Uncharted 2: Among Thieves

Anyone remember when video games were video games and movies were movies? Nowadays games are more and more trying to blur the lines between what we play and what we watch with varying degrees of success. Uncharted 2 is, hands down, the closest thing to an interactive cinematic experience you can get without having to step in front of a camera.

Uncharted 2's story feels as if it could be the story in the next Indiana Jones movie. Just replace religious artifacts with artifacts from real world explorers like Marco Polo and replace Nazis with, well, dead Nazis and you've got an approximation of Uncharted 2. But it's not just the plot that makes Nathan Drake feel like a latter day Indiana Jones. Most of the time, the story of a videogame is secondary to the gameplay. But here it feels as if the story was as equally important as the gameplay. The characters of Uncharted 2 are fully fleshed out in both the gameplay and the cutscenes that it's hard not to be vested in them by the time the end credits roll. The game isn't just filled with big flashy action sequences but quieter character moments that take you by surprise and make you feel like the characters have a life of their own.

And Uncharted 2 does a very good job a making the world feel alive. Not just in the characters but the environment that these characters inhabit. The colors of the jungle in Borneo are vibrant, the underground caverns are damp and dark and you can almost feel the wind in your hair as you gingerly navigate the rooftop of a moving train. It's at these points in the game when you're subject to the environment constantly changing around you, like the train, that the world is fully realized... You struggle to stay on the train while taking out enemies or keep hidden behind a wooden fence that's crumbling under constant gunfire. It's an impressive amount of immersion that few games can execute, let alone execute so well.

But the game's world isn't the only thing to get a facelift in this sequel, the gameplay mechanics have been equally refined. The stealth mechanics of the first Uncharted felt tacked on. It was nearly impossible to take out a room of enemies stealthily without being discovered after taking out the first guy. Now, you can sneak around and dispose of a whole room full of enemies with some careful planning like Batman (without swinging from statue to statue, of course... but you can push people off of rooftops). The gunplay is also improved with the addition of exploding propane tanks and the ability to quickly lob a grenade in a firefight. But, while the melee combat is technically deeper, I kind of prefer the simplicity of the original.

Uncharted 2 also boasts a number of both cooperative and competitive multiplayer modes. Cooperatively, you can complete missions with up to two other players or fight an ever increasing number of enemies while trying to retrieve treasure in Gold Rush mode. Competitively, most of the usual suspects are here, deathmatch, team deathmatch, etc. Both the cooperative and competitive modes capture the feel of the single player campaign but lack the story and the characters that give the single player campaign its depth. And probably my biggest pet peeve about the multiplayer is that you can't just play with who you want to play with... at least not that I've found so far. If your game has one empty slot in it, the game will attempt to fill that slot with a random player.

Seeing how refined the multiplayer modes are and seeing how often Nathan Drake is teamed with another character in the single player, it almost seems to me that Uncharted 2 was supposed to have cooperative gameplay throughout the main story. If that were the case, I understand why it was left out. Because most of the time, the second player would just be the "other guy"... and not necessarily someone you'd want to play. It's choices like these that make Uncharted 2: Among Thieves one of the best single player games out right now.

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