12 out of 12 people found the following review helpful:
Fortune favours the bold, and people who hide a lot
ChrisBarraclough from from London,
8th April, 2008
Drake's fortune is a over-the-shoulder romp that would probably be the result of a drunken nights fumbling between Resident Evil 4, Tomb Raider and Gears of War. It has the hiding and shooting mentality of Gears, where you take cover behind various pillars and walls and lean out to blow the kneecaps off a wide variety of enemies, although here you will find yourself shooting at johnny foreigners instead of slobbering Jade Goody look-alikes. And not just a hundred or so johnny foreigners, oh no. By the time you reach the end of this game, you'll have taken down pretty much the entire population of Cuba, with maybe half of Fiji thrown in for good measure. Still, the cover system works well and aiming is a cinch, meaning this part is relatively good fun (moreso if you have a deep xenophobic complex). In addition to the hiding and shooting bits, which make up the majority of the gameplay, you also have some Tomb Raider style hop-skip-and-jumping to do. These bits are fairly easy in general, apart from a few sections where your progression isn't entirely clear, leading to some rather hopeful leaps that end up with your corpse splattered across the bottom of a waterfall. Again, control is not a problem. Finally, you have some puzzley bits and some driving bits, which only occasionally crop up and aren't too intrusive. One word of advice is that when on a jetski, you can control the woman using L1 and get her to shoot at things, which I didn't work out for a good twenty minutes, leading to much cursing as I died for the ?th time by ramming into an exploding barrel. Honestly, who spends their whole day throwing these barrels into a river, just on the off-chance that someone will come driving up it and shoot them in the face? Talk about paranoid. As for the story, it is standard treasure-seeking fare with a typically English main baddie, that practically drowns in the sheer number of cliches that it vomits at you (even the dialogue is horrendous - 'You're looking awfully well for a corpse' being my favourite). And so, Drake is worthy of at least a rental, although perhaps not a purchase as it is quite short, and if you're like me, you can't be bothered to play through a game again to find every single hidden chest or coin or other length-extending devices. One-Sentence Review: Gears Of War in the jungle with Tomb-Raidery bits, but not as much jiggling. More at ChrisBarraclough dot com.