Parent's Guide: Uncharted 4: A Thief's End - Age rating, mature content and difficulty

What is Uncharted 4: A Thief's End?

Uncharted 4: A Thief's End is an action- adventure third-person shooter game about a treasure hunter named Nathan Drake, who goes on one final adventure to find the lost treasure of Captain Henry Avery. This game is exclusively available for the PlayStation 4.

How do you play Uncharted 4?

The main game is a single player adventure, that takes you on a globe trotting journey from forest areas to ancient ruins, as you set out on a quest to find the long lost treasure. You'll need to navigate Nathan up the side of mountains and buildings, jump across huge gaps and swing from ropes to clear gaping chasms - kind of like Indiana Jones, in game form. There are puzzles to solve along the way, too, whether you're rotating stones with different pictures on them, until they all show the correct image, or hunting for a switch to open a secret door. There's also a fair amount of combat, as you fight off mercenaries you come across either by knocking them out with your bare hands, shooting them with a gun or blowing them up with explosives.

There is also an online multiplayer mode which will require PlayStation Plus subscription. This mode includes daily challenges and matches to compete in which can earn you in-game currency to spend on unlocking extra gameplay items. You can face off against other players online in "capture-the-flag" type games, and other similar team vs team matches, in which you have to fight off and kill opposing team members to win.

As a third person action adventure, the game uses a dual analogue control scheme (left stick moves your character around, right stick controls the camera/lets you aim).

How easy in Uncharted 4 to pick up and play?

Overall, Uncharted 4 isn't too tricky to get in to. There are four difficulty settings on offer here, so you can tweak the game to your own preferences. If you want to just enjoy the story, set the game to easy, and combat will be much less challenging - but if you prefer a tougher fight, whacking the difficulty up will let you increase the difficulty of encounters to suit.

Although this is the fourth (and, at the time of writing, apparently the last game in the Uncharted series), you don't need to have played the previous games in order to understand the story, as important past events are recapped throughout the game. There's also plenty of tutorials for helping new players get into the game, from a tutorial that tells you how to fight with your bare hands, to how to stay out of harms way by dodging. If you ever get stuck and don't know what to do next, eventually the game will pick up on this and advise you to press "up" on the d-pad to get a hint.

While you can die, you never lose too much progress, as the game automatically saves your progress at regular checkpoints. As the game is fully voiced, there's no real reading to do - however, a lot of the clues and letters you pick up in the game are written, with nothing in the way of a voice over to read them out.

Additional Notes

• There is an Expansion Pass available, which gets you access to an additional single player add-on, and two additional multiplayer expansions.

While there's nothing in the way of sex in Uncharted 4, the game does contain some mild bad language, and moderate violence. Throughout the game, you'll engage in combat with mercenaries, either taking part in firefights using a range of weapons, from pistols to rocket launchers, or getting a bit more up close and personal using your bare hands. Perhaps as violent as the game gets is the stealth takedowns, where Nathan will put his arm around a man's neck, and pull, at which point you hear a cracking sound, and the guy slumps to the floor. If anything, gun based combat is actually less violent, as there's little in the way of blood spurts (a very light, and often not all that noticeable spray may come out when you shoot someone), although blood can stain their clothes, and red blood-like stains will appear on screen when you get shot.

There is also very mild swearing in the game, such as "crap" and "ass". The word sh*t is used a few times, for example often when Nathan dies you'll hear his brother Sam shout "oh sh*t, Nathan!"

Age Ratings

Format Reviewed: Playstation 4