I am probably the only person in the world who is going to criticize Uncharted 2, not that it is bad or anything, it is like eating junk food — a bag of crispy potato chips with a root beer ice cream float, knowing it is bad for your health but you will savor every last drop and morsel anyway. It is like picking up the best-looking girl in the bar and finding out later that you have to pay for her services, or watching Indiana Jones 4 or any James Bond movie, with paper-thin plots and guns and explosions and treasures and witty banters — fun while it lasted but if I asked you the plot of your favorite James Bond movie, you probably couldn’t form a coherent sentence even if your life depended on it. Yes I plan to fill the page with metaphors instead of talking about the game, I know that I want to.
There’s one thing Uncharted (I speak for both versions) is good at, that its sole mission is to not make you think while looking very pretty, like your college girlfriend’s slutty roommate whom you wish you didn’t get caught cheating with, but in hindsight you were glad you did it anyways. It will probably be just as fun watching someone play Uncharted, than playing it. In the game every decision is linear, you either move left or right or you would die, like in quick time events, like playing Dragon’s Lair. The puzzles are obvious and easy and usually relying on discovering where to go next, which the game does a good job of providing hints if you are stuck for too long. The only challenge to Uncharted is figuring where to go before the hint pops up and never run into your death for the first time, for death there is no penalty, as checkpoints are plentiful. There is no sense of danger and dread because Nathan (the protagonist) recovers his hit points no matter how much he is shot at (aka Gears of War) , in fact I felt invulnerable even when carrying a half-dead comrade in a storm of bullets, like playing Ikaruga with a wave of oncoming enemy fire that is only one color. You would argue that it didn’t make sense in Gears either — but the protagonists in Gears were not thieves, but trained beefy inhuman marines whose arms were thicker than Nathan’s torso. Uncharted would have made sense if the whole game was played from the Stealth angle, like the first Metal Gear Solid. As a matter of fact when Nathan was shot (from cinematic scene) and left half dead (this is how Uncharted 2 begins) it is even less believable. And I certainly don’t understand the decision of the game making you play that terrible bus-falling sequence twice, as if anyone would not remember they’ve already done it in the beginning of the game.
At times Uncharted 2 would feel a lot like Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, where the environment is crafted illogically just so that the protagonist could barely get through with his jump distance, not that I am questioning the suspense of disbelief here (I don’t question Super Mario Brothers either), but if there were 10 million things that Assassin’s Creed did wrongly, it did this aspect right, it totally erased that suspense of disbelief providing real believable structure that was not constructed just for the protagonist, yet became the protagonist’s playground all the same. The problem with Uncharted 2 here isn’t the illogical placement of platforms and levers and ledges and mountable walls, even though, you would question that why areas that take 2 people to traverse will conveniently be there always when there are 2 people in the team, but never when you are alone. Unlike Sands of Time, where areas that take 2 people to traverse will be there right from the start even when you are alone, but it is the progression of the game that lets you revisit and traverse those forbidden areas with your new found companion. Unlike the Sands of Time, Uncharted 2 doesn’t provide puzzles for you to solve, you are not given a room where you must go from A to B and there are a series of traps and levers you must overcome, what it does is it thrusts this Prince of Persia-like movement into a Dragon’s Lair flow of game, there is always just one way to go, and the other path is death, and the challenge is simply identifying out of the lush environment the camouflaged ledges you must get to, sometimes under time constrain — the result of that, not really my idea of good game design.
Uncharted 2: Among Thieves deserves my criticism because it can afford to be criticized, because before it was even released it was set out to out-sell every other exclusive PS3 games and make others buy a PS3 (if you didn’t buy it just to play MGS4), simply because the game is crafted like a Hollywood blockbuster, like Dan Brown and his international best-seller Da Vinci Code, with its paper-thin plot stamped on top of theories that has been long established and published in multiple non-fictions, already explored thoroughly in Gabriel Knight 3 by Jane Jansen.
It is a shame that we are great fans of Amy Henning, the creative director of the Uncharted series, who also wrote the convoluted tale of the immortal battle between Kain and Raziel in Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver. It is a shame that with her creative talents and the amazing technology and bright minds of the Naughty Dog team, she didn’t craft something epic and legendary.
We felt that Uncharted could have been better, if the game managed to involve some real adventure elements, like a Broken Sword game with action, and the result could have been something like the Fate of Atlantis of this decade, a gorgeous canvas painted by smart witty writing and clever puzzle solving with intense action scenes. But at the end of the day, Uncharted and Uncharted 2, are perfect weekend rentals — both of them together, which you can easily finish before the weekend is over. But for some, eye candy may be worth the entry price — if you didn’t get it when I said the best-looking whore in town has arrived, Uncharted 2 is the best looking game on the PS3, a juxtaposed screen of Tekken 6 makes it look like a PS2 game — yes, finally someone has unlocked the full potential of the PS3 cell processor and finally makes the best looking games on the 360 look like technology of the last generation.
