Territory Unknown
Well, they've done it. Uncharted 2: Among Thieves finally bridges the gap between an action movie and a video game. Oh, and it's a damn good video game too.
Published: October 10, 2009
So the game doesn’t get "better" on higher difficulty levels, it merely gets harder. Fair enough, nearly every game I play is like that. What you're treated to, regardless of difficulty, is one of the most impressive uses of the PlayStation 3 hardware out there. Things start out ever so slightly shaky, with a lengthy cutscene missing what feels like some important little details (Naughty Dog, those beer bottles are hilariously basic-looking), but quickly come into their own as Drake and company literally travel the globe in search of whatever it was that caused Marco Polo to abandon his vast treasure.
It's difficult to even talk about locales without spoiling anything, so I'll stick to the basics: jungles, snowy mountains, a bombed-out city, sprawling Moroccan museums (okay, so I spoiled the first level) and of course plenty of ancient temples rife with traps. The progression in areas is fantastic, and it's not until now, looking back, that I can see just how varied Naughty Dog tried to make things. That said, the complaints that the game focused too heavily on firefights apparently fell on deaf ears. Oh, there's a stealth mechanic (introduced with a fail-and-retry level of severity at the start of the game), and if you can sneak around and take out enemies, subsequent waves won't appear, but there's still a whole lot more gunplay than puzzle solving here. I can count the actual puzzles on one hand, and it's only that they were, by vast majority, so damned fun to figure out that I found fault in their number.
With the focus on shooting, though, it should be mentioned that the actual firefights themselves have gained the added layer of height in addition to normal single-plane cover. Major parts of the game allow you to take multiple paths, and when factored into the stealth kill parts of the game, doing all that trial and error actually becomes addictive. There were times when playing the game that I'd actually let myself get killed because I wanted to skulk around and snap necks because it was so satisfying. Given that the game only forces you to use the mechanic once, that's a rather ringing endorsement, I'd say.
When the game does offer platforming bits, I had no issues finding my way around, but a friend mentioned that they were a bit lost when playing it on a standard-def TV, so if you're still rocking it 480i/p-style, be forewarned. That said, the actual climbing bits were far easier to traverse than in the first game. The rope swinging mechanics return, but in fewer numbers and without the pain of death if you don't perfectly make the jump. Instead, the traversal is mainly to get you to the next little cutscene or bit of exposition, and it works wonderfully -- so wonderfully, in fact, that I still want more of it, Naughty Dog.
I realize this is starting to sound a bit like a laundry list of complaints; blah blah this is nice, blah blah, this isn't so great -- it's only because I'm having a hard time putting into words just how much I enjoyed Uncharted 2's story, and defaulting to picking out individual bits is so much easier. There's this weird tendency I find welling up in me to just talk about Drake, Elena, Sully and newcomers Chloe and Flynn like actual film characters. I want to gush about how much I love how Elena has grown or how Nate is the single most likeable action lead I've ever seen or how despotic villain Lazarevic almost seems to outgrow his typically power-hungry motivations or how even supporting characters like the entirely Tibetan-speaking Tenzin or the redemption-seeking Schafer are more likeable and identifiable than the whole of 10 other games' so-called characters.
I'd love to gush about the give and take between characters or the ridiculously amazing bits of destruction that play out during the story, how no one locale ever seems to overpower the other in terms of wonder and awe despite some of them taking place in ancient temples rife with time-whittled, lever-driven machinations. I want to talk endlessly about just how good the ending to the game was, how it was the antithesis of the short, truncated ending of the first game and how it wrapped things up so nicely. I want to pick apart every last little historical reference, to spaz out about how much real-world lore I discovered because of this game and marvel at how it was all worked so seamlessly. I want to tell you about this game and talk about it like a movie but I can't. You simply must play it and see for yourself.
