I use to have a certain distaste for this franchise, for as much as these games want to be movies I was never very convinced of their storytelling. Yeah the moment-to-moment dialog can be entertaining, but it always feels like their idea of cinema is just Indiana Jones running from a boulder. Nathan Drake in particular has always come across as this Duke Nukem-esque chimera of different quippy action stars, he hardly feels like a real character. Doesn’t help Uncharted 2’s case that Lazarovic is a really generic antagonist. My girlfriend and I have been watching through the Indiana Jones movies and, in the case of Raiders and Last Crusade, making the villains Nazis is such a quick and effective way to make you understand what they’re after and why you want to see them fail. With Lazarovic it’s just a vague hunger for power, not much to go on. In my God of War 3 review I mentioned how that game was more successful at being a movie-game than Uncharted 2. While the writing in God of War 3 has some glaring issues, I’m still able to appreciate the cinematic presentation because its telling a story unique to itself, wheras the Uncharted series never quite escapes being a facsimile of film.

After replaying it again, I’ll admit I had way more fun than I was expecting to. Combat kinda carries this game. It’s easy to look at chest-high walls and groan at how ubiquitous they were in the 7th generation, but the game loop here is never static. Enemies throw too many grenades for you to stick to the same piece of cover for longer than five seconds. You are always moving around, firing everything you have in your arsenal, narrowly rolling past shotgun blasts, sniper lines, and grenade launchers. Watching it in motion, you really do feel like an action star which, at the end of the day, is the whole goal of this franchise.