Editor’s note: After our review went live, it was brought to our attention that, as a DirectX 12-only game, there is no need for proper fullscreen support. As a result, we’ve updated our review and score with this new information in mind.
Another day, another Sony PC port that isn’t Bloodborne. Sure, I’ve heard the game’s code is held together with bandaids and spit, but eventually, they’re gonna run out of other announcements to torture me and thousands of other fans with.
Uncharted: Legacy of Thieves Collection is a collection (if you can call it that) of two games: Uncharted 4 and Uncharted: Lost Legacy (which is secretly the best game in the series). I don’t know when we started calling groups of two things collections, but here it is. And… it’s good! The games are still good, after all these years.
Okay, I’ll stop being a brat and talk about the port. The games run really well, regularly hitting in excess of 100 frames per second. In fact, eyeing the FPS meter like a hawk, I only saw one dip below 100 during my playtime. Of course, I’m running an RTX 3070 with DLSS enabled which, unsurprisingly, helps a lot.
Combing through the options left me with some pretty big questions, however. Since this is a DirectX 12 game, there’s no option for fullscreen at all, so you’re stuck with borderless windowed or, if you’re an insane person, windowed. Also, it doesn’t seem like there’s proper HDR support — a toggle will present in the settings menu only if HDR is enabled in Windows itself, but once turned on, there’s no proper calibration process.
Most bafflingly is the option to lock the framerate… at 30 FPS. Not 60, not 120… but 30. So I ran it unlocked which, for me, wasn’t a huge deal. But I imagine if you’re skirting around the 70 FPS mark with dips, you’re really going to be hankering for an option to lock it at 60. And, as I mentioned before, the game runs in forced windowed mode, so even using v-sync is going to be questionable at smoothing things over.
There are, of course, many graphical options to tinker with and a relatively robust detection system for preferred settings. But none of that can assuage the feeling that graphical options only really matter if you’re running the game in the way you want, at the framerate you want. I can set graphics as low or high as I want, but if my only option is an unlocked framerate in windowed mode, it’s not going to look as nice as it could.
And, for what it’s worth, I experienced one crash in my frenzied six-hour play session with the game (and yes, I have both of these games to completion). But I did get to choose the controller prompts for my DualSense controller, so I’m willing to let it slide.
So, yeah, at the end of the day, it’s kind of a bummer. It’s technically pretty solid, I think. It ran like a dream, but with the sheer variety of display types and refresh rates, a proper framerate cap would have gone a long way. And the lack of a proper HDR implementation is a huge blow to fidelity. So what we’re ultimately getting is a worse version of the PlayStation 5 version, unless you’ve got a high-end graphics card that can push hundreds of frames and you don’t mind a less colorful picture.
This review is based on the PC version of the game. A code was provided for review by Sony Interactive Entertainment.
Good
A lack of proper HDR and the inability to cap the framerate above 30 FPS leaves this otherwise excellent collection feeling a bit mishandled compared to the PlayStation 5 version.
Uncharted: Legacy of Thieves