You get to help the swashbuckling Nathan Drake find out by jumping, swimming, swinging, climbing, clinging and gunning your way across an uninhabited tropical island purported to be the location of El Dorado, the legendary South American "city of gold."

Pirates and double-dealers abound, complicating acrobatic escapades through jungles, ancient fortresses and underground trap-riddled chambers. Of course, that also means plenty of puzzles, most fitting the "pull two levers or line up some pictograms to open a door" modus operandi. Along the way you can optionally sniff out hidden treasures (little glints of light in out-of-the-way places) or surpass statistical thresholds to unlock bonus game background material.

Guided in third person, Drake has all the usual alpha-gymnastic propensities, meaning he's as liable to leg over vine-cuddled stonework and knuckle ledge over impossibly spaced ledge as lob grenades into enemy scrums and fire at explosives to send nearby pirates soaring. You can loose a few one-two punch combos in close quarters, duck behind objects and lean out for pop shots and occasionally ambush enemies to perform stealth kills. While a few sequences involve cruising canals and rivers on a jet ski, the lion's share of the game takes place on foot.

Fortune smiles on this one

With girls, guns, the promise of gold and goons around every torchlit corner and moss-covered rock, Uncharted: Drake's Fortune is probably the closest gaming has come to re-creating the 1930s serials that inspired movies like Treasure of the Sierra Madre and Raiders of the Lost Ark. That's counting Tomb Raider. Put another way, if you've been waiting for a solid Indiana Jones-style action adventure, something developer Eidos has always teased but never entirely delivered, this is it with bells on.

That's because Jak and Daxter creators Naughty Dog absolutely gets what makes a classy action adventure, or, more specifically, what doesn't. They know that trying to line up a perfect leap between platforms or crumbling protrusions and missing anyway (then dying and reloading) can feel sadistic, an issue Uncharted resolves by placing extra handholds around precarious ledges to transform near-misses from "sudden death" into "close enough for jazz." They know that getting stuck on some gamey puzzle can be a play-breaker, so they've included an optional hint system that intelligently directs your attention toward a solution if you're casting about aimlessly. They even offer little courtesy touches like grenades that glow red so you can quickly glean whether the ominous beeping from an incendiary object is inches away or on the far side of some wall because your opponent's toss hit an obstacle and bounced back.

Not that Uncharted's designed to be easy. Sure, the bad guys can seem a little dim-bulb at times, and as usual, it's possible to exploit their propensity to pop out of cover, but it's the way they come at you together that makes Uncharted such a tactical delight. Pirates at the far side of any rubble-strewn courtyard will zigzag expertly in an attempt to outflank you—pick them off too slowly and they'll mow you down in a crossfire blur. All the while, others will attempt to suppress you with ear-banging rockets while snipers in towers or on high platforms probe for head shots with telltale laser sights. Now try dealing with any of that while also jumping and wall-grappling.

It doesn't hurt that Uncharted looks like someone downloaded a slice of the South Pacific onto your PS3's hard drive. That's because Naughty Dog knows how to harmonize 3-D tech instead of simply assaulting you with it. Sure, you're mostly moving down one-way paths, but the level aesthetics are so subtle and cunningly organic that jungle trails and crumbling passageways feel inexorable instead of engineered.

If Uncharted could be improved, it might lose a few of its battle sequences, especially toward the end. You're supposed to believe that the secret rooms you've thrown special switches to uncover are justifiably full of goony pirates who always show up with guns and excavation lights before you do. The game could also stand a few more levels, bad-guy profiles and to-do lists, since it's possible to play a perfect game on "hard" in under 10 hours. And the story itself suffers, albeit momentarily, with its eventual "get to control room, turn on power" sequence, as tired a game cliche as pushing crates and exploding barrels.

Otherwise Uncharted is Naughty Dog at its best, so much more than just "Dude Raider," and probable game of the year (2007) material for Sony's struggling PlayStation 3.