I was recently invited to preview the Uncharted 4 multiplayer beta by PlayStation Australia and play a few games of it to see what it’s all about. I have to say I have really missed the Uncharted multiplayer experience, being one of my favourite video game series’ on the PlayStation 3 and having not played an online match for quite some time now, I realised that I have really missed it and gosh was Uncharted 4 fun!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c3r_QjF28QE
If you’ve played any of the Uncharted multiplayer games before, then you’ll be quite familiar as to what to expect from the experience as it’s fairly similar, with a few changes to the gameplay of course. The only mode available during my preview of the game on Wednesday was the team deathmatch and I’m unaware of any other game modes at the moment, so will only mention what I saw with what I had access to on the day.
Basically the multiplayer team deathmatch has you placed in one of two teams, either the hero or the villains. Characters in each of the teams are made up of the good and bad characters from the series and you can pick who ever you would like to play as. Funnily enough in my first game I was placed in the hero team almost everyone chose Elena to play as for some reason, so doubling up on characters is allowed and it looked funny having so many Elena’s on a team.
As far as the gameplay goes, it’s fairly similar to other uncharted games, you can duck behind objects and take cover from opponents firing at you and return fire when you’re ready. You can still roll and jump and punch your opponents similarly to how you could in other Uncharted games. A new feature I noticed was the rope ability, basically you pressed L1 in certain sections of the multiplayer map and your character will throw their rope up in the air and it would attach to something above allowing you to get across large gaps in the map that you otherwise wouldn’t be able to jump across on your own.
My favourite feature in the game by far strangely was the ability to kick your opponents while they are down. Basically what happens is when you kill an opponent, that person goes into a kind of crawl away mode for a small amount of time where they could potentially be revived by a teammate allowing them to get back up again. But, if you are the killer and can get close to them while they are crawling away you can press square and kick them down, the sound effect that accompanies this action is brutal and I loved it! Alternatively when you are the one down and trying to crawl away from your killer it really literally is like someone kicking you when you’re down and it’s all just fun really. I couldn’t get enough of doing that.
In the team deathmatches you get to choose from a variety of loadouts. The two that I played with were the assault and the support loadout choices. The main difference that I saw with these was that the grenade used in the assault loadout was swapped for a medical kit for the support player which you can throw at teammates to instantly heal them. I didn’t have enough time with the game to try the others, although there is quite few which I will likely try when the beta is actually live later today.
In the game when you get a kill or kick someone to death you get money which you can use to buy certain perks that can give you an advantage in the game for your next respawn. There are more powerful guns, a sniper AI you can summon to help you out, a big brute to attack your enemies etc. The big weapon and most expensive one involves throwing a stone in the centre of the map which unleashes what looked like to me to be spirits which attack your opponents. I enjoyed the perk system, but found that when I got my kills up quite high that it was a bit easy to just buy whatever I wanted. I am also curious about how many of these things there are in the game to buy and if they would be adding more in the future as I do think that there needs to be a bit more of these to stop things getting repetitive quickly. You can also run around a find small treasures which you can pick up for some extra cash which you can use to buy more weapons on top of just going in for the kills every single time.
There were only two maps that I experienced when playing on the day. One was a green jungle like environment filled with ruins and the other was a small town that looked a bit wrecked. I enjoyed the town a bit more than the jungle environment simply because I felt that I performed better there than the other map. To me though they seemed well planned out and fun enough to spend a good amount of time with each of them.
During my preview of the game I only had about 2 hours game time, but if I could have I would have sat there all day with this game. I enjoyed it so much that for me this is already a must have buy for 2016 and if you have enough time over the weekend to download and play the beta, I highly recommend doing so because you’ll have a lot of fun, especially if you can get some friends to play with you as well.
weird that the only one missing is Chloe, she’s the only one missing from the old gang. She’s my fav and always played as her in the prior games.
Yeah I did notice that as well! I do wonder why they left her out of the game. I used to use her a lot in the old games to, it’ll be good if they can add her in there, I think it actually does need more characters to choose from as well