Saturday, June 12, 2010
The Fretless Bass reviews: Uncharted 2: Among Thieves.
Uncharted 2 is the best game I have ever played. The story starts with a good old flash back sequence where in the first ten seconds of the game, the protagonist, Nathan Drake, finds himself hanging off the safety rail of a train car that is coincidentally hanging off a cliff. In the flash backs that follow, you find out that Drake was talked into stealing a priceless artifact that belonged to Marco Polo by an old associate, Harry Flynn. Now, Drake is a fortune hunter, but presumably was a thief before the events of Uncharted: Drake's fortune (the first game). So Drake goes with Flynn, and Something goes horribly wrong (any more would be a spoiler). The most basic plot of the game is that Drake is competing with an army of mercenaries to obtain a priceless treasure. Now for the review. My favorite part of the game (this was a hard thing to decide because I liked all of the game) was the way that combat, climbing/jumping, and puzzle solving, were all evenly dispersed throughout the game and were all still fun. Combat is amazing, the diversity of weapons is nice, everyone can have a favorite gun and/or combination of guns. My favorite weapons to carry are a wes .44 and an M4. The hand to hand combat system is good, they linked all combat to two buttons and made it so you felt like you knew what you were doing, and the combos varied enough to keep you entertained. One big thing I like is how punching is not more powerful than bullets (as in many 3rd person shooters). Climbing/jumping was powerful. Nathan Drake is superhumanly athletic, so he can pull himself over walls, leap from one ledge up to another, and jump across a twenty foot gap. One thing I didn't like though, was how even though Drake is supposed to be superhumanly athletic, he grunts like Venus Williams when he jumps off so much as the curb. Puzzle solving is the weakest out of the three, still fun, but weak. Every puzzle in the game can be solved by opening Drake's journal and it literally shows him the answer. There was one puzzle where the hardest part was remembering each symbol's corresponding color as you turned a page in the book. And now for my favorite part of the gameplay, stealth. I love stealth games, and uncharted 2, while not Batman Arkham Asylum (I'll review that one soon), satisfies. The parts where stealth is possible are really obvious, so you don't die twenty times only to realize you could have taken out six guys before ever even drawing your gun. The cover is nice too. The issues are again the grunting, I once jumped behind a guy and made a grunt that would have woken a dead man, and the guard didn't even blink. I don't know whether to blame this on the sound people or the fact that the AI couldn't tie it's shoelaces with instructions that have size thirty font. Also, the stealth move is almost always the same, a neck break. I'm about to wrap up, so know: the bad things I said about this game are purely stuff you don't even notice until you stop to write a review about it, and this game is flawless in every sense of the word. Mickey's rating 10/10.
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Everyone is always talking about how good Uncharted 2 is. I didn't like the game at all. This is why you shouldn't play uncharted 2, Among thieves.
ReplyDeleteThe big craze about Uncharted was that "It was like a movie" and "It was so realistic". No it was not. The fight scenes were all close to 10 minutes long, and it felt like the enemies were infinite, when I was done with this game, I was pretty sure there were no more mercenaries left in the world! Plus, I got tired of shooting at the same 3 or 4 characters in the second level.
The other thing that was attempted to be made a big deal of in the first game was that Nathan Drake was "an ordinary man". Again with the No. He is not. He has the amazing ability to be shot 20 times in the back, jump over a 30 foot wall, stand still for 5 seconds and be totally healed. He can also jump enormous 20 foot gaps without breaking a sweat until the next cutscene, at which point the only thing I can hear is his heavy breathing. Also, Nathan Drake grunts. A lot. It got to the point where I looked around the room for a different way across the gaps because I didn't want to listen to his constant screaming. It got better after the 5th level though, because I clawed my ears off in an attempt to stop hearing all those grunts.
Combat was one of the most tiring aspects of the game. As I stated before, the fights could last forever because of Nathan's healing factor that could make Deadpool's look like a band-aid machine, and the unending stream of mercenaries. No help from the CPU's. The only time I think a CPU actually helped me was when Sully was sniping in the second level, and that was because I was still in the "tutorial" part of the game. Every other time the CPUs just sit behind a wall having thumb wars and shooting at the enemies when they felt like I was having a hard time, meanwhile, I was almost emptying an entire clip on each enemy that looked at me funny. DId I mention that it takes something around 6-7 bullets to kill a single CPU enemy? They don't even have Nathan Drake's healing Factor!
Stealth was the most annoying part of the game. Every so often, you would be presented with a room full of mercenaries, looking for you in a room they happen to know you're not in. At that point you have to stealthy take them out, you can not leave the room until it is covered with dead bodies, and the only incentive to not shooting all of them is so that reinforcements don't come and you start another half hour long fight scene consisting of you staying behind one wall, never moving, and spraying bullets into a crowed of mercenaries that take 7 bullets to kill, never run out of ammo, and never miss.
Meanwhile, I put the controller down, burn the box, and play a good game.
I hate you too, Uncharted.
2/10
How can you expect shooters to be "realistic"? If games were realistic, you 'd have to wait six months between injuries while your character gets treated at a hospital, and you'd have to burn the game if you ever died. The gameplay may not have been overly realistic but the mindset you got into was. Throughout the entire game, you felt like you were improvising your actions one at a time. In the stealth rooms, you didn't feel like a god choosing who lives and who dies, as in Arkham Asylum, you felt like you had to make a snap action or die, and the beauty of it was, sometimes you were wrong, sometimes you'd have to go to take your one guy, and the sniper you didn't see got a clear shot on you. The game focused on what people would really do instead of spending $30,000 making Drakes mistakes look entirely like he meant to do them
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