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Art from the video game Uncharted: Lost Legacy
Art from the video game Uncharted: Lost Legacy

Title: Uncharted: The Lost Legacy

Platform: PlayStation 4

Cost: $39.99

Rating: Teen, for blood, language, use of alcohol and tobacco, violence

Uncharted: The Lost Legacy is the sixth installment of the decade-old series, and the first without protagonist Nathan Drake. Instead, players step into the role of Chloe Frazer, Drake's former squeeze and rival treasure hunter from Uncharted 2.

Chloe is joined by Nadine Ross, a mercenary who clashed with Drake in Uncharted 4. The two form an uneasy partnership to rescue an artifact known as the Tusk of Ganesh from an arms dealer who will use it to start a civil war.

Chloe is basically a mixture of Indiana Jones and Tomb Raider's Lara Croft, but lacking the whole "that belongs in a museum" moral compass when it comes to priceless antiquities. In short, she's a thief who loots ancient ruins for personal profit and always looks out for numero uno. This time, however, the mission is a little personal.

In India, her father's homeland, Chloe might end up fighting for something more than just herself.

Lost Legacy takes place in India's Western Ghats, a tropical, forest-covered mountain range spotted with waterfalls and ruins. Developer Naughty Dog can make some exquisitely crafted landscapes, and their full talent is on display here.

Much of the storyline revolves around Hindu mythology, so it's not just fun, it's educational.

Most of the Uncharted games tightly control where the player can go -- you move from Point A to Point B -- but Lost Legacy offers a few hours of a more open-world exploration, perhaps giving a glimpse of where Naughty Dog will take the game in its next, inevitable installment.

Originally intended as downloadable content for Uncharted 4, Lost Legacy expanded to the point where it was released as a stand-alone game. The mechanics, voice acting, animation and graphics are all excellent. It features all the mainstays of the Uncharted series: stealthy, third-person combat; dangerous free-climbing of the ruins of ancient civilizations; and lots of snarky dialogue and witty banter.

The game also does a pretty good job with NPC artificial intelligence -- nonplayer characters controlled by the game. The enemy will react to player actions -- if they see a dead body, movement or hear noise, they'll go investigate and can alert others. They'll flank, hide behind cover, use cooperative squad tactics and are pretty brutal in melee combat.

On Hard mode, which I played, run-and-gun tactics aren't going to work. There were several combat sections that took me quite a few tries to get through. Hint: Take out the guys with rocket-propelled grenades first.

While it doesn't hurt to have played the other Uncharted games, one of publisher Sony's core PlayStation franchises, it's also not necessary. Lost Legacy is quite a bit shorter than the other titles in the series. It will probably take less than 10 hours to complete the game. As a result, it also arrives at a lower price point.

While there isn't much replayability in the single-player campaign, Naughty Dog did include the full Uncharted 4: A Thief's End multiplayer experience. It's not just a similar multiplayer game, though, it's the exact same one -- meaning that rewards, character and weapon unlocks, etc., are all carried over. And when you join a multiplayer match, some players will have the Uncharted 4 disc in their PS4 and some will have Lost Legacy.

Naughty Dog put a lot of effort into its multiplayer modes. One of the best is that there's not really any "pay to win." There are microtransactions, but 100 percent of all multiplayer downloadable content (DLC) can be earned by simply playing the game, and all maps and modes are freely available to all players. However, people who don't want to wait can spend money to unlock those items faster.

Most of the multiplayer DLC is stuff that doesn't affect combat, such as weapon and character "skins" -- they are cosmetic items that make things look different. There are lots of gameplay modes as well, such as the standard team death-match and capture-the-flag, plus a cooperative mode where a team tries to hold off 50 waves of increasingly difficult and numerous enemies. Each wave of enemies comes with randomized rules and modifiers, such as kills that only count if made with a pistol, or enemies that move twice as fast, etc.

Lost Legacy is a great game to rent if you already have Uncharted 4. The campaign is short enough that it can be finished in a day or two, and perhaps because of this, the storyline is tightly focused, smartly written and never loses its sense of fun and adventure.

Clash swords with Jason at

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ActiveStyle on 09/18/2017

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