rootninja

Uncharted 2: Among Thieves

This game started off as one of the most boring games I had ever played. The fighting controls sucked, the movement was full of momentum and pistols are just as accurate as rifles which is one of my pet peeves. The graphics were really good (even though uncharted 3 is already out and probably looks a lot better) the environments were varied, and the characters didn’t look as scary as they did in the last one.

The game isn’t a shooter by any means, but you spend most of your time doing one of two things, running in a strange scripted event where something is chasing you and you need to run through a bunch of crappy camera angles, or shooting things. There is a hand to hand mechanic but it is hardly ever used, and a stealth kill that is very useful to thin the heard before you start shooting at them. Ammo is precious and the better your gun is the less ammo it holds, which makes sense for the balance of the game but is rather aggravating at large. I can hold 160 rounds for my m4 rifle, 75 rounds for my m9 pistol, but only 14 rounds for my desert eagle pistol and 15ish (I don’t remember the exact number) for the sniper rifle.

One interesting aspect of the combat is that when one bad guy sees you they all seem to, BUT (I’m excited to say this) if you have teammates and they engage them, their attention will focus on the NPC and you can flank around for the stealth kills. This is a feature that seems to have been forgotten lately and I am very, very happy to see it.

But back to how boring the game is. You wander around some forest and city settings shooting bad guys and scaling walls that no human could ever climb up. Which brings me to my next point: drake is either a robot or ninja, but I haven’t figured it out yet. If there is a crack in the mortar of a brick, he can grab onto it and launch himself five feet in the air to grab the next crack, he can even do it with ice or snow covered ledges. Once you realize that Drake is super human, it is pretty fun to jump around, but sometimes the momentum of the controls gets the better of you and Drake runs and jumps right into oblivion. There’s no real penalty for this, you just start back at the beginning of the area and have to try again.

The parkouring around really is quite fun, and they did an impeccable job of making everything look natural while making it obvious where you can grab and where you can’t… most of the time. There were at least 3 times that I can remember where I was running around an area for 10 minutes trying to find the way out until I finally found the wall with the suspiciously placed green bricks sticking out of it and scaled up them. The places where you can bat-hook….err grab onto while parkouring blend nicely with the environment, but when you realize that you overlooked them you feel like an idiot.

The boss battle at the end was one of the worst I have ever played and do not recommend it to anyone, however your reward is a cute little cut scene where you say, “there is no way they really did that…”, the guy gets the girl, sees an old friend, and has a funny little cliché conversation just before the credits roll.

Overall, I greatly disliked most of the features of this game. The controls were too momentum-y, ledges need to be more sticky, bullets need to do more damage (or less depending on the gun), they need to nix the ammo restriction based upon the gun, there needs to be an iron sight feature or a better precision aiming mode, the close in combat gets really dicey (but is fairly forgiving if there aren’t too many bad guys around), there’s way too many quick time events, no way to be stealthy from anything other than point blank range, and I want to know what drakes hands are made of.

The character development is pretty good, the dialogue is above average, the voice acting fits all of the characters, some of the random in game quips are Bruce Campbell worthy (there is a mention of the word zombie in one of ‘em), the setting are all pretty varied and have different feels to them, the puzzles, although there are very few, are pretty satisfying without being too hard, and the ludicrous plot is pretty believable.

On a scale of Homefront to MGS4, it can hold a very small and poorly burning candle to Batman so it gets an above average at large, and is definitely a very solid platformer.