Introduction

A couple of months ago, I played Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune for the first time, in anticipation of the then upcoming release of Uncharted 2: Among Thieves.  I liked it, but found that my anticipation of it was better than the reality of it.  (See my Game Impressions.)  Perhaps because it was hyped so well when it was initially released, being an decent exclusive on the underperforming PS3.  So when Uncharted 2: Among Thieves came out to heaps of praise, my BS radar immediately went off.  Could it possibly be as good as described, or was it just another above-average exclusive for the PS3?

Story

Uncharted 2 finds Nathan Drake lured once again into the world of treasure hunting and seedy mercenary fortune-seekers.  Naughty Dog throws you right into the action, with an injured Nate regaining consciousness on a wrecked train hanging from a frozen cliff.  The game then flashes back several months, to when Nate was approached by acquaintances  Harry Flynn and Chloe Frazer to steal on oil lamp from a museum in Istabul which may hold the key to Marco Polo’s lost fleet and an artifact called the Cintamani Stone.  One lamp (with hidden map inside) and one betrayal (by Flynn) later, you’re captured and tossed in jail for 3 months before being rescued by your old pal Victor Sullivan and Chloe.

Nate, Victor and Chloe follow Flynn and his boss, a Serbian war criminal named Zoran Lazarevic, to Borneo, where they discover the lost fleet and remains of Polo’s crew.  They learn that the Stone may have been taken to the mythical Tibetan Buddhist city of Shambhala.   They also learn that a clue to the location of the city can be found in a temple in a war-torn city in Nepal.  There they meet up with Elana (from the original Uncharted) and her cameraman Jeff.

Nate, Chloe, Elana and Jeff reach the temple and find that the Stone and Shambala are hidden in the Himilayas.  Jeff is wounded, and Chloe leaves on a train with Lazarevic.  Nate and Elena pursue the train and Nate boards the train.  He faces off with Flynn and gets shot.  He shoots some propane tanks that derail the train, and bring the story back to the beginning.

Nate recovers in a Tibetan village, and pairs back up with Elana.  Together they scour ice caves and Tibetan monastaries, and fight off Yeti like creatures and Lazarevic’s men, battle tanks and have armed car chases in their pursuit of the treasure of Shambhala.

Gameplay

The game plays like a movie.  I know that has been said before, but this game is the closest I’ve seen to it being a reality.  The action-adventure game slides seamlessly between your control and game-engine rendered scenes.  The video and audio from these scenes were all motion-captured from real actors acting out the performances, and you can tell.  Nothing feels fake or wooden or somehow off about it.  That’s probably half the reason this game is so good.

The other half is a great mix of gameplay.  All the pieces from the original Uncharted are back (minus the janky Sixaxis log crossing crap).  Running, jumping, hanging from ledges, switching between two weapons, all of it works very naturally.  Climbing has definitely improved over the first game.  Overall the control scheme works very well and seems tweaked in just the right ways.  And oddly enough for a game with climbing, hanging and swinging mechanics, the envionment takes better advantage of the vertical than the previous installment.

I’m not sure whether there are more puzzles than in the first game, or whether they are any more difficult, but they are definitely better spaced throughout the game, and they are more logically placed.  Overall the whole pacing of this game is very well done.  The action can be fast and furious, but you’re not beat over the head with any one playstyle.  The original Uncharted was more shoot, shoot, shoot.  This one has you in a ground battle, to a car chase, to a stealth area, to an interactive cutscene running across a collapsing bridge… never a dull moment, but never a repetitive one either.

The graphics once again are gorgeous.  The real-time moving environments look great, and the game has even more realistic textures and animations that the previous iteration.  The soundtrack is great and worth listening to on its own.  And Naughty Dog has really made an effort to add subtleties, like characters making spot-on comments about the environment as you are playing, whether you’ve done something or not.  It makes the game seem more natural, as the chatter is what you would say if you were adventuring with someone else, or muttering to yourself under your breath.

The main issues I had with the first Uncharted revolved mainly around non-nonsensical plot devices.  Naughty Dog really fine tuned that aspect of the game, and there are very few moments like that in this game.  You never felt like you went through some complicated puzzle or maze just to find the enemy was already there for no discernible reason.  When the enemy was ahead of you or behind you, it was for a reason.  Puzzles also made sense where they were placed… no hidden rooms behind stained glass windows that overlooked roofs that could be seen from anywhere.  My list of nitpicks is far, far smaller, and are a bit spoiler-ish, so skip that section when you get there if you don’t want anything ruined.

Extras

There are still collectibles in the game, although this time in the form of 101 artifacts you can find on the ground, or shoot of of a wall. Collecting these, as well as performing various actions or completing milestones, will award you with Playstation trophies and in game medals with give you money in the bonus area to unlock extras.  There is concept art, behind-the-scenes movies, and lots of game cheats like skins, special weapons, unlimited ammunition, and so forth.

A good way to get medals for killing enemies with all the different weapon types is to stop in an area towards the end of the game, close to the final battle.  You enter a rectangular room with stairs on two sides, and a tree in the middle.  Enemies will pour out of one side of the room continuously until you physically go over to that area.  Once you do, and kill all the enemies, then guardians will come out from the stair areas.  But if you stay away from the area where the enemies pour out, they’ll just keep coming indefinitely.  Turn on infinite ammo, switch to a weapon, and just keep killing until you get the medal for that weapon.  Switch to the next weapon and repeat.   I managed to get enough money to unlock just about everything in single player except a couple of skins.  The Donut Drake skin is hilarious!

I can’t speak at all to the multiplayer experience.  I will hopefully play some co-op with my co-worker, but haven’t as of yet.  As usual, I haven’t partaken in any competitive multiplayer either.  I’ve read good things about both, but can’t say at this time.

Nitpicks

A co-worker mentioned to me the first “Huh?” moment in the game.  It is when you’re stealth killing around the museum for a long while, and you get to a part where you can’t kill some enemies by stealth, Flynn pulls out a dart gun and says “Good thing I brought these.”  Huh?  You mean you didn’t think to say that until now?  It stands as one of the few moments where it felt like a game, in the sense of a game developer pulling your strings as you move through it.  Obviously that happens all throughout the game, but this stands out and a place where you notice it.

Next, I don’t think that Flynn’s motivations were clear enough, and his demise felt rather hollow.  Maybe he is jealous of Drake, and thinks by working with Lazarevic he can finally gain the upper hand on his rival.  Maybe when he doesn’t, and Chloe’s betrayed him, and Lazarevic has shot him and left him with a grenade with no pin, he thinks that if he can’t win, then neither can Drake.  But I say maybe to all of this because it isn’t really explained, it’s just me speculating.  I think I’d preferred to have a mini-boss fight with him.

My third nitpick is mainly whether or not you can believe that, in this age of satellite imagery, an open-to-the-sky place like Shambhala can exist in today’s world.  I was hoping for maybe a clever explanation of that, but it was never really addressed.  I guess a bit of suspension of disbelief belongs there.

Lastly, I played the whole game on Hard difficulty, and while I had trouble in some areas, none compared to the trouble I had defeating the last boss.  It probably took me 2 hours of repeated tries to get past it.  The reason I found it difficult related solely to game mechanics, which is why I include it there.  The boss moves very fast and hits very hard, and the fight basically boils down to you injuring the boss via explosions, which stun him briefly and slowly injure him.  The problem is that Naughty Dog interspersed the game-engine cut scenes into this battle, two or three times, which are triggered by you injuring the boss a certain number of times.  When the cutscenes happened, the boss would come out of the scene at full speed at you, not stunned like the other times you injured him.  It was almost like the NPC got a free pass every 3-4 times he’s injured, and coming off the cutscene he’s moving and reacting far quicker than you are.  Plus sometimes you could hit him for a double whammy, but the game ignored the second hit coming out of the cutscene.  Minor issues compared to the whole game, but frustrating nonetheless.

Conclusion

Uncharted 2: Among Thieves is without a doubt the best game I’ve played all year.  It has a Metacritic score of 96 among 103 critic reviews, and a user score of 9.5/10.  It deserves all that praise.  At least for this style of game, it’s how a game should be made.  Naughty Dog knocked it out of the park.  VGChartz shows it only selling 1.85m copies so far worldwide, and less than a million in the U.S. (week 7), which is really a shame.  Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 sold almost twice that in the first week, and it’s scores are slightly lower.  Maybe that’s the price of PS3 exclusivity (smaller install base), but Uncharted 2 deserves better.  If you have a PS3, it’s wasted without this title.  If you don’t yet have a PS3, this game is a system seller.