The original Uncharted, Drakes Fortune was released in 2007 and is still widely touted as one of the best games ever to grace the PS3. As I'm sure you know Among Thieves is the second highest rated current gen game, with a metacritic score hovering between 96 and 97/100. But I can't see what all the fuss is about.
Uncharted does what almost all sequels aim to do, build on the originals game play, and make everything bigger, prettier and better. With an extended single player campaign and an all new multiplayer component, the game is certainly bigger than the original. The graphics are also much improved, and while they still don't match Crysis', they are at least only one generation behind, something that very few other games can boast about.
At the very start of the game, you awake to find yourself bloody and bruised, sitting in a train carriage that is dangerously teetering on the edge of a cliff. The carriage slips, and the whole thing threatens to go off the edge. The first thing you get to do is climb up the carriage and onto the cliff edge to safety. Everything about the game has been scripted so precisely it’s not funny. The production quality is off the scale in terms of video games, and it makes some inroads on many popular movies efforts.
The movement is clunky and slow during this first level, which is fair enough given the huge wounds Drake has sustained. After getting out of the carriage, there a couple of cut scenes that do a good but job of backgrounding the game, but still leave a huge gaping whole between the end of Drake's Fortune and the beginning of Among Thieves. Most people don't seem to mind this, but it would have been nice to know at least something of what happened to the characters in between games.
In one of the opening cut scenes, you meet a new character, Chloe, an attractive girl (women if you'd prefer) voiced by Claudia Black, an excellent actress in my opinion.
The game then does the old fashioned trick of time warping the player back a few months, where you are working with Flynn and Chloe, voiced by the excellent Claudia Black, on a stealth mission with the goal to steeling an antique object that apparently has links with Marco Polo, the famous explorer.
The volume of cut scenes towards the beginning of the game was over the top. During the first hour there was probably more movie time than play time. It balances out well after that though, with far more game play than cut scenes overall as you fight and think your way to the famed but illusive Chintamani Stone.
For the whole game you are basically in a race against time, fighting to stay ahead of your opponent of sorts, who is also after the stone and Marco Polo's lost treasures. Drake is again voiced by the excellent Nolan North. Although I thought he did a better job with Prince of Persia than Among Thieves, his voice work is tremendous as ever, and he certainly deserves some sort of award for his efforts.
As with Prince of Persia, there is a fair bit of banter between characters, generally it’s pretty humorous, but the sexual innuendo tends to go over the top. Sure you are fighting alongside two gorgeous women for most of the game, but if they aren't going to get their kit off at some point in the game, then cut building poor Nathan (and me) up for it.
Anyway, back to the story. Unlike the first game, in Among Thieves you see yourself travelling all over the world in your quest for the stone, with locations varying greatly. Many of the locations that you play through in the front half of the game feel and look recycled from Drake's, but the vary wildly after that. All environments are well detailed and even I can’t help but think how good a job Naughty Dog has done with the game engine.
At level fifteen though, the game hits absolute rock bottom. It actually recycles itself, one of the worst possible things a game can ever do in my books. The very first part of the game, which wasn’t that fun the first time, is thrust upon you once more. They must have realised some bits sucked though because they skipped through them this time. I have no idea what ND was thinking, but I was left thinking ‘what was that about’ for a while, and it made me put down the controller for a while I was so appalled.
Thankfully it's not all bad though. The main train sequence is fairly epic, and thankfully lasts for a fairly long time. You fight both in and on the train, indeed you climb all over it. But to keep you on your toes, there are various signs and railway objects that you must avoid while climbing all over the train, not to mention a shed load of enemies to either take out or avoid (usually the former). You'll fight both inside and out, and the enemies also must avoid the barriers that fly past and above the train at times. Or do they? Well I have to say the first enemy that didn't got absolutely cleaned up. But after that, two enemies that should have suffered the same fate passed straight through the barriers, another ‘what is going on here’ moment.
For the most part the graphics are absolutely the best on the PS3, and it should go without saying, far better than anything on the 360. But some textures leave you wondering, and the tiled rooftops later on in the game are seriously sharp looking. There are quite a few low-poly objects which are a disappointment given how good the majority of them are. Surely it would have been better to make everything look good even if it comes at the expense of making some of the excellent textures slightly lower res? But anyway, the art direction is fairly impressive, most of the game is very colourful and well presented, this is undeniable and a welcome change from the wealth of dark and boring shooters on the market today.
Something else that is undeniable is how linear the game is. For most things you have only one way to get from A to B. You do get the option to fight your own fight though when it comes to combat. Gunfights may be pretty linear in actual fact, but they don't really feel like they are. The AI is a worry though. They might duck into cover, but it’s not like they are overly worried about dying. They also don't tend to spot you until you’re at their feet. You can be only 30 meters away from an enemy directly in its field of vision and it often won’t even notice you. Pulling of stealth moves certainly isn't a difficult task thanks to the seemingly deliberately dumb AI.
Hand-to-hand combat has been improved substantially, but its way too easy, even on the hard difficulty setting (I haven't tried crushing yet). Just spam square until you either kill the guy or he goes on the attack himself, at which point a big triangle comes up on the screen telling you to react. The problem is, you get what seems like about two seconds to react, which makes early on while players are still learning, but towards the middle of the game you should have your act together enough to react with speed and precision. The cover system is nice and responsive, and generally is easy to get right. There have been some complaints about it, but to be honest I can’t find a lot wrong with it.
Again, the puzzles aren't that hard to complete, although it can be hard to find what you are looking for in Drake's notebook. Oddly, given that it is a major part of the game, the notebook suffered from huge texture problems for me, where the pages would take a few seconds to come into any sort of focus. The puzzles are simple, but remain fun right through to the end. Since Drake's Fortune, ND has learnt to scatter miny puzzles throughout the game, with a few, more challenging ones in places. It means you are never kept away from the action for too long and sometimes the puzzling is somewhat integrated into combat situations.
One thing they haven't learnt though is that fighting wave after wave of more or less the same enemies gets seriously boring after a while, and they have surely only done it to bump up play time, which for me clocked in at a fair bit lower than what some people have touted. The general opinion is that it is an 11-12 hour game on Normal, but it took me only 10 hours 28 minutes to finish, and about half an hour of that was on the last boss.
It seems that ND has learnt very little from their previous games actually. Like with Drakes Fortune, as the game goes on, enemies start taking way too many hits to take down. The final boss battle isn't as linear as last time, but it is still just as cheap. Indeed, it takes both to long for you to kill him, and not long enough for him to kill you.
Before I get onto the multiplayer, there are some other things I should mention. The game is quite buggy, which makes me wonder how the bulk of reviewers came to the conclusion that it is extremely polished. For example, the train incident I mentioned earlier. Chloe also went straight through a few doors, the controls often simply refuse to do as they are told during one spawn, but comply the next time. Other issues include the horrendous lip sinking in some of the cut scenes (majority have it down to a fine art but some are shockingly bad) and during game play, and the fact that characters hands/feet etc often majorly ‘clip’ through objects, meaning they pass straight through them as if the were holographic. There are plenty of other faults, including one that allowed me to pass behind a staircase by going straight through a rock. They aren’t hard to find, and you will encounter a few along the way.
Naughty Dog also lied when they said that I would never see a loading screen, and I am able to report that at one stage the loading screen appeared for 5 seconds during a respawn. Also, they may well have filled a Blu-ray disc, but only because the cut scenes are pre-rendered. The fact that they are pre-rendered actually hurts the game in my eyes. For example, if you are carrying a rocket launcher on your back and say, a 9MM pistol in your hand and the game goes to a cut scene, you almost certainly won't be carrying that equipment in the movie, because it is pre rendered. Also, if you have a wet shirt and then go into a cut scene, it will be instantly dried with some ND magic.
And that leads me onto the animation system. It is very good at most things, but comes up short in a few areas. For example, whether or not you jump to a ledge that is 1 meter away, or 3 meters away, it uses the same animation, but slows down your horizontal movement, which is disappointing. Each individual animation itself is generally of exceptional quality; I would go as far to say the outright best ever. But transitioning between animations is often unbelievably clunky, something that no one else has picked up on apparently.
Now to the multiplayer component, which is substantial, especially given that one was completely absent before now in the series. There are a couple of different modes plus two different forms of Co-op. They’re all pretty boring though, which mostly comes down to the fact that you can only have 10 people per game, and even then, not all modes support this. Graphics take a substantial hit in online mode, but remain fairly impressive, though not stunning.
In co-op even when hosting the game I had huge problems with lag, where the AI would freeze for quite some time, and the game would not allow me to kill enemies or pick up ammo, although I could still run around. If you must go online then the Co-op is the most fun of the online modes. However, I’d give even it a miss completely if you have other games that you want to play.
In general, I am rather disappointed with Among Thieves. The graphics are certainly the most impressive part of the game, along with the level of production that has gone into the game. But I really failed to get into this game. It just wasn’t fun, the game play isn’t particularly engaging, and the cut scenes are too plentiful and too long at times. The story is told in great depth, but it isn’t revolutionary as people have often stated of the game. It still uses the age old gaming method of telling the story with heavy use of cut scenes, virtually no story is told during actual game play. The online largely isn’t worth the effort, although it is fairly easy to own the veritable smorgasbord of noobs who play the game.
