Uncharted legacy of Thrieves PC Review

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Uncharted: Legacy of Thieves Collection, which comes out on PC on Wednesday, is without a doubt a potent mix of big-budget stories and big-time thrills. Since the PS3, PC players haven’t been able to play this globe-trotting adventure series, which started nearly 15 years ago. With its release, PC players will be able to play it for the first time. Even the recent PS5 remaster doesn’t have any of the extra features that come with this version. When I saw that Iron Galaxy Studios was in charge of Uncharted: Legacy of Thieves Collection, I was wary. These are the same people who made the terrible PC port of Batman: Arkham Knight. Now, to be fair, that job was given to a small team of 12 people who had to do it quickly. This led to all kinds of technical problems. Still, I kept my fingers crossed and dove into Uncharted PC with a tiny bit of hope. This is my complete review.

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Uncharted: Legacy of Thieves Collection PC review — Prep work

Like the PS5 remaster, Uncharted: Legacy of Thieves Collection is basically a better version of Naughty Dog’s latest treasure-hunting games. It’s a cute box that holds Uncharted 4 from 2016 and the spin-off game that came after it, Uncharted: The Lost Legacy. This lets a new generation of players experience Nathan Drake and Chloe Frazer’s adventures in the wild.

First, let’s talk about distribution, which is my main worry. Iron Galaxy took the word “collection” at face value and put both games into a single program. This is an 89.6GB download for Uncharted: Legacy of Thieves Collection, which takes up 124GB of space on your hard drive after it is extracted and set up. Even if you don’t care about one of the titles, you’d have to give that much space to both of them.

You can switch between Uncharted 4 and Uncharted: The Lost Legacy at any time from the home screen of the Uncharted: Legacy of Thieves Collection. But it’s a strange way to do things. If you try, the game will force you to start over, and you’ll have to wait through a loading screen before you can play. The install folder makes it clear that it is switching between two different.exe files. This makes me wonder why they aren’t sold separately. The answer isn’t “convenience,” because it takes the same amount of time to launch a different game by hand.

Due to a process called “shader building,” setting up Uncharted: Legacy of Thieves Collection for the first time can feel like a chore, especially on less powerful PCs (according to a message on screen). Depending on your computer’s specs, this could take anywhere from 15 to 20 minutes for each game, which could affect Steam’s two-hour refund policy. You could still play the game while this is going on in the background, but it wouldn’t be a good experience. The screen would flicker, there would be lag, and the game might even crash hard. So, the best thing to do is to wait it out.

Uncharted: Legacy of Thieves Collection PC Review — Gameplay

I wouldn’t be the first person to say that the Uncharted series has lost its shine over time, with plot points that are easy to guess, corny dialogue, and mechanics that aren’t as good as they used to be. Don’t let that take your attention away from the game as a whole, which is still a lot of fun to play. The Uncharted: Legacy of Thieves Collection is pure chaos, whether you’re parkouring along wet scaffolding, taking apart a clock tower, or shooting enemies during that chase scene in Madagascar.

The game’s accessibility features help a little bit with the keyboard and mouse controls, which are very responsive. Even though The Last of Us Part II for the PS4 and PS5 is more complicated, it still has basic aids like lock-on aim, a center dot that stays in place, and mono audio for people with one-sided hearing loss. Hand-to-hand combat in Uncharted: Legacy of Thieves Collection requires me to hit buttons quickly, which is my worst enemy and hurts my wrist and palm tendons. I was lucky that I could just set up the “Hold” action, which made the whole thing almost too easy.

There are still grappling hooks to swing around on, puzzles to solve, and driving segments, but in The Lost Legacy, all of these are a little bigger. You have to be careful as you tiptoe along narrow beams, but you can keep making long, physics-defying jumps with ease. I was hoping for some small improvements, like auto-picking up ammo, which would make run-and-gun easier, but all of the changes are only on the technical side.

Uncharted: Legacy of Thieves Collection review — Graphics

In the same way as previous PlayStation-to-PC ports, Uncharted: Legacy of Thieves Collection puts character models ahead of everything else. And what better setting than Scotland, with its snow-capped mountains, lush greenery, and old pirate ruins? Before Chapter 8, I was worried about how the “Low” graphics setting would affect inscriptions, which are important for finding Henry Avery’s gravestone. As it turns out, Uncharted: Legacy of Thieves Collection makes an exception for objects that characters interact with. Like 2D animation, this gives these objects an extra level of detail that sets them apart from other assets.

For example, stickers on doors and cars tend to be blurry, and the edges of text are often jagged. But humans stay clean, with sweat-slick foreheads, real-looking skin, and clothes that get dirty and dusty over time. In Uncharted: Legacy of Thieves Collection, the same cutscenes are jarring because the textures of the characters and the background do not match. And to be honest, that might be the only thing that stands out as a problem with playing on the lowest settings. Unlike Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered on PC, the graphics menu doesn’t have much to change. Fine-tuning shadows, reflections, and ambient occlusion does make the game look better, but it doesn’t affect gameplay much, at least not at 1080p full HD.

Both Uncharted games look amazing compared to how they looked when they were first made for PS4. It’s hypnotic to run fast across the sand dunes of Madagascar, even though the heat makes you sweat more and more. This is made even more appealing by the rough, real-time dirt tracks you leave behind, the scurrying lemurs, and the scared locals who run away as you speed by. The Lost Legacy’s PC port has better graphics than the console version. The screen is filled with people trading in the bazaar, strange plants, and huge idols and shrines covered in moss. Uncharted: Legacy of Thieves Collection looks so good that it’s crazy. It made me want to buy an ultra-wide monitor.

In Uncharted: Legacy of Thieves Collection, the “Medium” quality setting adds lighting effects that make streams and puddles sparkle as you walk. On the marble floor of the Italian Rossi Estate, people’s reflections were pretty clear, but they were all over the place in the water.

At the “High” setting, small details like ridges and cracks are clear, which puts your GPU under a lot of stress. This helps hide the blurry, pixelated mess that happens when you grab onto rocky surfaces. It also makes the grass and flower beds look more real. I didn’t use the “Ultra” setting much in Uncharted: Legacy of Thieves Collection because my graphics card’s memory was already full.

Uncharted: Legacy of Thieves Collection review — Performance

Even though it’s not quite as well optimized as other PlayStation games that have been ported to PC, Uncharted: Legacy of Thieves Collection does a good job. My test system had a 3.6GHz AMD Ryzen 5 2400G processor, a 6GB VRAM Nvidia GeForce GTX 1660 Super GPU, 16GB of RAM, and a 500GB SSD. With this setup, I was able to find the sweet spot between Medium and High settings, which made the graphics look amazing. The experience was almost always smooth, but the frame rates in this game can be very random and even change from chapter to chapter.

At these settings, Uncharted 4 ran at an average of 65fps, but it often dropped to 51fps when the scene changed or the camera moved. This was true for both gunplay and exploration, with some cinematics and closed-room events reaching as high as 73fps. Early on in Uncharted: Legacy of Thieves Collection, the frame rate dropped to 32fps when people were rushing through the market in Madagascar or the auction setting. It then went back up to somewhere in the 40s. Even on the Low setting, that drop was very noticeable and sometimes even caused the sound to stop for a split second.

Uncharted: Legacy of Thieves Collection can be pushed to its limits best in the fast-paced chase sequence in Madagascar. You can’t just be thrown onto a big playing field with a tank right behind you. But you also have to take into account mercenaries, explosions, gunfire, mud flying off tires, destruction, and ongoing changes to the environment. At those settings, the game averaged 44fps and peaked at 55fps. The frame rate dropped to 28fps at one point when the character ran down a stairway full of stalls, vendors, and brightly colored umbrellas. Some lag spikes are unavoidable, but the camera shaking does help make the game feel more real.

At the time this was written, Uncharted: The Lost Legacy felt a little rough compared to the other games, but that was kind of expected. A big part of the game here is getting around in the wilderness. This made an average of 50fps, but during intense scenes, it dropped quickly to 32fps. On the other hand, the highest number of frames per second was seen during puzzles, climbing walls, and cutscenes.

Chapter 2 of The Lost Legacy puts Chloe Frazer and Nadine Ross in a high-stakes platforming run while mercenaries shoot at them in the rain. You have to deal with strong reflections on wet surfaces, sparking bullet streams, and damage to the environment. On average, this scene ran at 46fps, and a quick fight with an enemy ran at 28fps. Motion blur helped stop the screen from tearing, and I would recommend it because Sony never goes too far with it, so it doesn’t make you feel sick.

Keep in mind that, no matter which quality preset you choose, both of the above chase sequences will cause significant lag spikes at certain points if your hardware is similar to mine.

Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End (all values are in fps)
LOW			MEDIUM			HIGH			ULTRA
LOW	AVG	HIGH	LOW	AVG	HIGH	LOW	AVG	HIGH	LOW	AVG	HIGH
55	68	83	51	65	73	47	55	63	39	48	57
Uncharted: The Lost Legacy
LOW			MEDIUM			HIGH			ULTRA
LOW	AVG	HIGH	LOW	AVG	HIGH	LOW	AVG	HIGH	LOW	AVG	HIGH
35	51	66	32	50	63	30	42	55	30	40	50

Uncharted: Legacy of Thieves Collection review — Verdict

Uncharted: Legacy of Thieves Collection promises newcomers to the series a tasty adventure with its beautiful graphics and well-made levels. Sure, the timing of the release makes it seem like compensation or a playful jab at PC gamers who couldn’t play God of War Ragnarok at launch, but Sony has no plans to copy Microsoft’s strategy of releasing games on the same day for all platforms. For Rs. 3,299/$50, you get almost one and a half games here, which is a great deal if you can look past the fact that it came out on the last generation.

Uncharted: The Lost Legacy shows its flaws because it doesn’t have as much polish as it could. And while support for ultra-wide displays and native 4K 60fps sound delicious, I’m not sure if that will be enough to bring back people who have already played these games on PS4 or PS5.

Pros:

It looks and sounds great
Good features for getting around
Motion blur isn’t a big deal.

Cons:

Packaged as a single, big application
The Lost Legacy is not as well put together.
There are no automatic ammo pickups or changes to the game.
Setup for the first time can take time.