The Best PlayStation Game Every Year 1994 - 2024

Uncharted 4 goes to prove that sometimes if something isn’t broken you don’t need to attempt to fix it. Just make it bigger, deeper and add a driving section to it.

Whilst Uncharted 3 was a great game, retrospectively it wasn’t the ending that Nathan Drake and company deserved. With The Last of Us now in Naughty’s Dog rear-view, they could stand to write a conclusion with the right amount of emotional pathos. As such, A Thief’s End somehow brought a trilogy without a truly bad game to a whole new level previously unthought of. 

As with every instalment in the series, the improvements were incremental across the board. Moving from the PS3 to the PS4 of course meant more realistic animation, gorgeous graphics and mo-cap that helped to carry that deeper story.

The set pieces were bigger and more ridiculous than ever but equally the slower moments took advantage of the system too, by adding quasi-open levels where players have more opportunity to explore for secrets or find a route to the objective or around danger. It’s really important that Uncharted didn’t arbitrarily go open world but these moments of freedom were some of the most memorable in the game.

Every review or recap of every Uncharted compared it to an action movie (including this one!) but A Thief’s End was so much of a worthy cinematic jump that it made the previous games look like the tie-in TV series. There are few franchise finales as good as Uncharted 4.