shooter and an adventure game, played from a third-person perspective across Italy, Madagascar, Scotland and beyond, and it is the best thing the studio has made.
The setup is a homecoming. Nathan Drake has retired from fortune hunting and settled in New Orleans with his wife Elena, a journalist, taking work with a salvage company. Then Sam shows up.
Trailer, via IGDBcom.
Sam Drake Was Supposed to Be Dead
Sam is Nate’s older brother, presumed dead for fifteen years after being shot by guards during a Panamanian prison escape. He survived. He spent the intervening time incarcerated, escaped alongside drug lord Hector Alcazar, and now owes Alcazar a debt that only Henry Avery’s treasure can clear.
Nate agrees to help. He lies to Elena about it, telling her he has taken a salvaging job. That lie is the engine of the whole game.
Troy Baker plays Sam. Nolan North returns as Nate, Emily Rose as Elena, Richard McGonagle as Sully, Warren Kole as the rival treasure hunter Rafe Adler, Laura Bailey as Nadine Ross, who runs the private military company Shoreline, and Robin Atkin Downes as Alcazar. Britain Dalton and Chase Austin play the young Nate and Sam.
The cast is doing more than shouting over gunfire, and the script gives them room to.
A Grappling Hook That Changes Everything
Combat in Uncharted 4 runs on firearms, melee and stealth. Players pick from rifles and shotguns, pistols and revolvers, grenades and dynamite. The melee system was reworked to avoid quick time events, which is a clean win.
The grappling hook is the real addition. It lets Nate leap over gaps and often hands him a tactical advantage mid-fight. Enemies run on an AI system that reacts to whatever combat situation they land in — they respond to what the player does, coordinate tactics and cooperate with each other. Companions are AI-controlled too.
A dialogue tree lets players decide the outcome of some conversations. It does not affect the story’s progression. That is a fair description of a fair feature: nice to have, not the point.
Libertalia Is the Best Level in the Series
The search for Avery’s treasure runs from an illegal auction in Italy, where the Drakes steal a duplicate St. Dismas idol, to Madagascar and Scotland, and finally toward Libertalia, a legendary pirate colony.
Naughty Dog built larger levels than any earlier entry, with multiple paths through environments and open-world elements folded into a mostly linear structure. It was the studio’s first game made specifically for the PlayStation 4, and the team used the hardware to process larger dynamic environments. You can feel it in the scale.
The ranked list of what Uncharted 4 does better than its predecessors:
- Libertalia — a pirate colony that earns its legend before you ever reach it.
- The grappling hook — vertical combat that finally has a rhythm.
- The Nathan and Elena relationship — the emotional center, and the thing Naughty Dog tried hardest to humanize.
- Enemy AI — fights that punish standing still.
- Sam — a brother who complicates everything Nate thought he had finished with.
That order is not arbitrary. Libertalia is the game’s argument: obsession builds beautiful things and then ruins the people who chase them.
Development Was Not Smooth
Work on Uncharted 4 began in 2011, soon after Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception. Creative director Amy Hennig and game director Justin Richmond led it. Both left Naughty Dog in 2014, and Neil Druckmann and Bruce Straley replaced them.
Games survive this kind of turnover all the time. Games also do not survive it all the time. That this one shipped as coherent as it did is worth noting plainly.
Something else worth noting: the multiplayer. Up to ten players engage in co-operative and competitive modes. It is competent. It is also the part of Uncharted 4 that history will forget, and should.
The Cost of One Last Score
The plot’s real subject is not Avery’s gold. It is what Nate is willing to sacrifice to save the people he loves, and whether he can tell the difference between saving them and dragging them along.
Rafe Adler is a wealthy rival with a private military force and no patience. Nadine Ross is the professional who does the actual work. The game sets them against the Drakes as a mirror: people who want the same thing for worse reasons.
Nate lies to Elena. Sam lies to Nate, or at least tells him a version. Sully, the mentor and father figure, keeps showing up anyway. The story knows that the treasure is a pretext and treats it that way.
The game also introduces child versions of Nate and Sam in a flashback to a Panamanian jail, where Rafe impulsively kills a prison warden who demanded a cut, triggering a frantic escape. Sam is shot. Nate and Rafe get out. That sequence sets the tone for everything after: the past is not finished with anyone.
What Uncharted 4 Gets Right, and What It Doesn’t
The pacing sags in the middle. The open-ended Madagascar section is the game stretching muscles it does not fully use, and the dialogue tree is a promise the story never cashes.
But the ending lands, and the Nathan and Elena material is the strongest writing Naughty Dog has done. The relationship was central to the project, and the studio tried to humanize the pair more than in previous games. It worked.
Extra visual filters and modes — zero-gravity, bullet time, a cel-shaded art style — unlock through points. They are toys. Good toys.
Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End is a shooter and an adventure game about a man who cannot leave well enough alone, made by people who clearly could not either. It is the fourth main entry in the series and the first one that feels like it has nothing left to prove.
Get the Notebook.
The day's best stories and every fresh verdict, in plain English, in your inbox by seven. One email a day, no more.
