I'll make no apologies for being an absolute slobbering fanboy for the Uncharted series.

An updated Lara Croft/Indiana Jones mongrel fed to the brim with a film-tight script and stunning gameplay sequences that seems to take place mid-cutscene, each installment has served as a slap across the face to developers in exactly how they should be approaching high-end titles.

A Thief's End is the first current-generation entry (save for the remastered collection, obviously) and the leap from PS3 is massive, particularly graphically. Drake's years of fleeing for his life from supernatural terrors for the pleasures of trinkets and discovery has taken its toll and it's written all over his splendidly rendered mush.

He's now shacked up with Elena Fisher - she of the series' first effort Drake's Fortune - and earning a modest wage salvaging less-than-remarkable items. No golden treasure piles for our happily attached Drakester, no sir, just a solid nine-to-five local job with precious little in the way of bullet dodging or precipice-hanging.

Then up pops his presumed-deceased brother Sam and the pair are 'forced' back into the game, this time chasing an old pirate captain's not-insubstantial booty (arrr, etc...). A rather snowy-topped Sully also pushes in, lending his expert wise-cracks to proceedings.

There is no little amount of gaming enjoyment to be had from A Thief's End if one covets third-person action adventures. The sequence involving a mad chase down a Madagascan city hillock in a 4x4 while being pursued by an armoured vehicle is worth the price of admission alone. The variety of routes available is probably less than it seems; Uncharted 4 is linear but it never seems that way. The borders are terrifically natural and there occasionally appear to be a handful of routes in which to progress.

The narrative is something else; it's the closest you'll come to playing through a film with the characters given solid backgrounds and sympathetic driving forces. The script is once again a work of art as Drake and Sam take frequent brotherly digs at each other while scaling ludicrous heights or messing about in booby-trapped caverns. These are people with whom you want to spend time and you feel their pain, particularly the scenes in which Drake watches his brother fall to his apparent death.

Among the new stuff is conversation choice, although the response you choose affects the storyline about as much as picking your nose, so the feature sits somewhere between mildly diverting and utterly pointless. You can also mark out your enemies or even choose to sneak past them without ending their evil lives. Drake has grown weary of wanton slaughter, it seems.

Multiplayer is a lovely bag of wriggling jelly snakes, with all the typical features (deathmatch, etc) but with added mystical guff thanks to artefacts with which Drake fans will have become familiar over the years, such as the Cintamani Stone and El Dorado.

But necessary though the multiplayer garnish is, the juicy steak is in the story mode. The blend of storytelling and game-playing in software has never been this seamless.

Utterly glorious.