Review: Uncharted 2: Among Thieves

UNCHARTED 2: AMONG THIEVES
PlayStation 3R
Rating: * * * * *

Sony's unbelievably sweet blockbuster follow-up to Uncharted: Drake's Fortune takes what was an excellent third-person adventure and pushes it to a whole new level. It leaves both Tomb Raider and any Indiana Jones movies in the dust for thrilling artefact-chasing action, and adds frenetic firefights that manage to outstrip many shooters. The first few minutes show just how seriously the team at Naughty Dog take the thrill factor - the early "tutorial" level sees Nathan Drake trying to escape a burning train carriage hanging off a cliff. And the action barely pauses throughout.

Drake and Elena have parted company, and he hooks up with a renegade fortune hunter called Flynn and Antipodean strumpet Chloe to pick up Marco Polo's trail to find the legendary Chintimani Stone and, eventually, Shangri La. The plot twists and turns through numerous cinematic cut scenes, which generally meld seamlessly into the often-challenging gameplay.

A Hollywood-shaming script and quality voice acting are what makes the game - it's riveting and doesn't let up through the many hours of gameplay. A whopping 26 levels draw in the player with a combination of tricky puzzles - keep an eye out for the complex hunt for a "door" in a Nepal temple.

But as you're double-crossed by those closest and hunted by a crazy megalomaniac and his grenade launcher-toting, helicopter gunship-flying minions, it becomes progressively harder to put down the controller.

And if it's pretty graphics you're after, Uncharted 2 foots the bill in spades. One particular scene, from the top of a hotel in a hidden Himalayan city shows just how much grunt lives in the PS3's processor - with a fully living and breathing city rendered in faultless detail below. It's not running at full-noise 1080, but even at 720p its high-definition graphics run with fierce intensity and solid frame-rates.

It's hard to fault a game as well put together as this one - the only real glitches are those generally associated with third-person gameplay. That is, controls not quite putting Drake where you're trying to send him, which, when you're jumping and climbing around cliff faces or creeping along ledges high above the ground, can see Drake plummeting to his doom.

Verdict: A must-have game for any PS3 owner - unless you suffer from a heart condition. Relentless action sequences, brilliant cut-scenes, top graphic quality and kick-ass gameplay. It blurs the line between game and movie and delivers absolutely everything you could want in a third-person shooter/adventure - hard to top.