Uncharted: Drake's Fortune

From the adventure-filled gameplay to the pristine presentation, each of Uncharted's twenty chapters are polished to perfection and will leave you counting the days to the inevitable sequel. Despite packing a lengthy campaign, you'll hate to see it come to an end. Thankfully, collecting Xbox 360-like "Achievements" to unlock goodies--including Elena as a playable character--make a second play-through a no-brainer. Like a lost city of gold, Uncharted is well worth seeking out.

It took us about eight hours to get through Uncharted: Drake's Fortune, and it was an action-packed eight hours, without much in the ways of load times or informational status screens to break it up. The imbalance between the gunplay and the platforming is jarring but forgivable--but the platforming itself works pretty well and looks fantastic thanks to the game's excellent motion-captured animation. If nothing else, Uncharted is a graphical showcase for the PlayStation 3, and it dazzles the senses at nearly every opportunity.

Naturally, what starts as a simple treasure hunt rapidly unravels into a twisting adventure yarn involving pirates, mercenaries, dead Nazis, a mysteriously vanished Spanish colony and at least one U-boat suspiciously parked atop an Amazonian waterfall. The writing is snappy, the characters are endearing and the visuals are stunning throughout. If only the actual gameplay was as consistently awesome, it'd have Game of the Year written all over it.