Brief, Scattershot Thoughts on Uncharted 2

Great graphics, that goes without explanation if you’ve seen any screenshots or videos. Though I really had a problem with the character’s eyes in the cutscenes. It wasn’t that they were all dead/Polar Express/Uncanny Valley-ish it’s that they were too shiny and the irises seemed really big or just not a natural colour. It seems like a really nitpicky thing but it took me out of the story until I would just start staring at how amazing the fabric on someone’s jacket looked or the camera zoomed out far enough that I didn’t notice it as much.

Sometimes frustrating gameplay and that’s why I never finished Uncharted 1 but for some reason something felt different in this one and made me less frustrated. Though a lot of times during the game I’d just wait around (or purposely die a few times) for the ‘hint’ to pop-up for where to go or what to do and then immediately feel stupid that I needed that hint. It ended up boiling down to, ‘Ohhh, that’s what a climbable object looks like in this level’. I guess I was too accustomed to the inFamous style of being able to climb anything.

Also sometimes the shooting sections went too long between checkpoints. ‘Enter the area, ok, about 10 enemies, carefully pick them off. Ok, 10 more enemies come rushing in, cool, let’s do this. Ok, three guys with body armour and shotguns show up and one got behind me, ah fuck I’m dead. Respawning, goddammit it put me back at the beginning…’ repeat until I’m begging the game, ‘Oh please don’t put me at the start again.’ That happened all too often.

Multiplayer has some good ideas but nothing worth tearing me away from my MW2 addiction. In the lobby you get a choice between two levels to play and have a little election to see which one actually get played, that’s a pretty neat feature. It was nice to see the platforming and melee elements from the single-player game intact in the multiplayer game, wasn’t expecting that which was a nice surprise when trying to find a way to get to an upper level and was amazed that I could climb a wall and not nice when I was getting my neck broken from behind by an enemy. And there starts the problems. The actual shooting didn’t feel right which meant I ended up just running around hoping to melee people (and dying, repeatedly) . Also, at peak time there was only approximately 7000 people in the multiplayer (whereas there could be twenty times that in MW2) so it seemed to take a while to find a good match.

Hm, not as brief as I intended but wanted to write that out since I just played it. My recommendation is to rent it and play it on an easy difficulty just to see the decent story and awesome visuals.