Uncharted 2: Among Thieves
Oct. 13th, 2013 08:15 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chuckroNate Drake, fortune hunter extraordinaire, has a lead on the Cintamani Stone, a legendary artifact supposedly found by Marco Polo in Shambala, but sealed away for some reason. But Nate’s not the only one after the stone…
An LP of this used the tagline “It’s like I’m playing a movie”, and I can’t help but agree. It’s a 3D platformer, like so many others, but very cinematic and linear in the way it does things. I think that’s one of the things I liked about it—similar to the way I like my jrpgs pretty linear, I like my platformers pretty linear with a strong and present story. That, and if not for the fact you need to press buttons all the time and can die and need to replay segments, it’s like watching a really long action movie.
It’s a relatively short game (ten hours) and makes up for that with 100 hidden treasures, a multiplayer mode, and a zillion trophies to achieve. The actual gameplay is a mix of stealth and action. It has a similar health system to Infamous, where there’s no defined “meter” you just have red splotches appear on the screen as you take damage (and eventually everything goes slo-mo black-and-white right before you die).
Basically three parts of gameplay: The 3D pixel-hunter parkour segments, where you try to figure out where you can jump and grab onto and which things have edge gravity. The third-person shooter segments, which are the only segments that “Very Easy” mode actually makes easier, as it gives you more health to tank hits. And the stealth segments, which are basically puzzle sections: You have to figure out the right place to move and the right order to kill all of the enemies so that none of them see you. (Though in many cases, you sort-of have the choice of using stealth or fighting. If you fail at stealth, you have to fight!) There are a couple of places where you could argue you’re solving puzzles, but it’s either looking up the right answer in Nate’s Journal (press Select) or just keep climbing things until you find a switch.
The context-sensitive buttons and raw stupidity of your character when it comes to jumping means that attempts to roll out from cover cause you to merrily jump off a train. Also, the distance Drake can jump varies greatly from jump to jump. Fortunately, you have theoretically-infinite “lives” because you restart from the previous checkpoint any time you die, and the checkpoints are rarely that far back. So some sections become an experiment in, “Can I jump this way? Wheeee….thud. Guess not. How about way? Wheeee!”
It’s also amusing that occasionally the answer to a climbing/puzzle segment is shooting something—that, I found, worked remarkably well as a puzzle element.
I suspected I recognized a few of the voices, and the credits proved me right: Nolan North (who I recently saw as Superboy in Young Justice), Claudia Black (Aeryn Sun from Farscape), and Rene Auberjonois (Constable Odo from DS9).
Overall: If I was going to play 3D platformers, this is the style of 3D platformer I’d play. I’m glad it didn’t run longer, because I think it would have gotten old; and I’m glad it wasn’t harder, or I’d have gotten too frustrated to finished it. But as it stood, not bad.
An LP of this used the tagline “It’s like I’m playing a movie”, and I can’t help but agree. It’s a 3D platformer, like so many others, but very cinematic and linear in the way it does things. I think that’s one of the things I liked about it—similar to the way I like my jrpgs pretty linear, I like my platformers pretty linear with a strong and present story. That, and if not for the fact you need to press buttons all the time and can die and need to replay segments, it’s like watching a really long action movie.
It’s a relatively short game (ten hours) and makes up for that with 100 hidden treasures, a multiplayer mode, and a zillion trophies to achieve. The actual gameplay is a mix of stealth and action. It has a similar health system to Infamous, where there’s no defined “meter” you just have red splotches appear on the screen as you take damage (and eventually everything goes slo-mo black-and-white right before you die).
Basically three parts of gameplay: The 3D pixel-hunter parkour segments, where you try to figure out where you can jump and grab onto and which things have edge gravity. The third-person shooter segments, which are the only segments that “Very Easy” mode actually makes easier, as it gives you more health to tank hits. And the stealth segments, which are basically puzzle sections: You have to figure out the right place to move and the right order to kill all of the enemies so that none of them see you. (Though in many cases, you sort-of have the choice of using stealth or fighting. If you fail at stealth, you have to fight!) There are a couple of places where you could argue you’re solving puzzles, but it’s either looking up the right answer in Nate’s Journal (press Select) or just keep climbing things until you find a switch.
The context-sensitive buttons and raw stupidity of your character when it comes to jumping means that attempts to roll out from cover cause you to merrily jump off a train. Also, the distance Drake can jump varies greatly from jump to jump. Fortunately, you have theoretically-infinite “lives” because you restart from the previous checkpoint any time you die, and the checkpoints are rarely that far back. So some sections become an experiment in, “Can I jump this way? Wheeee….thud. Guess not. How about way? Wheeee!”
It’s also amusing that occasionally the answer to a climbing/puzzle segment is shooting something—that, I found, worked remarkably well as a puzzle element.
I suspected I recognized a few of the voices, and the credits proved me right: Nolan North (who I recently saw as Superboy in Young Justice), Claudia Black (Aeryn Sun from Farscape), and Rene Auberjonois (Constable Odo from DS9).
Overall: If I was going to play 3D platformers, this is the style of 3D platformer I’d play. I’m glad it didn’t run longer, because I think it would have gotten old; and I’m glad it wasn’t harder, or I’d have gotten too frustrated to finished it. But as it stood, not bad.
