It’s been eight months since Uncharted: Legacy of Thieves Collection released on PS5, updating the six-year-old Uncharted 4 with some minor visual tweaks but offering a massive boost in performance. Since then, PC gamers have been patiently waiting for Uncharted to finally land on PC storefronts as it is one of the last big PlayStation IPs still not on the platform. After a few false release date rumors sprinkled throughout the year and the announcement and release of God of War and Marvel’s Spider-Man well after Uncharted's PC announcement, the Legacy of Thieves Collection is finally here. Thankfully, the wait was well worth it.
Uncharted: Legacy of Thieves Collection brings the critically acclaimed Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End and The Lost Legacy standalone expansion into one convenient package. Naughty Dog’s celebrated action-adventure series is a benchmark in gaming, combining cover-based third-person shooting with thrilling platforming and environmental puzzle-solving while also telling a compelling story with well-defined characters and movie-grade cinematics. Any PC gamers jumping into Uncharted for the first time who aren’t well acquainted with Nathan Drake and his quippy supporting cast of characters will be happy to know that the Legacy of Thieves Collection is still a fantastic pair of games that work well independent of the previous series entries.
It is a questionable decision to bring Uncharted 4 and its DLC to PC while the platform is notably missing the previous three games, leaving some gamers hesitant to jump into the series. However, even as the final installment in this part of the Uncharted franchise, PC players can go into the Legacy of Thieves Collection with a basic knowledge of the series and still have a great time, thanks to the excellent writing that players have come to expect from Naughty Dog. Nathan Drake's quest to find Henry Avery's legendary pirate treasure takes place several years after Uncharted 3, often feeling like a victory lap entry for the series rather than a completely linear sequel. There are certainly plenty of payoffs and callbacks sprinkled throughout both games that will feel sweetest to those who have experienced Nathan’s journey from the beginning. However, the game’s main plot and story beats are as exciting, emotional, and well-earned to new players as they are for series veterans.
Uncharted: Legacy of Thieves Collection on PC is very much the same game released on PS5 earlier this year: an enhanced version of 2016’s Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End and accompanying DLC. Although naturally, the transition from console to PC would mean that Legacy of Thieves would come with some new bells and whistles, improving the game over the already impressive PS5 version with an uncapped ceiling for performance and a few new bits of eye candy.
Prior to release, there was some hesitancy from the PC crowd about the inclusion of support studio Iron Galaxy on this project. Any PC gamer that has been around long enough can recount the disastrous Batman: Arkham Knight PC port that Iron Galaxy spearheaded. This is not the case with Uncharted. As a matter of fact, Iron Galaxy might very well be putting itself right next to Nixxies as one of the best porting and support studios in the business right now with this entry. Uncharted: Legacy of Thieves Collection runs like a dream on PC, possibly being the best PlayStation Studios port from an out-of-the-box performance standpoint.
Across two test benches and Valve’s Steam Deck, Uncharted: Legacy of Thieves Collection proved to be a remarkably performant port offering great scalability while also sporting some seriously impressive graphics. Starting with the graphics menu, the Legacy of Thieves Collection does tend to be a bit leaner in terms of graphical settings, with less to tinker with under the hood than the massive suite of options available in Marvel’s Spider-Man. However, the game still hits the key settings needed to optimize performance with options for Textures, Model Quality, Anisotropic FIltering, Shadows, Reflections, and Ambient Occlusion, each scaling from Low to Ultra. AMD FSR and NVIDIA DLSS are also here for PC gamers who need that extra performance boost. Fans keeping up with the recent PlayStation ports will be quick to notice that these options are the same set the excellent PC port of God of War elected to use earlier this year.
The beefiest test bench that ran Legacy of Thieves consisted of an RTX 3080 and an i9 10900k at 4k. At all Ultra settings and native rendering, the game never dipped below 60 frames per second in the most intensive scenarios and generally liked to linger at around the 70-80 fps mark. Indoor scenes can go as high as 100 frames per second and even touch 120 fps in some instances. Turning on DLSS cleans up the variable frame rate and can achieve a steady 144 fps when upscaling to 4k at the Performance setting. At the higher end, any PC gamer with an RTX card or recent AMD card can run Uncharted at the highest settings with no problem.
On a more modestly powered ASUS ROG Zephyrus G14 laptop equipped with an AMD 6700s GPU, the game ran at 50-60 fps when rendering at 1600p native resolution. AMD's FSR solution at the Balanced preset impressively boosted those frames up to 80-90 fps. Overall, this is a solid showing from the Legacy of Thieves collection, as the game can clearly make the most out of both NVIDIA and AMD hardware, even allowing lower-powered mobile cards to run at native resolutions past 1440p at a buttery smooth 60 fps.
While Uncharted: Legacy of Thieves Collection performs exceptionally well in most circumstances, it won’t always run at a fixed frame rate for all players. Oddly enough, this PC port doesn’t include any option to limit the frame rate to any interval besides 30 fps. This presents a problem as not everyone runs a G-Sync or FreeSync monitor to combat screen tearing when frame rates fluctuate, resulting in inconsistent frame-pacing and a suboptimal experience. For now, fans will have to look for external frame-limiting solutions to achieve the most consistent frame rate possible or lower the settings and use DLSS or FSR to hit their monitor refresh rate cap.
Fans should note that unlike many PC games, which make players wait for shaders to compile before letting them play, the Legacy of Thieves Collection only gives a small notification in the bottom right corner of the main menu indicating that the game is building shaders but still lets players get into the action before the process is complete. Fans should let the game finish compiling these shaders before starting a new game, or else they will compile as the game is running, to the detriment of performance. Players will have to do this every time they update their graphics card drivers, but failure to do so will see Uncharted consume tons of CPU power and usage at all times, which becomes very important as it relates to the Steam Deck.
As far as the popular Steam Deck is concerned, Uncharted: Legacy of Thieves Collection runs just as impressively there as well. Once shaders are compiled and players get into the game, Uncharted can run at Medium settings with FSR set to Quality at 40-50 fps, sometimes going past 50. However, for a smoother experience, players can lock the game to 40 fps, where the game can stay stable for decent chunks of time. The handheld struggles the most in high-action scenes with many particle effects and enemy AI but regularly stabilizes as the scene continues. For the absolute smoothest and best-looking Uncharted experience on the Steam Deck, players can lock the game to 30 fps at the High graphical preset. Considering that the Steam Deck is essentially a handheld PS4 in terms of power, 30 fps at high settings makes sense as a PS4-level experience and showcases how remarkably scalable this PC port truly is.
On the PC quality-of-life front, Uncharted: Legacy of Thieves Collection has all the PC-centric options needed to tailor the game for any setup. The game supports ultrawide 21:9 and 32:9 monitors, with a complete set of rebindable keyboard and mouse controls, already bound intuitively out of the box. Any PC gamer with a PS5 DualSense controller can also take full advantage of its adaptive trigger functions as long as the controller is connected via USB-C. Moreover, the Legacy of Thieves Collection has also been one of the most bug-free PlayStation ports of late. So far, the only real problems with the game are minor frame stuttering issues that tend to occur throughout scene transitions, primarily on the Steam Deck. Otherwise, Uncharted has been a rock-solid experience from front to back.
PC gamers are in for a treat when Uncharted: Legacy of Thieves Collection launches on Steam and the Epic Games Store on October 19. The long-awaited arrival of a Naughty Dog modern classic on PC could not have been handled better, offering excellent performance across multiple PC setups featuring the latest upscaling tech to make the whole experience run, feel, and look as good as possible. The Legacy of Thieves Collection contains two of Sony's best exclusive games from the past ten years, and the port on display lives up to the standard for quality that Uncharted has established in its almost fifteen-year run. If Naughty Dog and its support studios continue to put this much care and effort into PC ports going forward, then PC gamers should also have plenty to be excited about when The Last of Us Part 1 is ready to jump from TV screens to computer monitors at some point in the future.
Uncharted: Legacy of Thieves Collection is available for PS5 and launches for PC on October 19. Game Rant was provided a PC code for the purposes of this review.
