Uncharted 4: A Thief's End is a thrilling, fitting finale for adventure series

Uncharted 4: A Thief's End is a fantastic movie. It's got characters that are charming and interesting, the plot moves along at a breakneck pace, and it is set in interesting locales. It's the best of Indiana Jones and James Bond mashed up into a well-written, well-directed entertainment.

A Thief’s End is a game, too, but it’s not trying to break new ground in that realm. This is a linear experience that lets you climb when it wants you to and fight when the story warrants it. 

The environments are designed with the vertical in mind, Italian villas and Scottish mountains included, so you'll be traversing up and down considerably. The plot path may be linear, but your route through the geography rarely is.

When confronted by enemies, you can sneak your way around, taking out the bad guys from cover, but you’ll often find yourself in a full-on firefight, where you’ll have to take position behind boxes and around corners to keep from getting overwhelmed.

The gameplay is mostly satisfying, providing a good mix of puzzles to solve, fights to have, and environments through which to move. But the mechanics of movement are sometimes clumsy. Everything else in the game, from the plot to the pacing, is smooth and seamless, so it's doubly frustrating when the carefully created immersion falls apart when your character catches an invisible corner or does a feeble hop rather than a heroic leap because you are slightly misaligned.

Naughty Dog's Neil Druckmann and Bruce Straley led the development of this game. The pair brought a few elements from The Last of Us, on which they worked previously, with the most obvious being the characters and their development.

Nathan Drake, affable scoundrel that he is, has never been painted with such a delicate brush. He becomes humanized in such a real way here that you can’t help but empathize, even while you’re shaking your head at some of the decisions he’s making.

Naughty Dog has been suggesting that with Uncharted 4 they are done with Nathan Drake. Whether this really is the final game in the series remains to be seen. It is difficult to let go of such a lucrative franchise.

Either way, A Thief's End is a fitting end to the story of Nathan Drake. And it will thrill every step of the way.