Stuff That I Played: Uncharted 2: Among Thieves

Note: This will be MOSTLY spoiler-free but not entirely. Like in the first game though, the plot is quite predictable so it hardly matters.

I did not like the first Uncharted game at all. Sure, it was really pretty and had some very well-written (if pretty shallow) characters, but the game just wasn't fun for me. All of its game elements were taken from other games, the level design was shoddy and the plot was boring and predictable. So it was with a certain skepticism that I went into Uncharted 2, despite it's many perfect scores in gaming publications and whopping 96 rating on Metacritic. At the end of the day, the game still didn't exactly win me over, but I liked it enough to say that if you own a PS3, you should give the game a shot.

In case you are uninitiated with the series, the Uncharted games follow Nathan Drake, an Indiana Jones-inspired treasure hunter, on his expeditions to find various artifacts. The games blend third-person shooting (a la Gears of War) with platforming (a la Tomb Raider, or in my case because I've never played any Tomb Raider games, Shadow of the Colossus). I had a lot of problems with the first game, which Uncharted 2 alleviates in a few ways.

Let's get this out of the way first: the game is beautiful. Characters' faces are more animated than in the first game, and the environments are a lot more varied this time around as the adventure takes place in more than one area of the world. The game isn't quite as jaw-dropping as God of War 3, but it's pretty close.

Yum.

The writing is just as good in this game as it was in the last; the main characters have fantastic chemistry and are voiced wonderfully. In fact, the sound overall is pretty great - guns and explosions sound exactly like they should, and the soundtrack is pretty damn epic.

The plot basically follows the exact same structure of the last game (albeit with a neat little "trick" in the narrative that is present throughout the first half of the game), and just like last time, the supernatural elements introduced into the plot halfway through are still rather awkward. I don't understand why the creators at Naughty Dog keep trying to add in these weird supernatural parts - in the last game it was Nazi zombies, in this game it's superpowered Yetis. It's an odd tonal shift, and one that never really gels with the feeling of the game. I suppose it's so that Drake's quest for treasure is seen less as selfish money-making and more as a valiant attempt to save the world, but that doesn't really work (Plug: check out my other post about this here!).

The gameplay has been beefed up quite a bit, largely by making a much greater effort to simulate a Hollywood action flick. What really seperates Uncharted 2 from the last game is that there a lot more big action set-pieces. You'll be climbing up trains that are dangling over cliffs, stealthily making your way through a guarded museum, and having huge firefights on top of several moving vehicles, among other things. These pieces are breathtaking and fun as hell. Even when the gameplay is more basic, there's usually some sort of gimmick, like a bridge suddenly falling down as you're traversing it, or a tank that you need to destroy to end a combat section. Furthermore, the two types of gameplay tend to intertwine a little bit more - the level design has been largely improved so that shooting parts usually have a couple different "floors" that you can jump on, enabling you to approach the shooting sections in many different ways. It's a marked improvement over the flat, boring levels of the last game.

Shoot-out on a moving train.  Yes, you're actually playing during this part.

The action also has a greater emphasis on stealth, as you are often thrown into situations where you can silently take out enemies before confronting them. This goes a long way in opening up the strategic possibilites of the game - there are some sections where, if you're skilled enough, you can take out every enemy without having to fire a single shot. It helps that the stealth kills are great fun to watch; my favourite is when a guard is close to a ledge and Drake smashes his face into it, knocking him out immediately. Good times.

So you may be asking yourself, "But Daniel, I was being really attentive whilst reading this review, and you said the game didn't win you over, even though you've been giving it mounds of praise so far.  What happened?"  To which I would reply "The last third of the game did, dear reader."

The problem with the game is that for the last 3 or 4 hours, it totally reverts back to the style of the first game.  It seems like the developers just ran out of ideas for huge action scenes, so they said "fuck it, just throw them into a bunch of shoot-outs, they'll still like it", and that's exactly what they do.  Instead of having some crazy ridiculous set-pieces to play through, the last few hours of the game have you merely alternating between frustrating shoot-outs with waves and waves of enemies and uninspired platforming sections.  The levels are still designed better than anything int he first game, but later firefights are intensely frustrating, and often devoid of strategy, especially once you fight the super-powered Yetis, who can take ludicrous amounts of damage and are impervious to melee attacks.

And I wish I could say that the game picks up in the last hour or something, but it doesn't.  In fact, the last hour is probably the worst part of the whole game, complete with an utterly disappointing final boss.  Literally the only thing you do for the boss is run around a small area and occasionally shoot explosive things as he chases you.  Then they "spice it up" by having him throw easily-dodged grenades.  Then they have him throw THREE grenades instead of TWO.  Sacre bleu!  Needless to say, I was pretty let down by the whole affair.

You have to understand that I really wanted to love this game.  The first 6 or 7 hours of it are brilliantly intense and some of the most enthralling moments of gaming I've ever played.  It's a real shame, then, that the game loses its luster in its final hours, falling into to a mindless alternation of annoying shooting and boring platforming.  Overall, there are still enough great moments in the game that it's definitely worth a playthrough - but don't say that I didn't warn you.

-Daniel