Developed for the PS3 by Naughty Dog Inc.
Published by Sony Computer Entertainment
Rated “T” For Teen. Contains blood, language, suggestive themes, violence.
With their latest game, Naughty Dog Inc. manages to offer a true sense of adventure, the kind normally found only in books. Uncharted 2: Among Thieves delivers breath-taking locales of such rich detail as to be poetically descriptive. The dynamic soundtrack, composed to touch upon the music of many cultures, has a beautiful way of always hinting at what is to come, and the voice-acting, so pitch-perfect, gives you the feeling that you’re always inside the character’s heads no matter what is going on. While other games try to keep you ever-distracted and always under stress, Uncharted 2 has the pace of a confident storyteller, giving you the time to take it all in, while still keeping your heart pounding with urgency. The result is the kind of trip where, once you reach the end you’ll want to immediately head back to the beginning to start all over again.
As story-tellers, Naughty Dog sure do love their clichés. Nathan Drake is still a straight-from-the-mold rascal-thief. Good-looking, his boyish love of artifacts and risk-taking brings him company from suave criminal types destined to resent his good heart and sexy tomboys equally destined to resent his lack of commitment. All that matters for him is the chase of an artifact, this time tied to the exploits of Marco Polo, and it takes him through the jungles of Borneo and the mountain temples of Tibet.
The inevitable twists and turns deliver a revolving door of partners for Drake, including both new friends as well as old, and while they watch him juggle with his life in pursuit of the next clue, they banter back and forth with him using Joss Whedon-like quips in an effort to try to smile in the face of danger. There’s no effort to be starkly original here, quite the opposite, the game embraces formula and genre familiarity and has so much sheer fun with it, that it works.
As before, the game is a mix of stealth, shoot-outs, and climbing puzzles. You climb into odd positions within the beginning of a level to perform slick take-down maneuvers on the initial guards, then jump in for an intense shoot-out with the remaining guards, and when the dust settles, try to work out the levers and hidden ledges needed to unlock the next item or clue. The stealth delivers satisfying tricks that are mixed right into the cover system used for combat. Slip up to a wall corner or behind a crate and then grab a guard as he passes by. The shoot-outs deliver a healthy variety of enemy types, level designs, and weapon combinations, including the use of riot shields that you can use as walking cover with a pistol in hand. I love the melee combat controls which make it easy to quickly get into fisticuffs with a bad guy, but also counter and perform cool finishing moves.
The climbing puzzles are a bit weak. I found it difficult to always understand the “rules” of what is climbable and what is not, and even when I did see the pieces, the puzzle itself rarely offered a challenge. Instead, the game often ties these moments with drama, forcing Drake to climb for his life while the world falls apart around him.
The real big change from the first game is the inclusion of more players. While I often think of games in this genre as solo adventures, you can have two friends take over as Drake’s partners for the levels that are more combat-focused. Despite this change, the solo mode still plays as normal, with the computer A.I. doing an excellent job of controlling the partner characters, keeping them out of your way and making them useful in a fight.
As it turns out the combat system really is strong enough to support an online multiplayer mode where the game’s epic-sized maps make ideal arenas for those looking to play deathmatches of team-based conflicts where players can climb and cover through intricate structures and collect points for ranks. It works, although it’s still not the kind of game you turn to for a multiplayer experience and to be honest, the solo adventure is so strong, you’re better off just starting it over again.
At the end of the adventure, however, it’s not the technical aspects of the gameplay that will stay with you, it’s the staggering moments. There’s one where you awaken within a village and find yourself being guided through it as the residents go through the tasks of their lives and it’s the language they speak to you, the detail of all their belongings and homes, it’s just presented far more powerfully than needed. There are many throw-away views like this, one comes when you are working your way through bombed out buildings in the city and just as you move between floors there’s a jaw-dropping view of the city sprawl, the intricate garden of rooftops and plumes of damage in the backdrop.
Video games are designed to make you feel as if your senses are heightened, often through excitement and excesses, but the rare games, like Uncharted 2 which would be just as fun with the gameplay turned off, manage to also achieve that effect with passive beauty too.
