Uncharted 2 was my introduction to the Uncharted series and it was a great one from the opening snow scene all the way to the weirdness at the end of the game.

This game takes a huge leap in terms of graphics and overall presentation compared to the first game, increasing further the Hollywood-esque tone of the game via set pieces and beatiful vistas found throughout the game.

Gunplay is a bit weird and off like in other game of the series, with certain enemy types acting as bullet sponges. Playing this on Crushing difficulty was overly frustrating and enough to deter me from going after the Platinum in future entries.

Multiplayer mode was fun and a welcome component of the game to provide an extended life to the game.

The Uncharted series has always seemed as close to a movie as a game can get, the uncharted games have always felt at their strongest when they were as big as they possibly could get with massive setpieces like the opening of Uncharted 2 when you are hanging from a train in the snow which is about to fall off a cliff. It gives me that same feeling that a film like 1992's Hardboiled gives me, it's just plain awesome it's pure action adventure bliss.

The worst bit about uncharted 2 and the uncharted series as a whole is its shooting mechanic, its just simply not very responsive or satisfying. All the guns as well don't have much of a difference to each other, with it being more useful to just stick to one gun the entire game than switching around like you would in a series like Halo or Half-Life.

Overall Uncharted 2 is a love letter to action films of the past with its expansive Indiana Jones like story and massive blockbuster setpieces, its a must have for fans of action adventure games and must have for PlayStation diehards.

Going back to play the Uncharted series was like cutting down the tree of cinematic gaming and looking at its growth rings. Compared to how thin the first game was, Uncharted 2 was a great evolution, but it's still pretty close to the center. You can tell that the developers learned a lot from their first swing at the genre, with an expanded, more interesting cast of characters, and one of the most legendary intros in gaming. The story brings you to a better variety of locations, the setpieces are more ambitious, and the shootouts are more interesting, addressing the problems with Drake’s Fortune across the board. However, with the connecting thread of all these elements still being a dry implementation of third-person shooting, it’s not the revolutionary step up in quality that would elevate it to a timeless classic. Instead, it’s the perfect period-piece for a moment in gaming history. Its successes are the highest out of all its peers, while sharing the flaws of a design that still needed years of refinement. Among Thieves may not be the best experience if you go in fresh, but there’s value in seeing the best of what 2009 had to offer.

I think my biggest takeaway from Uncharted 2 is "this is where the series should have started," and that statement is both my biggest praise and biggest criticism of this game. It is leaps and bounds ahead of its predecessor in terms of how much less frustrating the shootouts are and how much easier it is to know what you're supposed to do in exploration and puzzles; it doesn't completely escape the problems of the first game, but the difference is that in Uncharted 1 there were multiple instances in which I wanted to put the game down, and in Uncharted 2 I only ever wanted to keep playing it. That is the sign of a successful sequel in my eyes.

All that being said, this is still a game that I was very unimpressed with. The cover system is still broken; Drake doesn't put himself in the line of fire as much as he did in the first game, but he does get stuck behind pillars or on ledges that you don't want him to, or sometimes will just stand there when you DO want him to take cover. A lot of the shootouts end up feeling different from each other, which I appreciate, but that doesn't change the fact that there are a lot of them, and in the end game it felt like there were too many without much diversity.

My biggest issue is that outside of gunfights the game feels like it plays itself. The set pieces look cool but they're so shallow because you know from the very beginning that you will never be in any danger when these moments are happening; they are too automated. And because of how automated they feel, when the game opens up and has you do a bunch of puzzles it feels like a slog because of how much of a drastic shift in effort it requires. They aren't even hard, they just feel hard (and are tedious) because the rest of the game is so boring in comparison.

The best part of the game, just like the first, is the performances. Dialogue, voice acting, motion capture, even the animations during cutscenes are all incredible. I really didn't care about the story or the characters very much at all, but just watching everything in action kept me hooked.

But I feel like that's kind of a backhanded compliment, because by having the performances be the best part of the game, the experience as a whole just feels like squandered potential for a decent movie. If it had been a movie, it would have been way less impressive, to be fair, but still, something's wrong when watching the game is more enjoyable than playing the game. The difference in quality is too great.

Had Uncharted 1 started this good and the series only got better, my opinion on the series as a whole might be drastically different. As it is, I can recommend you skip Uncharted 1 and play this on its own. And my hope is that Uncharted 3 isn't as bad as people say it is, and that Uncharted 4 actually benefits from a jump in hardware power and an entire trilogy's worth of experience to make it a game I will actually enjoy.

Finished my 4th playthrough the other day and yeah, this game still slaps. I played on Crushing and outside of spending far too long on the final boss, I found the difficulty to be pretty much perfect (on The Nathan Drake Collection mind you, I’ve heard the original PS3 version suffered from its own share of balancing issues).

It’s crazy to think how much of an improvement this title was over Drake’s Fortune; despite both games being almost identical in terms of mechanics, the way that Among Thieves uses these systems places it in an almost entirely different genre. While Uncharted 1 kept its platforming and puzzle sections independent from its predominantly third-person shooter design, its sequel instead blends its 3D-platformer elements with the standard gameplay of ‘Gears of War meets Tomb Raider’ to create some truly jaw-dropping set-pieces (and also some more memorable puzzles thankfully). I’m not even saying that Drake’s Fortune is a terrible game, Resident Evil 4 had revolutionized the design of 3rd person action-adventure titles only 2 years prior after all, and the original Uncharted is still a fairly enjoyable romp today despite all of its dated aspects. But all someone has to do is play through the train sequence (which boggles my mind how Naughty Dog even got that to work), or the frantic, snow-covered car chase in Tibet, to understand the quality difference between the two games.

While Uncharted 2’s plot doesn’t quite match the emotional power of The Last of Us, it makes up for it with its charming cast, excellent voice acting, and witty dialogue. Whether it be the lovable rogue Nathan Drake, the confident and ever-so-cool Chloe Frazer, or the anti-Nathan found in the character of Harry Flynn, the characters in this game are just plain likable. While there are plot-holes, and the primary antagonist is a little cliched, it all functions well with the self-aware tone of the game, and is again, a major improvement from the mostly barebones story and underdeveloped villains from the first game. My only major complaint really would be that one of the best characters in the series, Victor Sullivan, is dropped from the story pretty early on – I would have liked to have seen more of him.

When broken-down to its basics, this game isn’t actually all that special; it is still Gears of War with an Indiana Jones coat of paint, like the first game. But its about how these lesser parts are used to create something larger, and between all the things I already mentioned, as well as the outstanding visuals and camera angles, Among Thieves still holds up after all these years.

I'll be blunt: I've played the Uncharted games pretty extensively, and I don't think this is the best one.

That isn't to say the game is bad by any means. By the minute you boot up the game, the improvement from the first game is palpable. Better graphics, better writing, more varied gameplay with a much more interesting story and fleshed-out characters. Uncharted 2 is a sequel done right.

I found the first half of the game to be fantastic: the story moved at a brisk pace with varied levels and strong set pieces to mix up the basic gameplay. The first half culminated in the iconic train sequence which was easily the best part of the game, and one of the best sections of any Uncharted game to this day. After a section as amazing as that, you'd probably think it's all downhill from there. Unfortunately, you'd be right.

The variety in levels from the first half of the game is gone going into the second half, I was so sick of snowy mountain levels by the end of the game I wanted to scream. The gameplay also felt noticeably weaker, devolving into repetitive shootout and repetitive climbing section on loop for what felt like hours, and I spent most of it longing to repay Uncharted 3. Throw in a disappointing final boss, and I have to say I barely enjoyed the latter half of the game, but that isn't even my biggest problem: that would be the characters.

They say strong characters can carry a weak story; it doesn't work the other way around. For that reason(and many others), I'll always prefer Uncharted 3 to 2. I may have said the characters were better than in Uncharted 1, but I didn't say they were good. The only two in this game who didn't annoy me were Tenzin and Sully. They were great; they were also barely in the game. Excuse me while I roast the rest of them:

I found Nate to still be a pretty cocky moron in this game: I hardly felt he had grown up since the first game, and I rarely enjoyed the scenes focused on him. I sorta hated Chloe to be honest: Her elegances changed so drastically it was legitimately pretty confusing, she came off as very selfish and short-sighted, and she became completely redundant the minute Elena came back, and the game seemed to know that and wrote her out of most of the rest of it. Elena was fine, but both of her out-of-nowhere appearances in the story were extremely jarring, and I didn't feel like she added much to the story. Karl Schafer is literally only necessary to the story because Tenzin can't speak English, and the game expects us to feel emotional at his death after knowing him for two minutes, just like it did with Jeff, I feel manipulated. Lazarevic is one of the goofiest placeholders for a character I've ever seen, he has very little stage presence, and his boss fight is one of the few parts of this game even diehard fans don't like. I'm amazed the game expects me to take him seriously.

And finally... let's talk about Flynn. Many in the Uncharted community regard Harry Flynn as the best villain in the franchise, and I couldn't disagree more. His motivations make no sense, why is he working for a guy who is obviously going to betray him and kill him? He doesn't even seem surprised when it happens. What was his endgame anyway? Money? That's boring. He needed a more personal motivation, like Rafe, if he was going to be interesting. The scenes with him are annoying, his dialogue isn't great, his death scene is really unsatisfying(yes, I understand that's the point, but it's a lousy point), and I have no idea where his distain for Nate came from. However, my biggest problem is how damn incompetent he is. Nate escapes when Harry has him at gunpoint five times by my count. Lazarevic was right; he hired the wrong guy.

I know I didn't say too many positive things about Among Thieves, but there are a million reviews you can read heralding this game as one of the all-time greats. I'm glad that's what you all think, but I can't relate, I'm mostly just bummed by how underappreciated Uncharted 3 is. I should really re-review that game, I didn't say half the good things I had to say.

HOLY HEATER! The pace of this game is incredible, from set piece to set piece, this title makes it incredibly difficult not to be engaged. Weapon variety was also great, every gun had its strengths in certain situations and felt like I could tackle even the biggest of Guardians. The puzzles were so much better, nothing mind bending but nothing like a shape peg puzzle either. This game just makes me smile, it itches that little adventurer in me that watched Last Crusade years ago. I love the writing this go around, and also the chemistry between Nathan and Elena, never a dull moment.