I have an interesting relationship with the Uncharted franchise. My first real glimpse of it was the E3 presentation of Uncharted 2, whereupon after watching the first few seconds of that agonizingly pretty texture-orgy, I became an instant fanboy, developed a deviant texture fetish, and brought up Amazon.co.uk to buy the first game and pre-order the second. The first game arrived a few days later, and a few sleepless days after that I'd completed it. In retrospective: The water was by far the most impressive part of the game. This may sound like an indication that the gameplay was not up to par, or that it couldn't live up to the incredible standards set by the legs-crossingingly good texture quality, but it honestly isn't. The water really was that good. I would happily have spent most of the game just dipping Drake in and out of that waterfall at the start of the game, admiring (in a very hetero way) the incredible effects of water on Drake's trousers, and not even encountering a single enemy goon, if it weren't for the drive to get all the necessary back-story before I picked up the sequel. The gameplay had some problems, I guess; for the large part it just seemed to jump from one pitched gunfight to another, and I would have much preferred to spend more time jumping around the beautiful scenery solving puzzles. But when you look that good, you don't have to do anything. So I should just be thankful it gave me gameplay at all. The writing was surprisingly good, and the characters were very well defined; which is doubly impressive when you consider that Naughty Dog have been predominantly making wise-cracking cartoon animals for the bulk of their career. Overall impression: Very pretty, I think there was some gamplay somewhere but I wasn't really paying attention. Water effects, water effects, water effects.
After getting the first Uncharted out of the way, I was free to put all of my attention into the upcoming Uncharted 2. From that point on, my life increasingly revolved around my QJ RSS feed, and the twitter feeds for the Naughty Dog dev team. If there was a new screenshot, hint at a release date, story-leak, or a review; I would be the first one on it. So when the mulitplayer Beta was finally released to the public on the Playstation Store; I was one of the first 1000 people online. Obvious downside of this being that I had to wait a few hours for there to be enough people online to actually get a game on the fucking thing; and I finally ended up just going back to bed when I realized most people have jobs or school, and, unlike me, aren't going to put all of that off just to Beta test an upcoming game. Fucking casual gamers.
So the multiplayer works thusly: There are two teams; the goodies and the baddies. The goodie team is home to all of our much loved, white-as-snow Uncharted 1 characters, with some new ones from the Uncharted 2 story: An Australian woman with a big arse, and a foreign looking man, who naturally, will turn out to be an enemy spy. The baddie team is home to a bunch of androgynous, balaclava'd terrorists. Forced to wear the balaclavas in order to hide that their faces aren't white. A fact that would immediately out them as terrorists, drug dealers and hired guns in the Uncharted universe.
The basic idea then, is that you will have a team of five generic, faceless terrorists; pitted against all of our familiar Uncharted heroes. Unfortunately this doesn't quite work out, as the game lets you pick which one of the heroes you want to fight as. So almost invariably, the game works out as five generic, faceless terrorists pitted against five identical, big-arsed Australian women. People learn not to pick the foreign looking man after the first ten accidental team-kills.
Shall I talk about the actual game now? Yes, I might as well. I was relieved to discover that the gameplay works very well with essentially no departures from the original concept. A big worry of mine was that it would end up like Metal Gear Online: Trying to accommodate a unique and complex single player game engine into a multiplayer environment, and ending up with a barely functional lag festival, and a sneaking engine that only works against the terminally short-sighted computer-operated guardsmen. But thankfully no. The gameplay is largely stealth-based, and works by zipping from cover to cover, either trying to push your way behind enemy lines, or lying in wait for any enemy combatants that might wander by your sandbag, so you can then jump up and riddle them with bullets. The maps do provide a very wide range of gameplay options. You can stick to the sandbags and pillars, or you can climb up a house and spend the game leaping from building to building. The sheer amount of creative options you can take in a firefight, makes parts of this game feel more like art than a simple run and gun affair.
I should probably mention the negative points. They certainly do stand out, but only in the way that a small imperfection would stand out on an otherwise perfect emerald. There are a few wall press issues, where your character might refuse to push himself up against a perfectly good pillar. The grenades are an absolute son of a *****: One second detonation, and perfect auto aim turns grenades into a get-out-of-gunfight-free card, and you might catch the enemy players repeating Drake's quips in Drakes voice.
The multiplayer appears to be built as a legitimate half of the game, rather than something they tacked on to increase the game length. There is a Call Of Duty style levelling and perk system. With some of the perks taken straight out of Call of Duty, name and all. So if you were relying on a long-lasting multiplayer experience for this game to be worth its buck, you shouldn't be disappointed. I certainly wasn't. Which is pretty incredible, considering how badly I bought into the hype.
After getting the first Uncharted out of the way, I was free to put all of my attention into the upcoming Uncharted 2. From that point on, my life increasingly revolved around my QJ RSS feed, and the twitter feeds for the Naughty Dog dev team. If there was a new screenshot, hint at a release date, story-leak, or a review; I would be the first one on it. So when the mulitplayer Beta was finally released to the public on the Playstation Store; I was one of the first 1000 people online. Obvious downside of this being that I had to wait a few hours for there to be enough people online to actually get a game on the fucking thing; and I finally ended up just going back to bed when I realized most people have jobs or school, and, unlike me, aren't going to put all of that off just to Beta test an upcoming game. Fucking casual gamers.
So the multiplayer works thusly: There are two teams; the goodies and the baddies. The goodie team is home to all of our much loved, white-as-snow Uncharted 1 characters, with some new ones from the Uncharted 2 story: An Australian woman with a big arse, and a foreign looking man, who naturally, will turn out to be an enemy spy. The baddie team is home to a bunch of androgynous, balaclava'd terrorists. Forced to wear the balaclavas in order to hide that their faces aren't white. A fact that would immediately out them as terrorists, drug dealers and hired guns in the Uncharted universe.
The basic idea then, is that you will have a team of five generic, faceless terrorists; pitted against all of our familiar Uncharted heroes. Unfortunately this doesn't quite work out, as the game lets you pick which one of the heroes you want to fight as. So almost invariably, the game works out as five generic, faceless terrorists pitted against five identical, big-arsed Australian women. People learn not to pick the foreign looking man after the first ten accidental team-kills.
Shall I talk about the actual game now? Yes, I might as well. I was relieved to discover that the gameplay works very well with essentially no departures from the original concept. A big worry of mine was that it would end up like Metal Gear Online: Trying to accommodate a unique and complex single player game engine into a multiplayer environment, and ending up with a barely functional lag festival, and a sneaking engine that only works against the terminally short-sighted computer-operated guardsmen. But thankfully no. The gameplay is largely stealth-based, and works by zipping from cover to cover, either trying to push your way behind enemy lines, or lying in wait for any enemy combatants that might wander by your sandbag, so you can then jump up and riddle them with bullets. The maps do provide a very wide range of gameplay options. You can stick to the sandbags and pillars, or you can climb up a house and spend the game leaping from building to building. The sheer amount of creative options you can take in a firefight, makes parts of this game feel more like art than a simple run and gun affair.
I should probably mention the negative points. They certainly do stand out, but only in the way that a small imperfection would stand out on an otherwise perfect emerald. There are a few wall press issues, where your character might refuse to push himself up against a perfectly good pillar. The grenades are an absolute son of a *****: One second detonation, and perfect auto aim turns grenades into a get-out-of-gunfight-free card, and you might catch the enemy players repeating Drake's quips in Drakes voice.
The multiplayer appears to be built as a legitimate half of the game, rather than something they tacked on to increase the game length. There is a Call Of Duty style levelling and perk system. With some of the perks taken straight out of Call of Duty, name and all. So if you were relying on a long-lasting multiplayer experience for this game to be worth its buck, you shouldn't be disappointed. I certainly wasn't. Which is pretty incredible, considering how badly I bought into the hype.
