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Writer's pictureArielle Danan

An overhyped Experience: Uncharted 2 Review

Intro: Uncharted 2 is a third person action-adventure game that continues the journey of Nathan Drake. This second installment brings our beloved sassy hero to new places, new lovers and new self-realizations. This game was a constant battle between good dialogue and attempts at a story and not enough to keep me interested. The Uncharted series does one thing really well and that is the character dialogue and certain scenic settings. So, was this actually a good game, or an overhyped mess that didn’t k now its end goal? An Adventure Of A Lifetime: Much like Uncharted, the second game is filled with action, comedy and bad mechanics. Uncharted 2 takes what was in the first game and draws more inspiration from the sassy sarcastic adventurer trope in the wrong place at the wrong time and expands on it. The game starts off with more questions than I’d like in a game while dangling off a cliff in a broken train. As the player my brain is going a million miles a minute asking “what did Nathan do this time?” As Nathan climbs back up the train and on to more safe grounds a cut scene slowly fades in where a hot woman with a beer in her hands and lust in her eye's approaches Nathan. What a way to start a game and confuse the hell out of a player. Memory Loss: It's really interesting how this game was done story wise. There were ups and downs and story motifs that made no sense when looked at objectively, the game just felt like it was going from one thing to another just to keep the player engaged. The monsters when I first saw them felt haphazardly place, and when you know about their origin (basically at the end of the game) it feels anticlimactic and much like the first game in how the story was approached. Nathan goes through hell in a basket and then gets knocked out only to be back where we started, at the train. I don’t mind that we had to go through that section again, but it just felt very much like Naughty Dog needed some filler content for the game, so the added the same thing all over again. We were back where we started, with a headache and possible memory loss. Tree of Life: Now if I thought things couldn’t get weirder, I was wrong. Our main villain of the game Lazarević, is looking for immortality (as all evil men do) and looks to the tree of life to drink its sweet nectar and become immortal. This part of the game is referencing the book of genesis and does it quite poorly, but I don’t expect a game to really deep dive into theology and do it correctly. “The tree of knowledge, connecting to heaven and the underworld, and the tree of life, connecting all forms of creation, are both forms of the world tree or cosmic tree, and are portrayed in various religions and philosophies as the same tree,” I feel Naughty Dog could have gone more in depth into the mythology and done a whole section on being in the underworld or just added more depth overall to the game. But instead, the utilization of the Tree of Life as a motif is poorly done and only used as a way to forward the plot, nothing more. Solid, but Also a Mess: While this game had some really solid point in terms of the characters, their dialogue and how certain areas of the map looked it was fairly overhyped and didn’t deliver on what everyone had told me that it would. The characters make this game what it is and bring life to a game that would have been otherwise drab and lackluster. Nathan brought out the charm and applied it to a world in desperate need of color.



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