So you’re stuck on a desert island. What do you do? Calling for help sounds like a feasible option, but what’s the point of leaving empty handed? There’s no Fedex package worth keeping sealed up just for the boost in willpower. It’s time to have free spirits and explore! And while the Xbox 360 has been getting a huge share of strong multiplayer titles, the PlayStation 3 has been churning out single player adventure games like Heavenly Sword and Ratchet & Clank Future: Tools of Destruction. And now Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune adds on to that list, giving us a powerful single player third-person story-driven shooter, with a tad of leg room for some good ol’ fashioned exploring.

Nathan Drake, the not-so-average protagonist that developer Naughty Dog aimed to be our ‘everyday man’, is only halfway there. In attitude, he’s the average surfer dude/adventure seeker who you’d expect to be part of Patrick Swayze’s posse in Point Break but actually a good guy, not just insane for the rush. Yet he maneuvers too much like Prince of Persia, jumping from ledge to ledge over huge cliffs that would lead him to certain doom. For a little treasure, risking his life is far too commonplace.

The constant struggle to get past certain areas through that physical labor is far too constant. Every time there isn’t some sort of action happening on screen, the static surroundings beckon Nathan to climb them, traverse them, and find that one singular path through them, many of which are extremely hard to find and thankfully marked white. It is, suffice to say, a pleasure to watch the movements Nathan makes jumping around the the world, but even then searching for that sole path is annoying and time consuming, and most importantly, boring after the tenth time.

Thus, our protagonist is an acrobat. One with some of the most realistic movements we’ve ever seen, slightly better than those of Assassins Creed. Nathan doesn’t just hop onto a ledge, he’ll climb up it naturally and smoothly, never once fidgeting like we’d generally expect. The animations are excellent, and so long as players time movements right, there’s no reason the entire game can’t feel cinematic during play.

As mentioned before, Uncharted is a story-driven title, meaning everything that happens isn’t just based around the plot; it is the plot. There isn’t cooperative play or multiplayer, but it isn’t necessary. The story is all that’s really important. Nathan, believing himself to be a far-off descendent of the English naval commander Sir Francis Drake, is searching for the treasure the Sir supposedly found before his death. With Nathan’s trouble-following friend Sully and documentary filmmaker Elena Fisher, they run into all kinds of trouble and mischief.