Uncharted: Legacy of Thieves Collection PC Review

Release Date: October 19, 2022

Genre: Adventure

Series: Uncharted

Developers: Iron Galaxy, Naughty Dog

Platform: Microsoft Windows

Publishers: PlayStation PC LLC, Sony Interactive Entertainment

"Review Copy Provided By Sony Interactive Entertainment"

Uncharted: Legacy of Thieves Collection is a remaster of Uncharted 4: Thieves End and Uncharted Lost Legacy for the PS5 and PC (Releasing later this year). These games were individually released in 2016 and 2017 for the PS4 and then remastered for the PS5 in February of 2022 in the Legacy of Theives Collection and were essentially the end of the Nathan Drake Saga and shifted focus to his friend and former lover, Chloe Frazier with her first solo adventure. These games were graphical marvels when they were initially released and truly pushed the PS4 to the limit of what developer Naughty Dog could do at the time and displayed substantial improvements when they were released on the PS5, so with the games being on PC now, do they run as optimally as the other PlayStation PC games, and does it run well on the Steam Deck? Well, we are going to cover that and more as this review goes on so mahalo/thank you to PlayStation for providing the review copy!

I ran the game on my Desktop that has an RTX 3070 rocking a i7 10700K with 32GB of DDR4 3200MHz on Ultra settings – 4K 120FPS – DLSS Quality and on my gaming laptop which is an ASUS ROG M16 with a RTX 3060 rocking an i9 11900H 16GB of DDR4 3200MHz on High settings – 1440P 120FPS – DLSS Performance both having Windows 11. Being able to utilize DLSS is a godsend, although if you have a powerful enough rig then you won’t need to utilize DLSS at all. If you’re on an AMD setup, then you have access to utilizing SuperFX settings as well. You’ll have a plethora of display options to tweak and tons of accessibility options that you can easily configure to get the best experience for your setup. There is no way for me to test this game on all PC configurations, but the game is so well optimized that you can expect it to work pretty well on almost any setup running a GTX 1060 and up.

On the Steam Deck the games run smoothly with Thieves End running at a variable refresh rate that fluctuates between 35fps-60fps and Lost Legacy running at a mostly locked 30fps. The resolution is set to 1280x800 with the rendered resolution being 853x533 and the aspect ration set to Auto. AMD FSR is2 is by default set to Quality with FSR Sharpness at 35 and Render Scale at 100 and V-Sync on. If you want to get a more stable framerate for Thieves' End, then I would recommend setting your refresh rate to 40hz as the sweet spot. Unfortunately, Lost Legacy doesn’t really perform higher than 30fps no matter what setting I put the game in.

When it comes to the battery life when playing these on Steam Deck; I was able to get roughly an hour and a half with the default settings and when I tinkered with the TDP and screen brightness I was able to get about 2 hours tops.

When it comes to controls, you have the option to either play the game with a traditional controller or keyboard and mouse combo. Which is better? Well, that’s truly up to you and how you prefer to game. Personally, I find the standard controller setup to be the most comfortable as I was playing this game with the Victrix Pro Gambit Controller and the Turtle Beach Recon and React-R Controller and utilized the ability to custom map actions to the back paddles of the controller. When I played with keyboard and mouse I switched between using the ROCCAT Vulkan II Max and Vulkan II Mini with my mouse being the ROCCAT Kone XP Air and Kone XP.

The audio options are solid with me using my ROCCAT Syn Max Air and getting the full effect of hearing everything from the flaura and fauna to gunshots and all the minute details in between.

What of the multiplayer mode of the previous release? Well, you won’t find that mode here as that has been left out of this remaster and while that is not really much of an issue for me given that I didn’t play that mode, there are some who I know who thoroughly enjoyed it and will feel it a shame that it is no longer available.

TL; DR is Uncharted: Legacy of Thieves Collection worth the purchase? If you’ve never played either title and have already played and enjoyed the first 3 titles, then yes this is a worthwhile purchase which will net you hours upon hours of fun and replay value. If you’ve already played both games and want to see what they would look like on your PC or Steam Deck with all the additional improvements and performance enhancements, then this is a no brainer. It is unfortunate that the first three titles are not on Steam yet but I do hope to see them be ported over down the road to have the entire series in my Steam library. Uncharted: Legacy of Thieves Collection gives you two of the series greatest entries with substantial improvements in graphically fidelity and performance while adding new bells and whistles and tweaks to what are masterpieces of the previous generation.