The Official UNCHARTED 2: AMONG THIEVES Thread.

[tedsteriscool]

For the lulz...here's a customer's review from gamestop's site:

I played through the single player campaign on normal difficulty. Uncharted 2 is basically a retooled Tomb Raider just better. The story is great and the cutscenes are really fun to watch. My small quibble would be that you can tell a huge amount of work went into the facial emotions and animations of the characters, yet during the cutscenes Chloe's eyes glow even in the daylight and make her look like she has been doing meth for the past week. The controls, while overall are nice, are a mixed bag. While on one hand the game allows more flexibility in the fact that you can jump diagonally from object to object, on the other this same mechanic makes you miss many jumps throughout the game. However, since most jumps don't mean certain doom and there is a decent checkpoint system in place, this doesn't really hamper gameplay. The single player story was a blast to playthrough!

The multiplayer is where I knocked this games rating a bit. First the positives. The level layout is very nice and balanced. Players can climb onto higher ground and buildings to find that perfect sniping spot. Action is nonstop as weapons laid out throughout the map provide extra incentive not to camp. There are also AI vehicles that come through some of the maps that will shoot you on site, so you better be heads up and on your toes. Similar to the Call of Duty franchise, there is a perk system called "boosters." These perks allow for the usual: more accurate aiming, more ammo, and even martyrdom. There are some really cool perks you haven't seen such as Come Get Some, which allows enemies to see you through walls for extra cash. Instead of XP, Uncharted 2 has you earning cash which you use to level and buy perks and characters to play with. Then of course there is the cover system which works nearly identically to Gears of War.

Now the bad. Anyone who has played Gears of War will immediately notice the simularities between the two games. You use the O button to take cover and if there is no cover around you will do an evasive roll. Just like the original Gears, this roll will keep you from taking a lot of damage and allow you to get closer to enemies. The cover system can become annoying. First, you have to be directly facing and stopped to take cover. Sometimes you will just sit there and roll while other times you will lock onto the wrong cover. Then comes the problem of getting off of cover. Sometimes if the camera isn't facing forward, say you're watching an enemy charging from the side or behind, hitting X or O won't disengage the cover. You will either just sit there or jump to a nearby cover two feet away which doesn't help when an enemy wants to bash your head in. The matchmaking system on this game is pretty much broken. It is extremely slow and will pair your level 8 character across from a team of level 40's. Also, again like Gears, no one can join a game that has already started. When someone quits the game on your team (because after all, no one wants to play 40's when you're first starting out) you remain 1-2 men down.

What makes matters even worse is that there are no leaderboards or even personal statistics boards, so you are basically just playing for the sake of ranking up. So why rank up? Exactly. In order to check your personal statistics you must log onto Naughty Dog's website, which provides you with 24hr old stats anyway. Unfotunately, the biggest similarity Uncharted has with Gears of War is lagg issues. If you don't have a REALLY fast connection, gameplay is going to range from sloppy to downright cheap. I can host an 18 player match on Modern Warfare 2 just fine, however, I still get lag on this game. At first the lag may not seem obvious, but then you start to notice little things. You will empty an entire clip into an enemy only to have them turn around and shoot you with two shots. You will melee a person 2-3 times only to have them melee kill you once from 10 feet away. You will find that you need to start leading people by a couple of feet to have shots register. At first I thought it was because everyone is higher ranked than me and must have unlocked some great perks. After ranking up and unlocking the same perks that people have used against me, I realized something: Perks really don't change gameplay at all and the lag is always going to favor the people with the better connections. To be fair this is an issue for a lot of games, even Call of Duty 4. However, since you can take A LOT of damage in this game before you die (again just like Gears) the lag really comes into play. If you have lag you can always count on two things: A) The enemy will be shooting you even if he looks like he is not shooting yet on the screen, and B) only 1/2 to 3/4 of your shot are going to register versus the other persons 100%. This leads me to have the strategy of always trying to get people from behind, using the clunky cover system constantly, or constantly looking for the high explosive weapons.

The game does run at a silky smooth framerate and has some really amazing sound effects and soundtrack. Probably the best thing about this game, I thought, was the animations. All the transitions are super smooth from stumbling on the run over a rock on the ground to scaling up walls, The animations are simply beautiful. While the water and weather effects are pretty stunning, watching your character run in the snow is a huge let down. Your character will leave two jetstreams of simple white balls as they travel through the snow which doesn't even come close to resembling snow. Graphically the game is great to look at, but surprisingly is equal to Gears of War 2. It is surprising that Sony and Naughty Dog hyped up the graphics so much, even going so far as to say, "This game can't be done on the 360!" when infact it can and already has. The same thing was said for Metal Gear, and a short time later it was announced the next Metal Gear will be coming to the 360. I'm not saying that the Uncharted series is ever coming to the 360, just that I see no reason why this game couldn't be done on the 360. Likely just a marketing ploy used by Sony as in the case of Metal Gear. The worst part of the graphics for me is the textures, admittedly I am a texture junky. The level design is complex and looks to have a high polygon count. It is, however, disappointing for me to see nothing but PS2-like mush when coming closer than 5 feet to any object. The textures are so bad that if one were to get right next to an object, that person would have a hard time making out which material the object is made of.

Uncharted 2 is a great game, just doesn't live up to the hype. The single player is a better and more refined Tomb Raider with an amazingly fun plot. The multiplayer is nothing more than a fun run and gun shooter that is not for the hardcore online gamer. Uncharted 2's multiplayer is a Gears of War clone with the same lag and dropout issues. Add to that the absence of any kind of leaderboard, the online portion of this game is sure to fizzle out within a year. 3 years later, COD4 (avg population per night being 80,000 players), Gears of War 2 (60,000), and Halo 3 (100,000), World at War (90,000) games have a much higher online gamer base than Uncharted 2 during its first week of release, which currently is 13,547 gamers.

Don't get me wrong though. Uncharted 2 is a great game that every PS3 gamer should at least check out.

4 of 55 people found this review helpful.