14 DAY TRIAL // 
Kill. Climb. Love. Take down a helicopter from the rooftops. Battle a tank on the streets of a Himalayan village. Get a giant dagger to stab the heart of a millennium-old statue. Climb on a train as it plummets into a crevasse. Save the love of your life from a mass murder. Steal from a Turkish museum. Get betrayed (multiple times). Fight mech-like enemies wielding Gatling guns. Decrypt ancient languages. Solve puzzles. Grab enemies from ledges and throw them in huge, open pits behind you. Take a comrade to safety while under fire. Destroy an armored carrier as it tries to crush you. Sneak around. Fight hordes of enemies. Offer witty remarks on the catastrophical events that happen around you. Carry a man to safety under fire. Jump ahead blind hoping that someone will catch you on the other side. Watch the city unfold around you. Get treasures. Fight evil. Find love.
The above are all things that you can do in Uncharted 2: Among Thieves. It comes from Naughty Dog, stars the same Nathan Drake and is an action adventure-type game that takes you from Turkey to Borneo and to Himalaya as you search for an ancient treasure, while also fighting a tough opponent.
Sure, the game is completely linear, there are tons of cutscenes that might put some people off and, at certain points, it makes you quickly press Triangle to get simple doors open, which is highly annoying. But the overall experience is so well crafted, so big on details, so B action movie-like, that PlayStation 3 players will quickly declare it a classic title for their platform.
Story
The narrative in Uncharted 2: Among Thieves is, to keep looking at the same genre, somewhat better than that of Indiana Jones and the Chrystal Skull (no fridges get nuked, thankfully), but somewhat weaker than Raiders of the Lost Ark. There's a very old and, apparently, very valuable artifact linked to Marco Polo that Nathan is dragged into finding and, as he nears his goal and travels towards it, the protagonist discovers that he is getting both more and less than he has bargained for.
Another complaint is the chain of betrayals that happens in the game. I get that they are staple of the adventure genre and that Uncharted 2 needed them, but they should have been built to be less obvious. Watching those cutscenes waiting for someone to switch sides at some point is almost painful. But the overall banter is interesting, even if a little too many references to human anatomy are made, especially when ladders are climbed.
Gameplay
There are two things that Nathan Drake and his fellow adventurers can do: free run and shoot things. The free running is clearly the more important of the two, as the player will spend most of the game grabbing ledges, jumping over obstacles, pushing people up ladders (curious how they can all be dropped down from the top) or swinging from poles. The movement is impressively animated and it rarely feels forced. The problem is that there are few precious sections where the player is really forced to think a lot about their path, maybe even backtrack a little and spend time looking around the scenery for their route. After one completes the initial train-based section of free running, one has pretty much mastered all the skills needed to navigate the adventuring areas, maybe with the exception of a particularly infuriating (for me at least) idol puzzle, which had me running around like a headless chicken for about an hour, until I discovered the ledge I wanted to reach.
This does not mean that the platforming elements are bad or that you'll not enjoy running along walls and building momentum to reach a distant space, but, in the final third, these elements might seem a bit tiresome.
Meanwhile, the combat is much improved over the original Uncharted. One of the biggest surprises is how well your companions, especially Chloe and Elena, with whom you spend most of the time, take care of themselves and of the various enemies. They know to cover flanks and help you when you're in a tight spot. Which really helps, given that the enemies can also be pretty smart, flushing you out of cover with grenades, while the heavier ones, shotgun-armed, advance steadily to flank you. Of course, the main threat is in their numbers, especially in the later stages, but it never feels like a chore to take them out. Even the close combat system is satisfying, even if it does not reach the elegance of the one employed in Batman: Arkham Asylum. The big letdown is in the overuse of helicopters, which feel overpowered in their abilities and that often lead to sequences where powerful weapons just pop up in the scenery to allow you to take them down.
Another issue, apart from some tougher-than-should-be sections, is that Naughty Dog separates the shooty bits and the adventuring bits too well. There are a few sections when you hang on a lamppost and use it as a cover while taking out bad guys on roofs, which were more exhilarating for me than the last boss fight and I wished for more of them. The truck-based combat sequence was intense and fun, even if death was a constant companion, and I would have liked another such section (maybe involving speed boats or helicopters) instead of the rather lame tank battle on the narrow streets of the snowy village.
Graphics and audio
Uncharted 2 is the best looking game I have ever seen on the PlayStation 3. The guys at Naughty Dog have some black magic, no doubt, the direct result of some long-lost, ancient treasure, which allows them to create crisp, wide vistas, simulate complex cities and derelict buildings, while keeping the frame rate fluid and implementing some pretty life-like animations for the main characters. I very much appreciated the views you got when dangling from some flag pole while climbing up to the top of the Tibetan hotel that would show the way to a certain plot-relevant temple. I simply hung there, not moving forward, showing the people around me in the room how clearly defined all the objects on the ground were, even if they were far away and in a section of the city that I would never get to explore. The depth of field in Uncharted 2 is simply unparalleled in console video gaming at the moment. In other words, the developers have applied extreme care to create a game world that looks gorgeous even in those areas that are not accessible to the player or have little importance to them. Every detail has been polished to perfection.
The only problem I encountered was with the level of lighting in some sections of Uncharted 2. At some points, the game foes are very dark and only brighten up if you reload or if you move around a bit so that the character catches a glimpse of a better illuminated area.
The audio is equally good, with the voice actors behind the trio of leading characters, Drake, Chloe and Elena, and Tenzin managing to actually inhabit the characters that they read lines for. Drake might be a bit too witty and dry-humored for his own good and the two main villains are a bit one-dimensional, but this is a game that has the audacity to actually introduce Tibetan-speaking characters (quite a musical language that one) and not provide a subtitle track for them, so the minor missteps are easily forgiven.
Multiplayer
One of the big, new things in Uncharted 2 is the multiplayer. First up, there are cooperative levels, which will pit a trio of characters, one of them always Nathan, against heavy-armed mercenaries as they move about the scenery trying to accomplish objectives. Both the fighting and the moving around require some real cooperation among the players and, at times, the challenge is really, really hard. And, if you've liked to play Firefight or Horde in Halo 3: ODST or in Gears of War 2, you could get something similar out of Survival in Uncharted 2.
But probably most of the crowd will try out the versus and multiplayer modes. There's the traditional Deathmatch, Plunder, which is like Capture the Flag, but with treasures and with a lot of thrown objects, Elimination, a deathmatch with no respawns and Chain Reaction, which is a domination-like mode based on capture points that need to be taken over in a specific order by the two opposing teams.
Conclusion
Uncharted 2: Among Thieves offers the thrills, the gun fights, the witty dialog, the climbing, the surprises and the plot that you would expect from an '80s archeology-oriented movie. The difference is that you get to play the main hero and directly enjoy, if not shape, the experience. Combine this with superb graphics, which probably are testing the limits of the PlayStation 3, some impressive details in the scenes and the animations, beautiful sounds and solid multiplayer offerings, and you get the first truly great experience of the year for the PlayStation 3. I've learned to overlook the minor issues it has, including a freeze-up, which seems to happen rather frequently in the final chapter, and to simply take it all in, as the game offers the best chance video gaming created to feel like Indiana Jones, but with a higher body count and cooler ladies.
