Uncharted 4: A Thief's End — The Set-Piece Machine Takes a Bow

Naughty Dog released Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End on PlayStation 4 on 10 May 2016, closing out Nathan Drake’s story across four mainline entries stretching back to 2007’s Drake’s Fortune. The series built its reputation on cinematic set-pieces — collapsing buildings, gunfights on moving trains, a sinking ocean liner — and the pressure on a finale is usually to escalate that spectacle one more notch. A Thief’s End does something more interesting instead: it slows the pace in places, opens up genuinely larger traversal spaces, and adds a grappling hook and piton that change the climbing more fundamentally than any prior sequel’s new toy managed.

Why the grapple works

The grappling hook, usable on marked anchor points to swing across gaps or descend quickly, and the climbing piton, hammered into rock faces to create new handholds where none previously existed, both attack the series' oldest structural weakness: Uncharted’s climbing had always been visually spectacular but mechanically narrow, a fixed path with the illusion of choice. A Thief’s End opens genuine option-rich climbing spaces — a cliff face with multiple viable routes, a ruin with more than one way up — and the grapple in particular turns momentum into a resource the way a Spider- Man or Batman traversal system does, letting a confident player chain a swing directly into a jump into a piton-assisted climb without the game ever fully pausing to reset the pace. It’s the single clearest evidence that Naughty Dog studied what made traversal-first action games feel good elsewhere in the genre and built a version calibrated for a much more linear campaign structure.

The vehicle sections, and open space as a new kind of set piece

Several mid-game chapters open into genuinely large drivable spaces — a Madagascar jungle traversed by jeep, later stretches allowing real detour and exploration rather than a fixed corridor — which is a significant departure from the series’ historically tight linearity. These aren’t full open-world zones by any reasonable measure, but they’re wide enough that finding an optional puzzle-tomb or a scenic vista feels like genuine discovery rather than following a corridor with scenery attached, and the game uses them sparingly enough that they read as a deliberate change of pace rather than a bloated concession to open-world trends the rest of the industry was chasing at the time.

The ancestor: this is Tomb Raider’s puzzle-platforming, filtered through Hollywood

Uncharted’s whole design lineage traces back to the block-pushing, ledge-jumping puzzle platforming of the original Tomb Raider games, filtered through a much bigger budget and a script structured like a summer blockbuster rather than an isolated tomb-crawl. A Thief’s End makes that debt more visible than any prior entry by finally giving the climbing genuine environmental puzzles again — water-wheel mechanisms, pulley systems, optional puzzle-tombs with their own self-contained logic — rather than the pure directed-climbing corridors the middle two games leaned on. It’s the series circling back to acknowledge where its own verbs originally came from, right as it closes the book on the character who’s spent four games putting a wisecracking, cinematic face on Lara Croft’s older, quieter puzzle-box design.

Combat: a shooter still finding its footing against its own cover system

Gunfights retain the series’ cover-based shooting with a wider arsenal and smarter enemy AI that flanks more aggressively than earlier entries, and Naughty Dog adds stealth takedowns and tall grass for a genuine non-lethal-first option in several encounters, mirroring the studio’s own work on The Last of Us. It’s a competent, occasionally excellent shooter, but combat has never been the series’ strongest system, and A Thief’s End doesn’t fully solve the tension between wanting players to experiment with stealth and the game’s habit of eventually forcing a loud firefight regardless of approach. The best gunfights are the ones staged in the larger, more open chapters, where cover, flanking routes and vertical traversal all combine into something closer to the series’ climbing at its best; the worst are corridor shootouts that feel like leftover series furniture rather than a fresh idea.

The jeep itself is a modest system — acceleration, a winch for towing a second vehicle across obstacles, nothing approaching a driving game’s depth — but it exists purely to make the larger Madagascar chapter’s scale readable at driving speed rather than walking speed, which is the correct scope for a mechanic that appears in exactly one extended sequence rather than across the whole campaign.

Rope-swinging turns combat and traversal into one system

The most underrated addition isn’t the grapple’s use in exploration but its use mid-firefight: swinging into a group of enemies for a takedown, or using a rope to reposition to high ground during an active gunfight, means traversal and combat stop being two separate modes the game switches between and start reading as one continuous space. It’s the clearest evidence Naughty Dog studied the same “momentum as a combat resource” idea this desk has traced through other traversal-heavy action games, adapted here for a series that had spent three prior entries treating climbing and shooting as strictly sequential activities rather than something the player could blend on the fly.

Elena, and a domestic subplot the series earns

Nathan’s marriage to Elena Fisher, established across the earlier games and strained at this story’s opening by his secret return to treasure-hunting, gives the campaign an emotional throughline that earlier entries’ romance-adjacent subplots never fully earned. The game is careful to let Elena be genuinely angry rather than simply worried, and her eventual decision to join the hunt rather than wait at home reframes the couple’s dynamic as a partnership under strain rather than a damsel arc, which matters for a series finale that’s explicitly asking whether Drake’s adventuring life is compatible with the domestic one he’s built.

Multiplayer, and the mode most players skipped

A Thief’s End shipped with a competitive multiplayer suite — objective modes, hero and villain character skins, traversal-focused map design echoing the campaign’s grapple mechanics — that saw a reasonable initial population but never became the game’s main draw the way Uncharted 2’s multiplayer had a console generation earlier. It’s a well-built mode let down mainly by timing: a single-player-driven series releasing a finale into a market that had already moved toward dedicated live-service shooters for its multiplayer attention, and Naughty Dog would not attempt competitive multiplayer again in a mainline entry after this one.

Where to play it

The original PS4 release remains playable via backward compatibility, but the definitive way to play now is Uncharted: Legacy of Thieves Collection, a 2022 remaster bundling A Thief’s End with its standalone expansion The Lost Legacy for PS5, with a PC port following later that year. The PS5 version adds a choice of fidelity or performance graphics modes and DualSense haptic feedback tuned to the climbing and grapple systems, which is a genuinely appropriate use of the controller’s strengths given how much of the game’s best design lives in traversal feel rather than button-press combat.

Sam Drake, and a sequel-length flashback structure

The story leans on a new character, Nathan’s previously unmentioned older brother Sam, and a flashback structure that reframes Drake’s entire origin — his time in a Panama juvenile facility, his early partnership with Sam before Nathan’s presumed death — as material the earlier trilogy had simply never shown the player. It’s a big retroactive addition to a character’s history three games deep into a story already told, and Naughty Dog earns the risk mostly through pacing: the flashbacks are placed to recontextualise specific late-game decisions rather than dumped in a single prologue, which keeps them feeling like character work rather than retcon housekeeping.

The honest case against the slower pace

The trade Naughty Dog makes for the larger traversal spaces and the flashback-heavy structure is a campaign that runs noticeably longer and slower than any prior Uncharted, and not every stretch justifies the extra time. The opening hours, spent almost entirely in Drake’s domestic present and the childhood flashbacks establishing Sam, delay the treasure-hunting plot longer than some players’ patience for a series famous for opening on a train wreck or a cargo-plane skydive will tolerate — it’s the slowest of the four games to actually get moving. A few of the walking-and-talking sections between set-pieces, while well-written, repeat the same rhythm often enough in the back half that the pacing occasionally drags rather than builds, a problem the tighter, punchier earlier entries in the series never had room to develop because they simply moved faster.

The verdict

A Thief’s End is the rare franchise finale that improves its core traversal mechanics rather than simply escalating its explosions, and the grapple-and-piton climbing is good enough that it’s worth playing the game for that system alone even for someone who finds the plot’s family- secret retcon a stretch. Anyone curious how this same studio applied identical traversal-and-cover instincts to a much bleaker story should read this desk’s take on The Last of Us Part II; anyone tracing where this generation of grappling-hook verticality echoes should note how directly it anticipates the momentum-management traversal this desk found in Insomniac’s Spider-Man games a few years later.

Spoilers below

The story’s central mystery — that Sam Drake, presumed dead in a Panama prison riot fifteen years earlier, actually survived and has spent the intervening years planning a return to the pirate treasure of Henry Avery that first drove the brothers apart — recontextualises the opening chapters’ domestic-life framing of a retired Nathan Drake as a man who was always going to be pulled back in, given a large enough debt owed to family rather than to greed. Sam’s terminal illness, contracted from the same prison conditions that kept him hidden for over a decade, gives the endgame heist genuine urgency beyond simple treasure-hunting stakes. The game’s final confrontation with mercenary Nadine Ross and her employer Rafe Adler, who dies buried under collapsing gold in Libertalia’s ruins, closes the treasure-hunt plot in the series’ bluntest possible moral — that greed for the same fortune which destroyed the historical pirate colony destroys the men chasing it one more time — before the epilogue jumps forward to show Nathan’s daughter Cassie discovering his old journal, passing the adventuring impulse down rather than ending it outright.