Platinum Review – Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End

Hello everyone and welcome to my platinum review of Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End.

In this article I will talk about my experience with the game, the gameplay, the roadmap to platinum and a trophy list, to hopefully help you decide if you want to go ahead and earn a platinum trophy in this amazing game. Keep in mind, this is not a trophy guide, if you need one you can find it here.

As you can probably already tell, I really like this game and this time around most of the people who played it will agree with me.

It is the last installment in Uncharted series with Nathan Drake as the main protagonist and it was beautifully executed both story and gameplay wise.

Because this is not a game review, I will not talk about the story but I will talk about the gameplay elements because it’s important for me to let you know what you getting yourself into.

Is this game for you

Although Uncharted 4 is, well the 4th game in the series you can jump into it without playing the previous games, but I would definitely recommend playing them as well, since they are really good. The game itself plays as a 3rd person action-adventure game with gunplay, climbing sections, puzzles and of cause, because it’s an Uncharted game there are big scale action sequences.

What makes it different from any other generic 3rd person shooters is an amazing story, characters and attention to details. While fans were worried at the time, because Amy Hennig, who was the game director for the series since the 1st Uncharted game in 2007 left the company in the beginning of the development, it turned out great. Neil Druckman, who directed The Last of Us previously took her place beside Bruce Straley and despite making some changes to the original script was respectful to her vision as far as we know.

Gunplay feels great, it’s much more action oriented then The Last of Us, for example, your health regenerates when you in cover and there is usually enough ammo, so no need to scavenge. Stealth plays a bigger role this time around, and there are sections of the game where you can take a quiet approach, something that was possible in the previous entries, but not to the same extent. Also, there are a couple of trophies for doing this, but I’ll get to it later. Another thing to note, the shooting galleries were scaled back from the previous entries and are usually not back-to-back anymore, so you have more time to breathe and enjoy the story.

Climbing is great, it’s really fluid and you can mostly understand easily enough where you are supposed to go next. Puzzles are present throughout the game, they can take you a few minutes to solve, but I wouldn’t say that they are hard by any means, so if you not into that, don’t let it discourage you.

Action sequences are big scale, fun, will keep you on the edge of your seat and make you feel like a bad ass.

As for the story, we are looking for Henry Avery’s lost treasure and I won’t give you any more information, other than it’s really good. The fact is, Uncharted 4 is one of my favorite games of all time, and although gameplay is fun, it’s mostly because of the story and the characters.

Roadmap

The difficulty for the platinum is 4/10 and it will take you a minimum of 30 hours and 2 playthroughs to complete, although you can make it considerably easier for yourself and do it in 3 playthroughs.

There are difficulty related trophies in the game and you will need to finish it on the hardest mode – Crushing. Now crushing is relatively hard but not impossible, you need to be very careful because you die in 3-4 shots and there are a couple of difficulty spikes throughout the game. There is one section that I felt was a bit unfair and it’s when you go through a cave with explosive traps in it. It took me around 20 minutes to get through it since you need to be very precise, I even looked up a guide because for the life of me I couldn’t figure it out myself.

If you wish, you can make the Crushing playthrough much easier by completing the game on any other difficulty first. That will grant you an access to Golden Guns and infinite ammo that you can give yourself at any point through the in-game menu. If you decide to do that just use Barrok .44 since it basically one shot’s most of the enemies, and with auto aim it really makes it a cake walk.

Another good reason to do it in 3 playthroughs is to enjoy the story first without worrying about the collectibles and get them by following a guide on your 2nd playthrough.

Your last playthrough should be a speedrun. You need to finish the game in under 6 hours, which is not that hard to do, since the time is pretty forgiving and on the easiest difficulty you can just run by most of the enemies and completely bypass some of the encounters. Keep in mind, you need to skip all the cutscenes because they add to your time and this is something that actually really annoyed me. You can pause the game if you wish and there is no need to complete it in one go, so you can exploit saves if you messed up, just make sure to manual save regularly and you can always check your time in the game menu. I finished the speedrun with 4:15:00 on the clock.

There is an exploit so you could potentially play only the first and last chapters to get this trophy and the trophy guide goes into detail on how to do it, but keep in mind you will need unpatched version of the game for it to work, so it’s easily doable if you have a physical copy and a bit of a pain if you own it digitally. Some people reported that it worked for them on the latest patch but it doesn’t work for most. I’ll check out a guide on how to get unpatched digital games.

Another trophy you should keep in mind on your speedrun is Sharpshooter, which requires you to finish the game with at least 70% accuracy. The speedrun is probably the best place to go for it, since you should be playing it on the easiest difficulty and with auto-lock-on anyway. Make sure that you choose not to carry over your statistics from previous playthroughs and check that your stats tab is actually empty after starting a new game, because it can be a bit buggy for some reason, so you might need to start a new game twice for it to actually erase your previous stats. You can check your accuracy through the in-game menu, it’s not too hard if you keep it in mind while playing. I managed to finish the game with 87% accuracy.

After finishing all of your story playthroughs you should complete all the miscellaneous trophies you didn’t get naturally, which to be fair is probably going to be most of them and I will give you more detail when I go over the trophy list.

Last but not least, there are multiplayer trophies in the game, but they are easy enough to do, the hardest one of them is actually for completing the trials that you can do solo. Other multiplayer trophies you should be able to easily get within a few matches. I believe that this is the right way to do multiplayer trophies in single player games. They just make you try it and there is no need to play for extended period of time, but that being said, the multiplayer mode is actually really fun in this game. I did those trophies legitimately without any boosting and managed to get them done in around 3 hours.

Trophy List

Now for the trophy list, the first 6 trophies are for completing the game. There is a trophy for beating the game on every one of 5 difficulty modes and for beating it in under 6 hours. Those trophies are stackable, so you will get trophies for both the difficulty you played at and all difficulties below, so no need to finish the game 5 times.

The speedrun trophy doesn’t have any difficulty requirement so you can, and should play it on Explorer mode. I talked about those trophies a bit in the roadmap section of the aricle so I won’t go over it again.

Something you will need to keep an eye out and definitely use a guide for, on your either first or second playthrough are collectibles. The game has 193 of them in the form of treasures, relics, journal entries, journal notes and optional conversations, and there are 9 trophies in total related to finding all of them. Collectibles carry over to additional playthroughs and you can check in chapter select what you are missing in each chapter, so it’s not hard to keep track of them. That being said almost 200 collectibles can feel a bit much, considering that 109 of them are treasures that don’t add anything to the story. I found them pretty boring, since they are another generic collectible that don’t reward you with anything for finding them. Sure, they look pretty, but nothing more to them.

Journal entries and journal notes on the other hand are pretty fun. The difference between them that journal entry is something Nathan writes down in his journal and note is, well, a note he finds. They usually fun to read and give you additional dialog, so I really enjoyed them. Another thing that gives you additional dialog is finding all optional conversations and, in my opinion, they are the best kind of collectible in this game, since they reward you with more information on the characters, their relationship and their backstory.

Last but not least, because the developer is Naughty Dog, they had to include easter eggs to their other games. There are 3 of them this time around, for Crash Bandicoot, Jak and Dexter and The Last of Us games. You will need to find all of them, and after you do, you will get a Relic Finder trophy.

Another trophy you might consider a collectible is I Accidentally All the Guns. For this one you will need to get at least one kill with every single weapon in the game. This is easier than it sounds, since 21 out of 28 weapons are accessible from the bonus menu after completing the game. Other 7 weapons you can easily cleanup with chapter select, and there is a very handy list of where you can find them in the trophy guide.

There are a lot of other miscellaneous kill related trophies in the game, for example killing 50 enemies with headshots or doing 30 stealth takedowns, something that you’ll probably get naturally. That being said, a lot of them are actually very specific, so let’s talk about the less straight forward ones and skip the more obvious. Also, just so you know, all the stats save to your profile instantly, so you can “checkpoint farm” by getting a couple of kills and restarting checkpoint.

Hangman’s Bullet is a trophy for getting 20 headshots while swinging from a rope, which is honestly easier than it sounds. Just disable auto aim, get on a rope and shoot some heads. By the way, you don’t actually have to be swinging.

Another easy trophy is I thought I heard Something and you will get it for performing 30 vertical stealth takedowns. This one is really easy and even a bit boring to do in Chapter 8 by checkpoint farming, so you shouldn’t have any trouble with it.

You will get Leapfrog trophy for killing 10 enemies in a row by alternating gunplay and melee. This one you can’t checkpoint farm, so you will need to find an encounter where you have 10 enemies or more and if you are on explorer difficulty you should be able to earn it easily enough.

Unstoppable is a trophy for killing 100 enemies in a row without dying. You might get this one naturally, but if didn’t you can just replay Chapter 7 section on the easiest difficulty and keep killing guards until you get the trophy, I got this one first try doing it this way. It will probably take you around 10 minutes, just remember to take cover if your health gets low and you should be good.

Now a couple of trophies that might take a few tries are Rushing Roulette and Run the Table and I actually had a bit of trouble with those two. For the first one you need to defeat enemies with a pistol, machine gun, and grenade, in that order, in 15 seconds. The timing is pretty tight so you should use a video guide to find the best way to do it. The second one is actually harder, you need to defeat enemies with a stealth attack, melee attack, headshot, and explosives, in that order, in 15 seconds. It took me probably around 10 minutes of tries to get this one, but don’t worry it’s possible with enough attempts and a bit of luck.

Other kill related trophies consist of making 10 enemies drop their grenades which is achievable by shooting an enemy when he is about throw one, getting 4 kills with one explosive, killing 10 enemies in 60 seconds with a China Lake GL, killing 5 armored enemies with melee, performing 10 combo buddy takedowns, pulling 20 enemies from a ledge and killing 1000 enemies in total. Those are pretty straight forward and easy to do, so don’t worry too much about them.

Another kind of trophies are for being stealthy in specific areas of the game. For example, you need to sneak through a cemetery without being seen for Ghost in the Cemetery trophy. Those ones can be either a pain or very easy, depending on how good you are with stealth. Regardless, you should be attempting them on the easy difficulty because on easy the enemies will take much longer to spot you. That being said if you want a challenge you can even do it on Crushing, which is exactly what I did, but it took me around 40 minutes worth of tries, so it’s really unnecessary.

Last type of single player trophies in the game are chapter related miscellaneous trophies, I won’t talk too much about them, since they are semi-story related and mostly easy to get, I’ll just talk about the spoiler free ones I had trouble with. You should check out the trophy guide if you want a full break down of the trophies by chapters.

For On Porpoise trophy you need to get 3 dolphins to follow your boat. I think it either requires a bit of luck, or I didn’t figure out the right way to do it, since I was trying to get it for around 20 minutes, but I got it eventually, so it can be a tiny bit annoying but not too bad.

Another one is for beating a High Score in Crash Bandicoot. Yes, they actually added a playable Crash Bandicoot level into the game, and since I am not great at it took me a few tries. No worries though, chapter select is you friend there and you should be trying it when you get to play it the second time, since it will be a bit easier.

And probably the hardest one of those is to get through the last fight of the game without getting hit. I can’t talk too much about it without giving away spoilers, just note that you can use gameplay modifiers if you already completed the game and turn on slow motion, which will give you more time to react and make it a lot easier.

Now for the multiplayer part, you should start with completing the introduction and finishing all the 15 trials. You supposed do the trials by yourself and they mostly consist of earning points by using different weapons or performing miscellaneous tasks. I did have trouble with a couple of them, but you should be able to beat them if you try a few times and look up a good strategy. No need to beat them on a highest difficulty either, moderate will be enough, so they are not too hard.

Other trophies in a multiplayer are for spawning 10 sidekicks, which is an ability you have and you can easily do by playing trials, no need to actually do it in the multiplayer itself. You will also need to revive 10 players, which you have to do in an online match, but that should be easy enough and the last one is for finishing 5 online games. You are not even required to win them, so no skill needed.

Conclusions

This is all you need to do to earn a platinum trophy in this game. Now should you do it?

I think it depends on what kind of gamer you are, this one is not very straight forward and you will have to go out of your way to achieve most of the trophies.

I think the trophy list itself is really fun and it forces you to change your play style at times, something that I really appreciate. Collectibles are a little excessive but not a deal breaker for me and multiplayer trophies are done right.

What can be a deal breaker for you is the need for either 2 or 3 playthroughs with the requirement to complete the game on the highest difficulty and speedrunning the game.

I personally really like speedrunning trophies so I liked it, but I know that not everyone shares this opinion.

Regardless, this is a very satisfying platinum, so if you don’t mind putting a little effort and you like Uncharted games you should go for it. If you are more casual gamer you can probably skip this platinum. Anyhow, I can’t recommend this game enough, so if you didn’t play it yet, what are you waiting for?

I really hope this video helped you, and if it did and you want to see more of them consider pressing the like and subscribe buttons. I am looking for suggestions of other games I should review in this format, so feel free to leave a suggestion in the comment section below.

Thank you for reading and have a good one!




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