Hanging out (literally) with Nate Drake in Uncharted 2: Among Thieves

by Glen A.

Late last year, Trevor wrote a review on Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune. Though we were late getting the game, it was still fun, and lived up to the reviews we had read.

I don’t play a whole lot of games (Halo 3 online is about it right now), but every now and then I’ll pick something up and play its campaign/story mode. We heard a while back that the Uncharted game was getting a sequel, and based on the hype around it, it was supposed to surpass the first in just about every category.

Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune was earlier on in the PS3 game rollout, and so the developers, while doing a great job, didn’t feel they were able to do everything they could have done if there had been more time and if they knew more about the PS3. They expressed that over and over again in interviews I saw online regarding Uncharted 2. They said they had pushed the PS3 development and Blu-ray disc about as far as they could with Uncharted 2.

I didn’t ever play the first Uncharted (though I’ve been told several times I should), but based on what Trevor thought about the game, and what I heard about the the new one, I decided to go Uncharted 2: Among Thieves.

Uncharted is a combination of different genres. There’s a lot of shooting, and there’s a lot of climbing, and then there’s puzzles to solve. You do have a diary or book that you have to pull out from time to time to give you hints on how you should advance. In game, there are hints too, though not all of the hints that flash up on the screen actually tell you where or how to accomplish something. You’re still left up to your own powers of deduction and perception.

I’ve played games where you take hours to figure out what turns out to be the simplest of tasks. I hate that. If you don’t stumble upon the answer in the first few minutes, it can really hang you up. Among Thieves did not have any moments like that. There were a couple where I had no clue what I was supposed to do, and it did take a while, but in a couple of cases, game play actually resolved itself. I won’t tell you how, in case you want to pick up the game, but not all situations are about how many enemies you can kill. All of them, however, are about survival.

Uncharted 2: Among Thieves opens up halfway through the game, with Nathan Drake waking up after a train wreck. He’s bleeding, already lost a lot of blood, but he can’t rest as the train starts shifting on it’s snowy mountain perch and the next thing you know, you’re having to scramble up and in and out of train cars to get back to solid ground.

As you do, flash backs start to fill in the story you’ve jumped forward on, and you get to play those levels. Eventually, you catch up to yourself, and the story continues.

The graphics between cut scene and game play are pretty similar. There is still a wait time in between levels, but it isn’t too long. The graphics throughout are very good. They are crisp and colorful, whether you be in the jungle or in an ice cave.

If you’re acutely afraid of heights, you might not want to try this game. As I said, there’s a lot of climbing, and there’s a lot of open air. There were quite a few times that I found myself curling my toes in both concentration and in reaction to what I was trying to do on the screen. A wrong move, or a leap in the wrong direction can lead to instant death. Thankfully, for the most part, the game doesn’t make you go back so far that it takes 30 minutes just to get back to where you were, so you can still keep in mind your mistake and try something else.

I liked the storyline, and I liked the characters. Instead of Francis Drake, the plot revolves around the lost ships of Marco Polo, which supposedly were laden down with treasure. The plot has enough twists and turns in it that what you’re searching for and why ends up changing enough that you’re not on the same adventure that you started out on. The alliances shift, too, though it’s not like you’re necessarily working for the bad guys one moment and the good guys the next. However, priorities and principles are kind of confusing, but what do you expect among grave robbers, power mongers and theives?

Elena Fisher is back, though she doesn’t show up until halfway through. There is another love interest (sort of) in the form of a Chloe, a long raven-haired adventurer with a British accent (can anyone say Lara Croft?). There is some innuendo here and there, but the ambitions of the two characters and where they draw the lines with their loyalties never allow them to get too close.

There are characters Nate knows that aren’t really explained as to how or why, other than perhaps they’ve crossed paths professionally. Flynn, is one of them, who seems rather dubious from the get go and turns out to be downright nasty as the game wears on. Sully is another, though he seems loyal to Nate throughout, though he could have easily not been.

I didn’t keep track of how many hours it took to play through the game, but it easily could have been 20 hours. There aren’t many side adventures, which is fine, and I didn’t see any advantage in having any particular kind of gun or weapon at your disposal that you would want to make sure you had.

Some weapons were more effective than others, obviously, but as game play progressed, the defeating of foes or the maps themselves did a good job of providing you with the tools you needed. The trick, of course, was being able to efficiently dispatch enemies with the amount of bullets you had before they took you out.

You don’t get much help from the non-playing characters. They either spend their time ducking, or when they do fight, it’s not exactly with overwhelming force. Likewise, though, you don’t have to worry too much about them for most of the game. There are a couple of spots where you have to either save them or hurry them to be helped, but those are not constant, like some games where you’re monitoring everyone’s health bar even though you can’t keep the non-playing characters out of harm’s way.

As I mentioned earlier, there were only a couple of spots that were harder to get out of. Some of this is due to sequence–how you take out enemies and in what order–while others have to do with time duration–how long it takes to complete a give task. There is no clock, however, so it’s impossible to know. I stumbled upon it simply because I managed to not die. That’s about all the hint I’m going to give you about that.

Throughout the game you are following a particularly power-hungry fellow named Zoran Lazarevic, who is described as a war criminal. He’s got an Eastern European accent of some sort. They could have told you in the game where he’s from and which war he did what (you end up in a battle zone for a while), but that all escapes me now. It’s not essential to the game play, anyway.

However, I bring up Lazarevic because you do end up going one on one against a supercharged version of him towards the end of the game. The confrontation, while not easy (I didn’t defeat him the first seven times I tried), is less than satisfying, and falls firmly into the anti-climatic category. I won’t tell you why, but just know you’ve fought off some pretty powerful creatures, a tank and Lazarevic’s hired mercenaries, so you would think defeating the boss would be pretty spectacular. In my mind, it’s not.

Aside from that, and an ending that leaves the fate of Nate’s and Elena’s relationship writhing in ambiguity, the game is fun to play, and seems just right as far as the amount of tasks that need to be performed, and just how easy they are to complete.

I played single player throughout, but if you have some friends who would like to join in, there is actually a multi-player co-op you can try. There’s also supposed to be team based online play for up to 10 players, with different game objectives. I’ve not done that either.

I paid full price, $59.99 for my copy of Uncharted 2: Among Thieves. I don’t know if there are any games that are worth the $60, so if you’re inclined to wait for the price drops, go for it. The game play won’t change just because you’re not one of the first to try it. Without a strong online draw, like a Halo or Modern Warfare, it’s just not necessary to pick it up so quickly. But when you do, I believe you will have a good time, and feel like you did get your discounted money’s worth.

Uncharted 2: Among Thieves is rated T for Teen blood, language, suggestive themes and violence. I can’t really think of too many instance of blood, so it must be less than in Halo 3, but there is a fair amount of bullets and fists flying, along with explosions. I’ve probably already mentioned the suggestive themes, but I do have to comment on the language. The most pervasive is the S-word. There’s nothing really stronger than that, but Nate likes to stay it quite a bit, particularly when he gets caught during the stealthier parts of the mission. During this one level, I kept getting caught and the scene would end with him saying the word. That happened several times in a row, and it got irritating and old very quickly (aside from the fact I was already frustrated because I kept getting caught).