Before I begin, I would like to make it clear that Uncharted 2 is an excellent game. The wonderful characterization, interesting story, and action-movie feel all contribute to an experience that most games in the past few years would be hard-pressed to match. It is one of the best games I have played in a long time. Naughty Dog has put a lot of love and care into the development of Uncharted 2, and they deserve every single bit of praise for it.

Unfortunately, no video game is perfect, and as a video game, Uncharted 2 has its problems. Fair warning: some of my words will tell you about things that happen in the game, so if you have a problem with spoilers, wait until you finish playing before you read.

Ambiguous platforming

It's hard to be careful when this is going on

Platforming is a large part of Uncharted 2's gameplay. A good portion of the time you spend on it will see you jumping from ledge to ledge, swinging on overhangs, and scaling walls. It's simple, for the most part, which makes it frustrating when some little thing you thought you had control over goes wrong and you end up plummeting to your death.

The main culprit is Drake's jump. More specifically, Drake's jump relative to the proximity of a dangerous ledge that you may or may not actually need to jump from. When on solid ground, pressing the X button will get you a nice, small hop. When standing at the edge of, say, a rooftop with a 100-foot drop waiting to send you back to the last checkpoint, pressing the same button will get you a daring horizontal lunge.

It's the difference between a death-defying leap and a life-ending fall. Normally it's not a problem -- you can take your time to carefully move around obstacles, judging your movements, and safely making your way to the other side of any trouble you may encounter. It becomes an issue when you need to do something quickly or when the camera does a scripted swing to an odd angle. Now it's challenging to be sure that you're the proper distance from the edge, and a button press half a second too soon means that you're doing the whole thing over again.

Quirky AI

Three people should be able to watch my back, right? Right?

AI is one of the most important parts of a game. If it's too dumb, the game is no fun because you're just moving through a virtual shooting gallery, blasting what are essentially cardboard cutouts. If it's too smart, the game's no fun because the enemy knows exactly where you are after seeing a few pixels of hair peek out from cover, and can snipe you from halfway across the game with a pellet gun. Similarly, if a companion is too dumb, a game becomes one long escort mission. Too smart, and everything is dead before you can experience the game.

For the most part, enemies are a nice challenge. They will take cover, try to dodge gunfire and explosives, and flank you if you decide that a particular spot is nice and safe. The problem is target priority. In the event that you have an AI friend with you, I've noticed that enemies will still act as if you're alone. Companions can and will kill enemies when given the opportunity, but even when they are a more obvious and direct threat, enemies will often ignore them completely in order to seek you out.

The most stand-out example of this comes later in the game, once you reach Shambhala. You're thrown in a small arena with three Guardians, fast and hard-to-kill opponents with weapons that will take you down within seconds. Despite being escorted by to friends who did nothing but shoot, and despite not doing anything but running around and trying to take cover, the Guardians were invariably locked on me. I was not an immediate danger, but was targeted first and killed many times while my companions were actively unloading magazine after magazine into them.

Weird AI is not limited to the enemies, though. Companion AI can be frustrating as well. The only major problem I experienced was a similar ignorance of enemy presence. While it is great that they don't just clear a room and leave me with nothing, there should be some attempt to defend the team. There were more than a few times when I would end up with a shotgun to the back of my head because a flanking enemy just walked around my two buddies who were too busy taking cover to bother with helping me not die. I found myself wishing that the characters were real so I could punch them in their stupid heads.

Trial-and-error gameplay

It's that damned helicopter again!

Once upon a time, it was normal for a game to have the occasional part where you were given absolutely no clue regarding the safe passage of an area, then punished you with lost lives until you figured out what you were supposed to do. This kind of mechanic meant that the player kept feeding quarters into an arcade machine, generating revenue for the video game industry. Nowadays, video games are a mostly home-based affair, with no need to keep players on the hook with unfair deaths. Even so, many games still have these areas, and while generous checkpointing and clues help, there are two stand-out parts that take Uncharted 2 from a fun game experience to an aggravating exercise in repetition.

The first one is easily recovered from and is more of an example of inconsistent design than anything else. During a great chapter that involves the traversal of a moving train, there's an area where track signals pass over the train cars, knocking hapless enemies and players to their deaths. During this part, the signals are spaced so that you have just enough time between signals to make it across the top of a single car before ducking into safety. Later, as you're being attacked by a helicopter, the signals return, but now there's just enough time to dive headlong into the next signal and be swept off of the roof. As it turns out, you're supposed to shimmy along the side of the car, something which you most likely would not have figured out before dying at least once.

The second occurs right at the end of the game. After defeating the final boss, you emerge triumphantly from the temple only to be faced with a crumbling bridge that you must dash across in a thrilling climax before the final few cutscenes play out and the credits roll. But wait, instead of the promised thrilling dash, your excitement is killed by the fact that you die about six times before finally figuring out the pattern of the crumbling rock well enough to survive. And to add to it, sometimes the automatic ledge gripping latches on to the wrong bit of rubble, and you fall anyway. It's a disappointing and premature end to a great part of the game.

Gameplay/storytelling inconsistencies

"What happened to my recharging health?"

Uncharted 2 has solid gameplay and wonderful storytelling, and Naughty Dog put a lot of work into the blending of the two to provide a constant, seamless transition between them. While some conflict between the two elements is understandable, there were two moments in the story that just seem out of place when put in the context of the rest of the game.

The first occurs fairly early on, when Drake is shot in the stomach by the backstabbing Flynn. It's a powerful moment, and results in some interesting events during the following scenes. What makes it strange is that, up until that moment, Drake was running through gunfire, shrugging off grenades, and generally doing things that would normally get him killed. Suddenly, one pistol shot practically disables him, breaking the perceived continuity between game moments and storyline.

There is a second, similar event near the end of the game. During a cutscene Elena is grievously injured by a close-range grenade blast. Just like Drake, Elena spent her entire previous game time under constant fire, and even survived an almost-direct hit from a rocket during a scripted sequence, but suddenly the story needs her to be vulnerable, and it just doesn't fit well with the rest of the experience.

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The thing to remember is that despite these flaws, Uncharted 2 is a great game. It provides a wonderful experience that makes it hard to put down you controller. I would recommend it without hesitation to any PS3 owner, and would go so far as to say that it justifies the purchase of a PS3 for anyone who doesn't already have one.

It's just that there has been a lot of hype and hyperbole thrown around (21/20? Really?), and this “perfect” game had me shouting angrily and waving my arms violently about with some of its not-so-perfect elements.