I AM a big fan of Sony bringing some of their most popular PlayStation games to PC, and am particularly thrilled with their latest addition to the line-up.
As you may recall, I’m an enormous fan of the Uncharted games, and have long lamented their absence from my preferred gaming platform.
No longer must I suffer an Uncharted-less computer, however, as Sony have just released the excellent Uncharted: Legacy of Thieves collection (containing both Uncharted 4: Among Thieves and Uncharted: The Lost Legacy) for PC.
I’m not going to review the game(s) itself again – I reviewed the PS5 version earlier this year and it’s excellent – so instead I’m going to focus on how this is as a PC gaming experience.
The TLDR version, of course, is “Fantastic” – from the graphics to the gameplay, everything was superb, and the overall gameplay experience was exactly what I hoped for.
The graphics were outstanding on my PC (Running an Nvidia RTX 3070 GPU with a 2K HDR ultrawide screen) – the graphical enhancements to take advantage of what a decent computer can do are noticeable and very well done indeed.
One of the most striking for me was that in Uncharted: The Lost Legacy (which is set in India), I could see sweat beads on character’s faces and necks, really selling the idea the environment is hot and humid. Similar effects features in Uncharted 4, and in both games the fire effects from candles and the like were simply exquisite.
Character and facial animations were well done and expressive, the sound was great, and the visuals really popped with HDR enabled – the game’s setpieces and effects looked absolutely stunning with all the settings cranked up. It is worth noting if you’ve got a processor with six cores or fewer, you’ll need to wait for the shaders to build the first time you run the game – it’ll take about the same amount of time as making a cup of tea or coffee, then you don’t have to worry about it again.
While some of the keyboard and mouse controls felt a bit awkward at first (left shift to crouch?) the controls can all be remapped and if you really want to get something akin to the console experience, you can even plug a controller (your choice of Xbox or PlayStation DualSense!) into the PC and use that too.
The PC has desperately needed the Uncharted games or something in that same “Indiana Jones-inspired adventure” genre for a long time, particularly after the Tomb Raider games became dark/gritty and emo, so you can imagine my delight at finally being able to play Uncharted 4 and The Lost Legacy on my PC with a keyboard and mouse.
The fact the games have not previously been available on PC is one of the things that makes them worth the AUD$74.95 asking price at launch – there’s no “earlier” versions of the games to play, so for all practical purposes you’re getting an all-new PC experience which there’s an extremely good chance you’ve haven’t previously played, unless you’ve also got a PlayStation.
Playing Uncharted: Legacy of Thieves on PC has extraordinary and long-awaited experience, so I am very pleased to say that if you have a PC and like action-adventure games, this one is an absolute must buy and an essential addition to your gaming library.
