Greetings my fellow comrades and readers! I’m back at it again to continue choosing games to review here on this site and have a good old time talking to what feels like an imaginary audience. I had exams this week, so the last few days were spent studying day and night so that I may pass them. Managed to pull through the week, pass each of my classes with flying colors, and didn’t completely lose my sanity while sitting in a box each day. I’m just in a really good mood right now and I decided to fulfill one of the many promises I made last time. Right after beating Uncharted Drake’s Fortune my mind immediately zipped over to it’s sequel and some of my break time while studying was put towards slowing inching through this game. Managed to beat it today and I am so excited to get this review out to you all. Uncharted 2: Among Thieves, the sequel to the original and what is considered one of the most highly acclaimed video games of all time. It has a ninety-six out of a hundred on Metacritic, received a nine point five out of ten from IGN and Gamespot, and from dozens of other outlets it got perfect scores across the board. Many consider it the best in the franchise and an utter masterpiece, and after playing it would I consider Uncharted 2 the best one? Well to be honest, no. It made a huge leap forward from the first game and after almost twelve years it aged beautifully, but I still like Uncharted 4 the most. Maybe it’s a first time thing where I always love the first game in the franchise that I play. Like how Bloodborne still remains to be my favorite in the Soulsborne series, but I digress from this statement. This game still holds up extremely well today and is definitely a must play for many. How did all of this happen though? How did Naughty Dog make such a huge strive?
After the successful release of Drake’s Fortune, the team at Nuaghty Dog went straight ahead to work on the sequel. They wanted the sequel to improve on some of the problems the first game had, and feel more like the grandiose adventure Uncharted should aim more. Take them to dozens of locations that differ from each other, and have crazier action packed set pieces from before. Add some touches to the gameplay, have a more interesting cast of characters, and offer more of that swashbuckling joy the first game was known for. Returning to direct the project was Amy Hennig and to help her with the anticipation was secondary director Bruce Straley. Amy was also returning to work on the script along with Josh Scherr and Neil Druckman. Remember kids, this was before his name became more recognizable with the recent controversy. Anyways, Uncharted 2 was such a bold project and pushed the hardware of the Playstation 3 more than ever. A blu-ray disc had the storage size of about 25 gigabytes which was a lot at the time. Most games didn’t take it all up, but Uncharted 2 was one of the few games out there to use up all that space. Graphically the game was more vibrant and realistic than the first, and it generated some environments that were almost near impossible. It had 564 in-game cinematic animations which was seven times the amount of the 80 in-game cinematics that the first game had. The game relied on motion capture and used it brilliantly to generate some amazing scenes. All of this would become bigger as Naughty Dog made more ambitious games, but this was a massive deal back in 2009. Much like comparing Uncharted 4 to other game releases in 2016, comparing Uncharted 2 to the releases of 2009 made it feel ahead of its time. Demon’s Souls, Infamous, they all looked like stumblers when taking a gaze back at Uncharted 2. That’s why it’s so easy to see why Uncharted 2 was so well acclaimed, because while it didn’t innovative it certainly showed what the PS3 could do.
Uncharted 2 was one of the main selling points for the Playstation 3 and showed that Sony was willing to compete with Microsoft over who had the most ambitious exclusives. Microsoft had Halo and Sony had Uncharted……and God of War, and Ratchet & Clank, and Demon’s Souls, and Infamous, and Resistance, and Metal Gear Solid 4. Then they got The Last of Us and then we saw what they could do with the Playstation 4. Look, I think console wars are stupid and that it doesn’t matter what console is the best as long as you are having fun, but so much for that old meme of, “The Playstaion 3 has no games”. I’m bragging aren’t I? I don’t want to turn into one of those toxic fanboys who flex and make lies over how big their “it” is. Why did I decide to write this all down? Oh well. I’m stalling for time and we really should be getting to talking about Uncharted 2. Today I want to talk to you all about why Uncharted 2: Among Thieves is amazing and why it deserves your attention. So hop onto that train and keep on drifting.
Story
You may find yourself bleeding while sitting on a train. You may find yourself dangling off the edge of a snowy cliff. You may find yourself stuck in the middle of unexplainable wreckage. You may find yourself with a glistening knife, with a glistening face, and you may ask yourself, “Well…. How Did I Get Here!?” Letting the days go by. (Coughing noises) With the attempted Talking Heads reference out of the way, we find legendary treasure hunter Nathan Drake crawling through the remains of a crashed train. He’s wounded, he has no one to help him out, and there’s a gang of mercenaries nearby trying to hunt him down. He manages to escape, but he inches further through the snow he begins to black out. He falls down and we flashback to several months before.
Nathan Drake is busy sipping a cold bottle of beer on a tropical island, but he is interrupted by a man he seems to recognize. His name is Harry Flynn and he’s a treasure hunter just like Nate. With him at the table is Chloe Frazer who is his girlfriend and works alongside him. Flynn tells Nate of his most recent assignment. Seek into a heavily guarded museum and steal one of the many valuables contained within it. An oil lamp. No golden statue or shiny jewel, just an oil lamp made of Mongolian ceramics. It all seems too simple at first, but Flynn reveals that his client is after whatever is inside the oil lamp. A clue pointing towards what happened to sailing merchant Marco Polo and his doomed fleet of ships. Nate buys into the heist and decides to tag along with Flynn. They plan to locate the oil lamp, get whatever is inside it, and deceive the man that gave Flynn the assignment. It’s all laid out in their head, but we are given the scene to this fabled heist. Nate is busy packing in his hotel room and he is approached by Chloe. Turns out they both know each other and have worked together in the past. They have a relationship with each other and plan to deceive Harry. Chloe will blackmail Flynn into giving her the treasure they find, and with Nate she’ll make a daring escape and do whatever the two want. Nate agrees to the idea and that night they f*ck! Wow, that’s not what actually happens and that’s really extreme of me to write down. Especially since this game is surprisingly aimed towards teens.
On the night of the heist, Flynn and Nate manage to sneak past the guards of the museum and locate the oil lamp. They smash the bugger open and rather than find a special jewel they discover a map and some resin which has a mysterious blue glow. Nate tells Flynn to give him a lighter and when igniting the resin they find some secret writing on the map. Turns out that Marco Polo and his fleet were transporting the Cintamani Stone, a relic that hails from the city of Shambala. Which if you don’t know is the spiritual city believed by Buddists. The fleet ended up shipwrecked in Borneo, but the stone wasn’t found amongst the disaster. If the two treasure hunters can locate the stone or next piece to the puzzle, then they might find a city that a majority of people thought was out of this world. One problem though. Turns out Flynn planned to trick Nate and leaves him behind while sounding the alarms. Nate makes a run for it, but ends up getting caught by the police. Spending the next three months behind bars.
After those three months he is bailed out by his old friend Sully and Chloe is back to confront Nate. He scolds her for betraying him, but she explains she had nothing to do with leaving him behind. Flynn is actually working for a big bastard named Zoran Lazarevic, who is a devious war criminal spreading chaos across Siberia along with his private army. While the fight ensues, Lazarevic’s real plan is to find the Cintamani Stone and claim whatever treasure lies in the depths of Shambala. He’ll use this treasure to gain power and become practically unstoppable. Chloe works alongside Flynn, but he doesn’t know that she is working against him. She tells Nate that they must stop Lazarevic or HArry, otherwise total war will spread across the globe. Nate decides to help and Sully tries to tag along too, but immediately leaves the two adventurers when he finds that they are dealing with an ever evolving threat. So Nate must travel to numerous locations, fight the forces of Lazarevic, and trace the next steps towards the Cintamani Stone. He’ll even encounter another friend of his. Some who were there on his previous journey and documenting the chaos spreading through the country. Elena Fisher, journalist and friend of Nate. She may even get wrapped into his chaotic journey and remind Nate that treasure isn’t everything. That there are real problems at hand.
Gameplay
Uncharted 2 has a more interesting and engaging story than the first game, so it must have made some improvements with the gameplay department then? Well the answer is ranging between both yes and no. Yes, because the gameplay has been polished up to feel more enjoyable. No, because not much has actually changed and we are still playing a cover based third person over the shoulder shooter. Let me repeat this again, sadly, if you were someone who didn’t read my previous review and somehow don’t know how a cover based shooter works. Your character can run around and shoot guys. If he is shot at too much then he will die, but the game indicates this by fading the screen to black and white. All you have to do to recover health is to avoid damage for a short period of time and to do that you may want to take cover behind a chest high wall. You can carry two guns at a time and exchange them for other guns that can be looted off of enemies. When a gun’s clip is empty you stop and reload which pauses the combat for a short bit. You have a dodge roll to avoid gunfire, but to be honest it’s kind of useless most of the time. That’s pretty much how Uncharted works. The same shooter trends and sh*t we’ve been seeing plenty of other modern day shooters, but I guess Uncharted must be doing something right as compared to a lot of modern cover based shooters Uncharted can be pretty fun at times. Especially this one.
There’s more guns this time around and some of the fun weapons in the first game are introduced earlier in the second. You have a classic pistol, machine gun, shotgun, submachine galore, but then you unlock the cool stuff. A faster, more powerful machine gun named the M4, a short ranged handgun that fires like a shotgun known as the Pistole, a faster pump action shotgun named the SAS, and some pretty powerful stuff like the Dragon Sniper and RPG. All the guns feel pretty good to use and compared to before Uncharted 2 is much more difficult. There are plenty more enemy types than the first game and they all have distinct behaviors and weapon types. You have then basic blokes who run around, some helmet wearing guys who can’t just be simply shot once in the head, rocket launcher guys, snipers, some guys who close into your position with shotguns, and occasionally the one chaingun guy with layers of armor and must be broken through with explosives. They do a mostly stellar job keeping the player on their toes and scouring the battlefield for weapons instead of using the same ones. Same gameplay structure would go on for Uncharted 4 which I still think has the best combat. The stealth in Uncharted 2 is also more refined as sneaking up on an enemy is easier and the environments are actually made for it. Not as great as Uncharted 4 either, but it did allow for more options rather than “shoot people”. Some cover can be destroyed if shot at enough, so it’s not always best to stay in the same spot. Also melee combat has been improved, but it’s kind of useless in Uncharted 2 as there will be a point where performing melee kills is suicidal during gunfights.
To break up the monotony of gunfights you have those traversal sections and more relevant to Uncharted 2 are the puzzles. A lot of people can agree that this type of game design hasn’t really aged well and Naughty Dog should try to stray away from it. All it does is pad out the game and prevent us from getting to what is actually fun, but I’m fine with it. If it’s one thing that prevents me from going completely insane it’s down time, because if all you do is shoot guys and never get a break then it becomes repetitive after a while. You climb through some beautiful environments and the puzzles are a little more unique than the last game. They require some actual thinking and analysis of the pictures in your journal. Those sections where you must push a box or cart to get up a wall are still annoying, but at least it’s not a majority of the game. That’s all I can really say about Uncharted 2 right now. It’s not game design perfection, but it’s fun and some of the set pieces are downright energetic. We’ll cover this more in the conclusion. Hopefully you can locate Shambal and fulfill another wondrous journey.
Thoughts
Uncharted 2: Among Thieves held up beautifully after all these years and I definitely recommend it. I still love Uncharted 4 more and would rather recommend that instead, but Uncharted 2 is a high point in the franchise and a game changer for narrative and action drive games. It doesn’t do anything new or innovative, but what it does right is done extremely well. The locations and regions you go to are more diverse and just when you get annoyed by one particular environment you move onto another one. Drake’s Fortune took place in a jungle and when the game said it was going somewhere different it just went to another jungle. Here you have a museum where you scurry along the rooftops. A colorful city in Nepal caught in the warfare created by Lazarevic. Underground temples with scriptures, statues, and weirdly carved out monuments. You go through a mountain village gazing over the mountain beyond, and you go inside that mountain to uncover its secrets. I could explain to you Shambala and the beauty it beholds, but that would be a complete spoiler so I should avoid it. Uncharted 2 has those moments where they show the wonders of these locations and they all still look beautiful. This game is graphically amazing for 2009 and you wonder to yourself, “How did they make this?” The lighting, backdrops, animations, detailing, all of it was done well. The voice acting is great with Nolan North still putting on a great performance.
The story of Uncharted 2 is much better than the first and it has a better drive. There’s a constant rise in tension and stress, and you just keep pushing forward hoping to get closer to your goal before a warlord takes over the world. There’s more emotions in the characters and you really get to see the tug and pull that goes on with Nate. Where he questions the reason he chooses to venture into the unknown and deal with people more powerful than him. Shall he choose to be rich and famous, or take care of the people? The weaker men? The people who care for him and will be there till the day they die. This theme would expand with the third and fourth game, but it was the start for a better and more well told narrative. They also did a good job explaining how you end up in one place to another, and there’s one moment where they pull some weird mythology stuff out of their butts. It’s more of that Indiana Jones styled thrill for adventure we know and love. Just with a little more darkness sprinkled into the recipe.
The set pieces are scripted moments that are much better than Drake’s Fortune and some of them would be referenced in later games. From battling your way through crumbling buildings, and this one car chase moment that would be recreated in Uncharted 4 but way more exciting and ball busting. There are some actual boss fights in this game and they help switch up the combat. You fight a helicopter and there’s explosive launchers littered around to signal to the player to fight back. The final boss fight is interesting, not the best, but the mechanics work as a puzzle.
Uncharted 2: Among Thieves is still a great roller coaster of an experience to go through, but I do have some gripes. The game is more challenging and fun than the first game as you take more damage than usual, but there are those moments where you die for unfair reasons. Where the game just keeps throwing enemy hordes at you. Where there are multiple snipers pointing at you, there’s a guy with a turret, and shotgun blaster enclosing on your position. The stress is only made worse when the screen turns black and white near death, making it way harder to see where the enemies are in the environment. I don’t know why shooters have to do this to display the health you had. Why not do what Doom does and have a small recognizable hud. I still hate two weapon limited restrictions and weapon reloading as it disrupts the combat. Besides that, good game. Uncharted 2 is a good foundation for what this franchise strives for and it’s no wonder it’s a fan favorite after all these years. In the end I am going to give Uncharted 2: Among Thieves a 9/10 for excellence at best.
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