Reviews

Uncharted: Legacy of Thieves Collection PC Review

18 October 2022

Has there ever been a better time to be a PC gamer?

We’ll always prefer the convenience of playing on a console, but PC is the place to go if you want full control over your gaming experience. And while at one point PC gamers had to look at the first-party titles released on consoles with envious eyes, it’s quickly becoming a thing of the past. Microsoft was, unsurprisingly, the first to bring its games to PC. And now there’s Sony, which with stellar ports of the likes of God of War and Marvel’s Spider-Man is demonstrating it means business.

Uncharted: Legacy of Thieves Collection further displays Sony’s commitment to PC gaming. Released earlier this year on PS5, it bundles up two of the very best Uncharted games while also enhancing them in various ways. On PS5, we enjoyed the subtly enhanced visuals, but more importantly we revelled in the improved performance and dramatically improved loading times. DualSense support was appreciated, too. Unsurprisingly, most of these boons translate over to PC.

Whack the settings up to ultra on either Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End or Uncharted: The Lost Legacy, and chances are you’ll be wowed. The locations in both of these games have been masterfully crafted, absolutely dripping with detail even when they open up to allow a pleasant amount of exploration. Character models are spectacular for the most part, too. Though it has to be said that Uncharted: The Lost Legacy impresses the most on both counts – it might just be one of the most beautiful-looking games we’ve ever laid our eyes on.

No-one makes games quite like Naughty Dog. Jump into either game included in Uncharted: Legacy of Thieves Collection and you’ll be treated to expertly-directed cinematic story scenes, brought to life with stunning facial animations. But the gameplay is equally impressive. Combining stealth, puzzles, explorations and combat all played from a third-person perspective, both Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End and Uncharted: The Lost Legacy are gripping from beginning to end.

They’re grand adventures, elevated by thrilling set-pieces that often take your breath away. But they also have story beats that keep that them grounded. Sure, the action is bombastic and ridiculous at times, but over the course of both games vulnerabilities are exposed and growth is made. Like in all good stories, there’s depth to each character’s actions and motivations – things aren’t always black and white.

Don’t be put off by the fact that Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End is the lead title here, either. While it is indeed the fourth entry in a series, it actually works as a good entry point, taking players back to the origins of Nathan Drake. You’ll get more out of it if you have played the original Uncharted trilogy of course, but it’s by no means necessary – it’ll just take you a little bit longer to build binds with some of its characters. The same goes for Uncharted: The Lost legacy, but being a standalone title in which you’re in control of Chloe Frazer rather than Nathan Drake, it’s even more accessible to newcomers.

Like on PS5, both games in Uncharted: Legacy of Thieves Collection on PC are accessed via a single install – a bit of a pain if you’re only interested in playing one game and are short on storage space. A range of advanced graphical settings are available, allowing you to tweak the quality of aspects such as shadows, anisotropic filtering, ambient occlusion and textures. Needless to say, with a bit of tweaking, both games can be configured to play well on a wide range of PC specifications.

Helping matters is the fact that the PC version of Uncharted: Legacy of Thieves Collection also has support for the likes of FSR and DLSS. With an NVIDIA RTX 3070 paired with a Ryzen 5 3600 CPU, we were able to play both titles at ultra settings at close to a locked 60fps using the DLSS Performance settings. And while the rendering resolution might have been lower than than what the PS5 employs in Performance mode, the image quality and visuals in general were beyond the PS5 Fidelity mode. DLSS and and improved anisotropic filtering really make a difference.

Along with other PC-centric features such as ultra-wide monitor support, this is undoubtedly another brilliant port that PC gamers will lap up. And if they have a DualSense controller, they can even enjoy haptic feedback and adaptive trigger effects – the caveat being it has to be connected with a wire. There are some issues that we’d like to see ironed out though.

There’s currently no exclusive fullscreen option, for example, and so the game only outputs at your desktop resolution unless you play windowed. You might also encounter the odd unfathomable framerate drop here and there – thankfully such instances are rare and they don’t really affect gameplay. And this is something that PC gamers will just have to live with, but loading times just aren’t as good at their PS5 counterparts. Still, they’re not exactly long.

If you’re a PC gamer with a thirst for adventure, or you’re simply keen to finally check out the Uncharted series if you haven’t owned a PlayStation console, it’s definitely worth investing in Uncharted: Legacy of Thieves Collection. Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End may seem like a strange place to jump into the series but it works, while Uncharted: The Lost Legacy is pretty much worth the asking price alone as it’s such a well-rounded adventure. Sony continues its streak of putting out top-quality ports, and we’re here for them.