

LOS ANGELES—Delays, departures, and public rumblings are enough to make any game series fan apprehensive about a sequel—especially one like Uncharted 4, whose actual gameplay has been kept at arm's length ever since a December 2014 reveal.

With the game's May 10 launch looming, Naughty Dog finally put controllers in hands of the press at a private event last week. While the demo didn't include much plot or dialogue, it emphasized new ways for series hero Nathan Drake to trot the globe—some stealthier than others—and they all felt pretty fun.

Our 20-minute demo included a slice from one of the game's later missions, apparently chosen for its very neutral, spoiler-free attachment to the plot. Naughty Dog representatives told us we had landed in Madagascar on a hunt to find lucrative pirate treasure before a bad-guy duo of a tech billionaire and a South African mercenary could do so first. Drake starts the mission hopping in a rented four-by-four with brother Sam Drake and longtime chum Victor Sullivan in the passenger seats.

Welcome to “wide linear”

This video above is made up entirely of our own hands-on time with Uncharted 4—meaning, the wipeout at the start of the video was totally intentional. (Who doesn't wanna drive a Jeep off a cliff?)

Once Drake got into the car, Naughty Dog unfurled its new favorite buzz phrase: "wide linear." Uncharted 4 doesn't have any Grand Theft Auto-level aspirations in terms of sandboxes or optional mission paths, but its creators want players to feel like their path through this guided, cinematic experience has a mix of path choices and required visual and storytelling beats.

One way they're getting this right is by putting players into more enormous environments, which are met with faster, more capable vehicles. Forget climbing along the edges of a mountain's cliff. It's time to scale the entire mountain in a muck-chewing Jeep. The Madagascar mission's opening mountain felt both enormous and approachable thanks to smooth-yet-burly driving mechanics. It was easy to pull turns but also fun to drift in mud pools and rev the vehicle up steep cliffs.

This lengthy, enjoyable drive also provided an organic opportunity for the Drake brothers to rap about pirates. When Nathan hopped out of the driver's seat to run on foot toward hidden goodies, the car's remaining passengers exchanged colorful banter. And while Uncharted has always been a looker of a series, the bump from PS3 to PS4 is unmistakable. View distances are staggering, and the mountain environment I explored offered a good mix of reflection and particle effects in the mud. In-game character faces and animations certainly pale compared to this month's beautiful Xbox exclusive, Quantum Break, but Uncharted fans may prefer the polygonal budget being spent on those incredible views anyway.

Eventually, the drive was rudely interrupted by the discovery of a mercenary hideout, at which point I saw a few obvious driving routes to take into battle. For funsies, I rammed the car into one baddie, then hopped out and laid down some Aliens-caliber machine-gun fire before dying an idiotic death. After respawning, I decided to give the series' new stealth mechanics a shot.

Drake has slinked around bad guys and pulled off surprise chokeholds in the past, but this Uncharted includes a far more robust stealth system. Each in-game environment has obvious chunks of terrain that characters can slink through undetected, and in Madagascar, that was some very tall grass. Between those patches, obscuring walls, and occasional breaks in baddies' patrolling eyes, I got Drake closer to his foes—though I occasionally triggered foes' awareness. This is represented by a diamond-shaped icon over their heads, which appears once your character is visible and fills up if you don't hide in time.

Live to stealth another day













Sony Computer Entertainment

Usually, this icon then turns yellow, which means the bad guy will start walking in your direction with a gun drawn—but that's still quiet enough for Drake to knock the guy out and remain hidden. Should Drake be clearly identified, on the other hand, the foe's icon will turn orange, at which point he'll shout for help and point you out to anybody nearby. Even at this point, Drake can still run or grappling-hook his way to cover, and if he's far enough away from his last seen spot, enemies will return to a yellow level, which means players can still stealth around to some extent.

Previously, once Drake was spotted in an encounter, he was exposed and fired upon for the whole rest of the fight. I certainly prefer the option to be able to kinda-sorta hide again, at least to set up my next assault tactic. And since these are open environments, players don't get fully comprehensive cover to work with; in three sessions with this mission, I never found a way to remain hidden the whole time, especially due to a sniper on a perch that had to be shot down. (Drake didn't pack a silencer for this mission, I guess.) Ultimately, while inspirations drawn from Naughty Dog's stealthy The Last of Us seemed obvious, this game's take on stealth made sense within the more bombastic Uncharted framework—and the cover fire and takedown assistance from companions made the battle even more immersive and entertaining.

The only real maneuverability hitch I noticed during battle was the game's new grappling hook system, mostly because I didn't disconnect and jump across gaps the way I expected to. Perhaps this is a timing system that makes more sense after spending time with Uncharted 4, but for a series that makes gunplay and stealth takedowns feel so crisp and immediately accessible, the grappling-hook hitch felt like a weird exception.

I walked away from the LA demo otherwise impressed by smooth action and a cool new take on the series' story-during-traversal sequences. What we saw absolutely qualifies as "next-gen Uncharted," which is great news for the series. Still, the demo's utter lack of story elements has Ars worried. Sometimes, preview events will reveal a smidge of story and ask writers to keep their mouths shut on those, but the content we tried out was so plotless that we're going to consider that part of the game a huge question mark until it launches in May.

Listing image by Sony Computer Entertainment