ONE-WAY TICKET TO INTENSITY, PLEASE
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Uncharted 2: Among Thieves is one of those sequels that hardly adds anything new. Instead it treats the first entry like a test drive, tweaking what's already in place to fulfil the potential of the promising concept. Developer Naughty Dog fine-tunes the gunplay,
fixes the broken platforming, tightens the level design, pumps up the pacing,
throws in a few changes of scenery, experiments a little with the narrative
and adds a few memorable characters to replace the cardboard cutouts that
perished in the first game.
All-in-all, we have a winner on our hands. Sleeker and leaner than
Uncharted: Drake's Fortune, Uncharted 2 is intense from start to
finish, giving us only a few moments of respite. The PS4 remaster is once
again handled with the utmost care by Bluepoint Games. I'd have to play
the PS3 original and this one back-to-back to fully appreciate the
improvements, but simply being able to control the thieving treasure hunter Nathan Drake with the Dualshock
4 (my favorite overall controller) makes this the best version out there - at
least for now.
This story is a bit more mature than the predecessor's, even as Drake and
his fellow adventurers do their utmost to maintain their spirited banter. Drake is naughtier in
his interactions with the great new love interest Chloe Frazer (superbly
voiced by Claudia Black), a dark-haired Australian beauty and possible
femme fatale. She and Drake are birds of a feather, which might be why his
trust for her sometimes falters. He's unsure about her knack for
double-crossing - where does her allegiances really lie?
The quest this time is to follow a trail of old breadcrumbs left behind by the explorer Marco
Polo on his search for the lost kingdom of Shambhala and the fabled Cintamani stone,
supposedly valued at tens of millions of dollars. The trail leads Drake from a
museum in Turkey, via the jungles of Borneo, to a Himalayan setting in Tibet, where most of the game takes place.
A chain of memorable set pieces, among them an iconic train sequence, takes
him from one location to the next.
Naughty Dog are so proud of that train ride that they open the game in its
aftermath, in median res, and later return to it as the story catches up. It
sure as hell is a standout sequence, one that encapsulates all the game's
finest gameplay features in one elaborate setting. It could be perceived as a miniature
game set inside the larger framework of the treasure hunt story, but the same
could be said about many other scenes as well. A spectator, watching your
gameplay, could join in on the action at any point and be just as mesmerized
as someone watching from the beginning.
The cast of characters is amazing, and they're brought to life by a splendid
voice cast. The funny old geezer Victor Sullivan tags along briefly before
he's replaced by Chloe, and soon Drake's old flame Elena Fisher returns,
adding a love triangle to the already high stakes. Another great new addition
is Harry Flynn, a charismatic thief who involves Nathan on this treasure hunt
in the beginning.
Even the duo of villains has improved a lot for this entry. I had played
Uncharted 2 before, and as soon as I saw them, particularly the monstrous main
antagonist Lazarevic, I remembered their roles in the upcoming drama. The same
could definitely not be said about the boring villains from the first game.
Uncharted 2 employs the same gameplay elements as the first game - combat, light puzzles, platforming - but with an even keener sense of progression.
Every part transitions so neatly into the next - often with a heart-stopping
fight against impossible odds - that you sometimes might fail to notice the
chapter progression at the top of the screen. Split up into 26 chapters, the story takes around 10-11 hours to beat.
The updated visuals are eye-popping. An almost wasteful attention to architecture is taken to absorb the player into moist jungles, crowded cities and
ancient temples. Even as the breakneck action prevents me from soaking it all
up, I'm nonetheless aware that it's there, in the periphery, and I'm thankful
for it. The dynamic soundtrack raises the tension further, and the way it dies down
once the situation's over is a reward in itself. It means you've reached a
checkpoint and can relax a bit, and fully appreciate your surroundings.
A few new gameplay additions are so minor they're hardly worth mentioning. You
can pick up and hide behind riot shields, and a few new weapons are added. You can now throw gas canisters and shoot them mid-air to devastating effect. We
also get a first glimpse of Naughty Dog's trademark story exploration segments, where
Drake walks around a Tibetan village, interacting with its residents to
familiarize himself with the strange new culture.
I'm left with very few complaints, and most of them are very minor leftovers
from the first game. The story still feels a bit trite. The linearity and lack
of side content removes some sense of exploration and wonder, as well as the flavor of really participating in an archaeological quest. No, the treasure hunt is really an excuse - albeit a good one - for all the action. Some animations still look awkward under the wrong circumstances, but at least they function a whole lot better this time around. I didn't miss a single jump I
intended, and whenever I fell to my death it was an error of judgement on my
part.
Unfortunately - and this is the biggest flaw - Naughty Dog throws in a few stealth segments, a mechanic they don't quite pull off. The game encourages you to use it as much as possible, giving you a bonus weapon pickup for taking out enemies silently. But the approach only works for a couple of enemies, tops, before you're discovered, and then you can only resort to gunplay. One short early section in Turkey, where it's "game over" as soon as you're detected, reveals what a let-down this game could've been if Naughty Dog had gotten their priorities wrong. Thankfully, they didn't.
Instead, Uncharted 2 feels like Naughty Dog learning their lessons well. The gameplay
screws and bolts are tightened, bringing it closer to the action-adventure
movie experience the first game was striving for. Although a bit flimsy at times, Drake controls better,
which allows for more intense combat scenarios. They include a couple of thrilling
encounters with a helicopter, and a mad dash through a Tibetan village beset
by a small army, which is spearheaded by a tank.
All Uncharted games share the same approachability. The controls are self-explanatory and a nice cleanliness to the user experience brings the player close to the action. You never have to delve deep into menus - the face buttons, shoulder buttons and d-pad cover all you need to get by. And the cinematics might tell of yet another trite treasure hunt, but the character interactions, which already
were excellent in the first part, are even better this time around, adding a lot of personality as well.
The users on the site
mobygames.com still rank Uncharted 2 as the
number one game on the PS3. It merges video games with cinematic
storytelling without sacrificing either medium. The storytelling is
top-notch, and the players are given enough space to express their own preferred style of
action. With Uncharted 2: Among Thieves, it's clear that Naughty Dog had all
their parameters set exactly right to craft the best cinematic action game of the era.
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