Review: Uncharted 2: Among Thieves

It has a great story. It has characters you care about. It has great level design. It has music that drives the action. It has a sterling multiplayer mode.

But the thing that puts Uncharted 2: Among Thieves over the top is its humor.

There’s the witty repartee being protagonists and the self-deprecating way the hero talks. There’s the goofy doodles in his journal. There’s the little encounter in the swimming pool. It all adds up, making a technically brilliant game an endearing one.

Uncharted 2: Among Thieves tells the tale of fortune hunter Nathan Drake, who is drawn into a search for the mythical Shangri-la (Shambhala), a paradise supposedly located somewhere in the Tibetan mountains and allegedly visited by Marco Polo during his journeys.

The game begins with a bang.

Drake awakes from being knocked out to find himself in a train car dangling precariously over the edge of a snowy mountain cliff.

The next few minutes are spent extricating Drake from his situation, with harrowingly narrow escapes and multiplying dangers. The level serves as a quick tutorial on the basics of the game.

Flashbacks fill in the blanks of the story, as Drake teams up with one of two female adventurers to seek out the Cintamani Stone rumored to be in Shangri la and purported to be a source of world-dominating power. Adding to the urgency is competition with Zoran Lazarevic, a war criminal who wants to also find the stone, for obvious reasons.

Needless to say, the chase is on as Drake and Lazarevic cross paths numerous times in the quest. Battling soldiers in a war-torn village, bounding across railroad cars in a high-speed train ride to climbing sheer cliffs in remote Himalayas, Uncharted 2: Among Thieves takes the player on an adventure-filled joyride. The game is cinematic in scope.

The multiplayer mode provides plenty of variety and a rock-solid experience. The game offers a diverse selection of game types, including deathmatch modes, objective modes, elimination modes, co-op and others. The choices are extensive.

Also available is Cinema mode, which allows you to record and save games, replay them at your leisure and upload them online. The most recent 20 games are automatically recorded, with the option to protect games from being deleted.

Uncharted 2: Among Thieves isn’t perfect, however.

I did find the hint system a bit annoying, as if the game developers were worried that the puzzles and direction of the game might be too confusing without a lot of hand-holding. Of course, I played at an easier skill level, so it’s possible that harder modes would have been less forgiving.

But the biggest issues I had with the game were contained in the multiplayer mode.

First was the matter of choice. The game offers a multiplicity of game modes that are sure to satisfy just about any gamer. But as it stands now, gamers can’t choose specifically what mode to play.

For instance, if you’re a big fan of the “King of the Hill” mode and only want to play that – you can’t.

The game allows you to choose a category – KotH would fall into the “objective” category – and then, after the player lobby is filled, two choices are offered for vote. One of them may be a KotH match, but more often than not, neither will be.

At this point, the options are to go ahead and play that match you didn’t want and hope the next one might by to your liking or exit the lobby and try again.

That decision leads to the second multiplayer issue.

Since players can only join a match at the outset, leaving a game before it starts or in mid-game will cause your team to be down a man the entire match, almost always guaranteeing a loss. It would be nice to enable players to join a match mid-game.

But these complaints are quibbling, at best. Uncharted 2: Among Thieves is one of the best – if not the best – games of the year.

Platform: Playstation 3 Rating: Teen Manufacturer: Sony Score: 9.5 charted chilies