Writing: 1/5
Gameplay: 2/5
Art Design & Visuals: 2/5
Voices & Sounds: 2/5
Atmosphere & Immersion: 1/5

Much better. Still has some of the same niggles as the first ie poor combat, frustratingly obtuse puzzles and level design that just doesn't seem that play tested. The game has NO idea what to do when you break off from the beaten path. Stealth mechanics are introduced in the first 'proper' level and then immediately after you are given a large snowy area and are free to face these enemies how you see fit. Here's the issue, WHY showcase a stealth mechanic to the game if you're just gonna punish me for using it in an applicable sense? You heard right, the game straight up insta kills you in this section for getting past all the guards with stealth kills. These games are like being strapped to a rollercoaster but you have to keep the restraints held down yourself. Can't even fathom thinking this is a 96 on metacritic, even for the time.

It's crazy how this game is better than the first one in every way. The shooting is more fun, the climbing is more fun, the story is more interesting, everything is just better.

The best part about this game is the variety of the environments you get to explore. In the first game you were trapped on one stupid island running through the same stupid jungles and the same stupid caves. In this game you go from Tibetan mountains, to an art museum in Istanbul, to Borneo, back to Tibet in like the first four levels.

The story still kinda sucks but it's the national treasure kind of stupid that you just don't see anymore. In my opinion it does enough but thats about it, I was consistently interested, which in a game like this is pretty much all you can ask for. Plus getting to actually play through the lost city in this game after getting blue-balled in the last game was great. The villain was still lame though and his boss fight sucked.

Also the puzzles were still really bad. They were better than the ones in the last game but they still basically all boil down to turning something to make it match how it looks in Drake's journal, straight 0 IQ shit. The shooting sections also get kinda tedious. All of the big set pieces were awesome though, they really cashed the cinematic check that the story wrote.

Overall this game is really good. It improves on every single aspect of the first game, but it still feels too shallow to give it anything higher than a 7.

Even more Uncharted for those who couldn't get enough of dickhead extraordinaire and part time psychopath Nathan Drake and his ethically questionable adventures despite not being presented as such. Being facetious, of course. Bad stealth that isn't really viable because enemies have way too good of an eyesight notwithstanding, virtually everything in this game shows some improvement over the original. The long ass time to recover your health is still here and still makes me want to die, but I actually had fun with the combat, and sections like the train or the big convoy where you jump from truck to truck were really memorable and a joy to sit through despite all my deaths because I played on hard again. Even the story is better, Nathan went from a smug cunt on Uncharted 1 to a slightly more tolerable smug cunt here. Also the puzzles were pretty decent, none were all that hard or illogical and several are equally as memorable as the best combat sections, with special mention to the overhauled Nathan's notebook, which still gives you how to solve the puzzle in a pretty simple way, but its a lot more visually striking and interesting to sift through.

This is a good ass game. I played through on the hardest diffIculty and i didnt even realise but the combat encounters are alot more intense when you realise that you die in like 2 shots. Nathan drake makes so many jokes about peoples asses in this game that i have to give the writing a 10/10. The reason you play this game though is for the big indiana jones set pieces, you go from climbing up a train as its falling off a cliff to jumping from moving trucks fucking blowing up shit with a grenade launcher but there no knack so i had to drop a point.