Console:
Playstation 3
Genre:
3rd person action/adventure.
Setting:
Around the world, where treasures and artefacts can be found.
Story:
Seeking artefacts for mysterious, rich people and having to form alliances to achieve this. There are crosses, double crosses and weird things to see. The story is told in a very arty, cinematic way...the narrative is chopped up and that makes the overall story even more intriguing. E.g. You start the game injured in a train, which you have to make your way out before it is destroyed. Through flashbacks and gameplay in those flashbacks, you wonder what on Earth happened to your character (Nathan Drake) to see him near death and abandoned at the start of the game.
Graphics:
Whilst the first game's graphics were pretty good, Uncharted 2 just looks so much more sumptuous, especially during the cinematic cut scenes. In other games you can see spots of white around characters' mouths, but in this game this seemingly tricky part of anatomy to represent comes off as realistic. Lots of different kinds of terrain is represented well...snowy ground, water, fire, jungle etc. Brilliant quality.
Strengths of the game:
* Brilliant character animation and voice acting by the cast...it comes across as a big budget Hollywood movie.
* Improved combat mechanics...it's a bit like Metal Gear Solid 3's combat mechanics...not as sophisticated as that, but an improvement over the mechanics of the first game nonetheless.
* Variety in game play...driving sections, leaping from moving cars sections etc.
Weaknesses of the game:
* You get some novel enemies in this game...the first time you fight those blue people you really are left to flounder, clueless, as to how to defeat them. Some sort of damage guage/health bar on them to clue you into what works against them would have been appreciated.
* Some ridiculous 'boss' battles...the end of the game has progressively harder enemies to defeat...but quite a way before then I got the imression that a soldier you had to fight on the train section was a 'boss' of sorts...just an odd section there, and ridiculously hard to defeat 'boss'...it really didn't make any sense for that character to be as hard to defeat as he was.
* The grinding final fight of the game. The most annoying aspect to this game was the inability to save progress in your fight against your final opponent. There are a few 'set pieces' in that fight, which you notice when you continually die and have to hear/see them again when you replay that section. Assuming that there were 3 such set pieces marking progress made in the fight, it was supremely annoying that instead of resuming your fight on the same set piece in which you died, you had to start again from a previous section of the fight. I honestly felt like rage quitting this game when I couldn't win this final fight...felt that the game was cheating me. Somehow, the next day, I got a good run (it seemed to me) and managed to defeat the final boss. It's this randomness which also supremely annoyed me...the feeling that on most replays you get something excessively hard, and on a random replay you get it easy. I like predictability.
Niggles:
* As with the first game, you can still find yourself leaping to your death with the rather strict jumping feature.
General thoughts:
I played this game on "Normal" difficulty. For most of this game, this setting seemed easier than on the "Easy" setting on the first Uncharted game. Towards the end of the game it started getting very difficult all of a sudden. Whereas I scored the first Uncharted game as 7.5/10 due to finding replaying that game on "Normal" as "Do-able", with the sequel I just don't really have that desire...defeating the blue men and the final boss in the game just seemed overly difficult (due to the lack of cues as to how effective your attacks were) and the randomness of eventually defeating them just seemed to mark this game as grinding and not fun. For some players having to escape the train twice in the game (although it was just the one escape) might seem too self-indulgent on the part of the game's makers...you think to yourself "But I've ALREADY done that! Why do I have to do it AGAIN?".
All in all the many improvements in graphics and story telling do not overcome the all of a sudden difficulty of the final sections of the game, which are reduced to a very annoying, frustrating, rage inducing grind.
Playstation 3
Genre:
3rd person action/adventure.
Setting:
Around the world, where treasures and artefacts can be found.
Story:
Seeking artefacts for mysterious, rich people and having to form alliances to achieve this. There are crosses, double crosses and weird things to see. The story is told in a very arty, cinematic way...the narrative is chopped up and that makes the overall story even more intriguing. E.g. You start the game injured in a train, which you have to make your way out before it is destroyed. Through flashbacks and gameplay in those flashbacks, you wonder what on Earth happened to your character (Nathan Drake) to see him near death and abandoned at the start of the game.
Graphics:
Whilst the first game's graphics were pretty good, Uncharted 2 just looks so much more sumptuous, especially during the cinematic cut scenes. In other games you can see spots of white around characters' mouths, but in this game this seemingly tricky part of anatomy to represent comes off as realistic. Lots of different kinds of terrain is represented well...snowy ground, water, fire, jungle etc. Brilliant quality.
Strengths of the game:
* Brilliant character animation and voice acting by the cast...it comes across as a big budget Hollywood movie.
* Improved combat mechanics...it's a bit like Metal Gear Solid 3's combat mechanics...not as sophisticated as that, but an improvement over the mechanics of the first game nonetheless.
* Variety in game play...driving sections, leaping from moving cars sections etc.
Weaknesses of the game:
* You get some novel enemies in this game...the first time you fight those blue people you really are left to flounder, clueless, as to how to defeat them. Some sort of damage guage/health bar on them to clue you into what works against them would have been appreciated.
* Some ridiculous 'boss' battles...the end of the game has progressively harder enemies to defeat...but quite a way before then I got the imression that a soldier you had to fight on the train section was a 'boss' of sorts...just an odd section there, and ridiculously hard to defeat 'boss'...it really didn't make any sense for that character to be as hard to defeat as he was.
* The grinding final fight of the game. The most annoying aspect to this game was the inability to save progress in your fight against your final opponent. There are a few 'set pieces' in that fight, which you notice when you continually die and have to hear/see them again when you replay that section. Assuming that there were 3 such set pieces marking progress made in the fight, it was supremely annoying that instead of resuming your fight on the same set piece in which you died, you had to start again from a previous section of the fight. I honestly felt like rage quitting this game when I couldn't win this final fight...felt that the game was cheating me. Somehow, the next day, I got a good run (it seemed to me) and managed to defeat the final boss. It's this randomness which also supremely annoyed me...the feeling that on most replays you get something excessively hard, and on a random replay you get it easy. I like predictability.
Niggles:
* As with the first game, you can still find yourself leaping to your death with the rather strict jumping feature.
General thoughts:
I played this game on "Normal" difficulty. For most of this game, this setting seemed easier than on the "Easy" setting on the first Uncharted game. Towards the end of the game it started getting very difficult all of a sudden. Whereas I scored the first Uncharted game as 7.5/10 due to finding replaying that game on "Normal" as "Do-able", with the sequel I just don't really have that desire...defeating the blue men and the final boss in the game just seemed overly difficult (due to the lack of cues as to how effective your attacks were) and the randomness of eventually defeating them just seemed to mark this game as grinding and not fun. For some players having to escape the train twice in the game (although it was just the one escape) might seem too self-indulgent on the part of the game's makers...you think to yourself "But I've ALREADY done that! Why do I have to do it AGAIN?".
All in all the many improvements in graphics and story telling do not overcome the all of a sudden difficulty of the final sections of the game, which are reduced to a very annoying, frustrating, rage inducing grind.