The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

People are saying that Uncharted 2 is one of the best games of the year.
I’ll be honest. I don’t see it.

I mean, you know, everything that has been said about the storytelling in this game? Completely true. The voice acting is top-notch, the characters actually act in realistic ways, there’s great dialog while you’re playing… you believe these characters. Nathan Drake is a pretty likable guy, though how anti-gun he is at the beginning of the game is pretty humorous seeing how many dudes you kill by the end. But those elements, that people point out as being excellent? Are.

The rest of the game? Not so much.
I feel like this game has a lot in common with Brutal Legend because of that. The presentation of Brutal Legend was top notch, but the gameplay was lackluster. This is the same way.

The shooter segments basically work like Gears of War. You’re hopping behind cover and shooting dudes, only you don’t chainsaw them. You can rush up and do a punch combo to take them out, if you’d prefer. The controls, though, feel really weird. I never felt like I had exact control over the shooting, and it felt like the guys took too many bullets to kill. There were these super-dudes covered in armor with big helmets that you can only kill in an efficient manner by shooting them in the head. They’re really annoying. It’s all passable, but nothing special.
The one interesting decision I think they made is that Nathan can’t carry many bullets. You only have enough bullets to reload your gun twice, at most, at any time. It really makes you scavenge for ammo, which is a different feel than something like Gears. You often had to debate whether to run out of cover to get more ammo or to switch to your pistol to finish people off, which is cool. I did like that.

The real part where the game falls apart for me, and for some reason, this is what people say they like the most about the game, is the platforming. Nathan Drake has the best grip of any person ever, and has to climb every wall forever. You often have to traverse terrain like this, scaling walls, leaping from roof to roof, etc.
There are two main issues with this. One, the game is almost always one or the other. You have to platform for a long period of time, then you have to do nothing but shooting for a long period of time. The game would have been much better had they mixed it up a bit more than they did. They could learn from Arkham Asylum.
The real main issue, and the reason why I got so frustrated that I sent the game back, is that the game gives you very little indication of what you’re supposed to do. You’re given a goal, and no clear way to get there. The locations look fairly realistic, so they’re lacking markers that jump out at you to say “climb here!” The characters in the game, whom you’d think could give you hints with the good dialog, are useless in these sequences. In fact, most of them start with Drake saying “how the hell am I supposed to get up there?” This frustrated me to no end. He’s supposed to tell me so I could do it! There is a hint system to help you go where you need to go, but you can only activate it when the game thinks you’re lost. Making the game think you’re lost basically involves setting the controller down for a few minutes. It’s stupid. Once you find the path, it’s not like there’s any challenge in it, either. You just move on a linear path forward. These sequences really got to me.

On top of it all, the game is kind of stupidly hard. There are five difficulty levels. I picked Easy, one up from the easiest setting, and I died constantly. I picked Easy so grenade launchers wouldn’t cheaply kill me in one hit out of nowhere, thanks. I just wanted to play through the story everyone was saying was so good. But no, they had to make the game stupid hard.

So I sent it back right at the end of the game. I really don’t get Uncharted 2. If you enjoyed it? Wonderful. Good for you. But there was so much bullshit annoyance in the game that I just can’t really recommend it that highly. Obviously it just wasn’t a game for me.