Uncharted 2: Among Thieves
One of our Christmas gifts this year was Uncharted 2 (no, not 3, 2. Yeah, we know). We've never played the franchise before and wondered what kind of experience it would be.
First things first: this game doesn't play like a game. It plays like a freakin' ACTION movie. It seems like every seven-ten minutes there's a death-defying leap, or a truck chasing Drake down a narrow alleyway as he runs towards the camera and fires blindly behind him. The first chapter takes place (technically) halfway through the game where Drake almost dies in a train wreck and has to climb out of it before he falls off a cliff. This is high quality stuff. We spent the first half of the game excited and wondering what was going to happen to make Drake so beat up and bloody, anxiously working through puzzles to try and get to wherever the train was and see what happened next. The second half of the game was a pseudo-chase after the villain to try and beat him to the tree of life in the mythical Shambala - Shagri-La.
The historic reference to Marco Polo and the climbing, and Nolan North's voice acting, we openly admit, made us think Assassin's Creed more than a little. But the game stands out on its own because it takes such a different spin from the AC series - the game is a giant love letter to Indiana Jones and B-serials of the black and white movie theaters were there's one cliffhanger after the next (in some cases literally). We eventually stopped calling Drake Ezio (er, and Desmond...) and appreciated the game for what it was.
The climbing puzzles in this game are great. Moreover, Drake isn't this fluid elegant climber like Ezio, but rather a slightly clumsy, prone-to-falling-flat-on-his-face type. He even runs like he's tired, and there was something always slightly funny about when that rope broke and he face-planted into a wall before falling to the ground so the game could force you to go a different direction. This is enhanced by Drake's irreverent attitude, quipping one liners one after the other. "This seems like such a good idea when I was on the ground..."
The locations are all unique in their own way, from the heist in Istanbul (Constantinople! We were just there a few hundred years ago!) to the wilds of Borneo to the anarchy of Nepal (?) to the Train Ride to the snowy mountains of Tibet. The break up from fighting to climbing to puzzle solving has a good pace to it. It even had zombie-yeti-wompa things.
Like the action movies it emulates, the plot is relatively thin: get hired by bad guy to steal something innocuous from Istanbul, screw bad guy when the word Shangri-La is mentioned, have teammates screw you instead, race to find the next clue first, save girlfriend number 1 which leads to Train Ride, get saved conveniently by Tibeten mountaineer, meet Shangri-La visitor who tells you to Bad Things happen, see bodies of visitor's old search party, watch visitor be kidnapped by bad guy, chase bad guy to monastery, open gate to Shangri-La, fight bad guy who became immortal, win, watch Shangri-La be destroyed.
We don't like action movies for this reason, and something similar happened here. While the game makes it much more immersive, once the Shangri-La visitor was kidnapped our excitement started to go downhill, because then we could predict what was happening. The visitor was dragged around and killed, making Drake and girlfriend number 2 shed a tear, and we didn't give a damn about him.
And at the risk of being picky, why is Shambala depicted as a garden of eden when they're in the middle of the very snow Tibetan mountains...?
Combat was a pain. A lot of this game is a shooter, an as we've said over and over, us + shooters = FAIL. Even set on easy we died an unscrupulous number of times because we cannot aim for beans, and worse, all of Drakes guns have recoil, so we're constantly adjusting the aim to account for the bullseye always shifting up. It's like asking us to die over and over; and just when we had that perfect shot finally lines up some guy from around the corner would start pounding us with a riot shield, forcing us to melee. Melee was actually pretty fun, except for the riot shield. And the people still firing on us. And the guys with RPGs.
We also learned something about ourselves as gamers. After a life of playing RPGs like Final Fantasy or Kingdom Hears, open world games like AC or Infamous, we played through Uncharted and were done in only 12 hours. It felt... short. We realized that we love luxuriating in a game, wandering around and checking out nooks and crannies, bumping up just one more level to get the extra HP/MP/AP, fiddling with side quests, etc. Treasure hunting in Uncharted was fun, but it was the only true "side" mission of the story, and done in one pass, too. Even Ratchet and Clank you can replay levels to get skill points. We never figured out how to unlock chapters to play individually, and even then, there's be nothing to "do."
In the end, we enjoyed Uncharted. It was different and exciting, but it was not wowing like other games are to us. We would have been happier to rent it.
First things first: this game doesn't play like a game. It plays like a freakin' ACTION movie. It seems like every seven-ten minutes there's a death-defying leap, or a truck chasing Drake down a narrow alleyway as he runs towards the camera and fires blindly behind him. The first chapter takes place (technically) halfway through the game where Drake almost dies in a train wreck and has to climb out of it before he falls off a cliff. This is high quality stuff. We spent the first half of the game excited and wondering what was going to happen to make Drake so beat up and bloody, anxiously working through puzzles to try and get to wherever the train was and see what happened next. The second half of the game was a pseudo-chase after the villain to try and beat him to the tree of life in the mythical Shambala - Shagri-La.
The historic reference to Marco Polo and the climbing, and Nolan North's voice acting, we openly admit, made us think Assassin's Creed more than a little. But the game stands out on its own because it takes such a different spin from the AC series - the game is a giant love letter to Indiana Jones and B-serials of the black and white movie theaters were there's one cliffhanger after the next (in some cases literally). We eventually stopped calling Drake Ezio (er, and Desmond...) and appreciated the game for what it was.
The climbing puzzles in this game are great. Moreover, Drake isn't this fluid elegant climber like Ezio, but rather a slightly clumsy, prone-to-falling-flat-on-his-face type. He even runs like he's tired, and there was something always slightly funny about when that rope broke and he face-planted into a wall before falling to the ground so the game could force you to go a different direction. This is enhanced by Drake's irreverent attitude, quipping one liners one after the other. "This seems like such a good idea when I was on the ground..."
The locations are all unique in their own way, from the heist in Istanbul (Constantinople! We were just there a few hundred years ago!) to the wilds of Borneo to the anarchy of Nepal (?) to the Train Ride to the snowy mountains of Tibet. The break up from fighting to climbing to puzzle solving has a good pace to it. It even had zombie-yeti-wompa things.
Like the action movies it emulates, the plot is relatively thin: get hired by bad guy to steal something innocuous from Istanbul, screw bad guy when the word Shangri-La is mentioned, have teammates screw you instead, race to find the next clue first, save girlfriend number 1 which leads to Train Ride, get saved conveniently by Tibeten mountaineer, meet Shangri-La visitor who tells you to Bad Things happen, see bodies of visitor's old search party, watch visitor be kidnapped by bad guy, chase bad guy to monastery, open gate to Shangri-La, fight bad guy who became immortal, win, watch Shangri-La be destroyed.
We don't like action movies for this reason, and something similar happened here. While the game makes it much more immersive, once the Shangri-La visitor was kidnapped our excitement started to go downhill, because then we could predict what was happening. The visitor was dragged around and killed, making Drake and girlfriend number 2 shed a tear, and we didn't give a damn about him.
And at the risk of being picky, why is Shambala depicted as a garden of eden when they're in the middle of the very snow Tibetan mountains...?
Combat was a pain. A lot of this game is a shooter, an as we've said over and over, us + shooters = FAIL. Even set on easy we died an unscrupulous number of times because we cannot aim for beans, and worse, all of Drakes guns have recoil, so we're constantly adjusting the aim to account for the bullseye always shifting up. It's like asking us to die over and over; and just when we had that perfect shot finally lines up some guy from around the corner would start pounding us with a riot shield, forcing us to melee. Melee was actually pretty fun, except for the riot shield. And the people still firing on us. And the guys with RPGs.
We also learned something about ourselves as gamers. After a life of playing RPGs like Final Fantasy or Kingdom Hears, open world games like AC or Infamous, we played through Uncharted and were done in only 12 hours. It felt... short. We realized that we love luxuriating in a game, wandering around and checking out nooks and crannies, bumping up just one more level to get the extra HP/MP/AP, fiddling with side quests, etc. Treasure hunting in Uncharted was fun, but it was the only true "side" mission of the story, and done in one pass, too. Even Ratchet and Clank you can replay levels to get skill points. We never figured out how to unlock chapters to play individually, and even then, there's be nothing to "do."
In the end, we enjoyed Uncharted. It was different and exciting, but it was not wowing like other games are to us. We would have been happier to rent it.