Blockbuster movies, now on your console

Being a PS3 owner, I should have played the original Uncharted by now. I didn't until yesterday. To me, it didn't look incredibly....different. A few people threw their opinions at me when it first came out, and watching 5-10 minutes of gameplay footage didn't leave me impressed. At the time, it was just another Tomb Raider/Indiana Jones knockoff, albeit a very pretty one.

What spurred on this investigation was the trailer for Uncharted 2. I wasn't interested in the least, but heap enough praise on a game that isn't released yet and you start to bark up Halo territory. When you get near that, it deserved a look to make sure it's worth the hype. Bash me now, but Halo never has been worth the hype. In a nutshell, Halo is the Goldeneye everybody and their mother owns, making it as accessible as possible to the multiplayer crowd. There's nothing particularly wrong with it as an engine, but I happen to find it bland, repetitive, monotonous, and the opposite of compelling. Even the "epic" story seemed watered down and lost somewhere. It's my personal taste, sure, but the whole idea of recharging health and a deathmatch that just isn't very intense to me makes it something I stay away from.

The trailer wowed me, and I was sold on Uncharted 2 being a very impressive piece of eye candy, and it spurned me to plop down some cash for the pre-order. Of course, that included a multiplayer demo, so I finally got some hands-on experience with the engine rather than just looking at it. The demo is a lot of fun, and the modes available are definitely worth wasting some time on. Trouble is, everybody else knew their way around the first game, so I picked that up for some practice.

As far as entertaining, Uncharted definitely ranks up there as a game that's fun to play and the production values are very high. As you've probably heard, this is the equivalent of a good Hollywood blockbuster and one of the few games out there that really convinces you that movies are going to have to directly compete with games someday soon. When I saw StarFox 64 for the first time, I knew that it was entirely possible that with a good engine, it would be far cheaper and maybe even more impressive to just slap a movie module into a game. While we're just dealing with machinima right now, eventually somebody is going to take their scripting/voice skills into an actual game where you do nothing but watch things play out. Instead of building a movie set, the battlefields will play out within your game. It will happen, trust me.

Uncharted has this going for it, which is nice, and thankfully the guys at Naughty Dog created a good cast of characters to go with the story. Yet, my impressions still remain as true as when I first saw the game. True, the game is damned pretty and the engine/controls are amazing, but I felt like something was missing. There just wasn't enough of a game there for me. I do love this game, I really do, and the game isn't necessarily a movie with real-time events scattered throughout. It just feels like it's getting too close to that territory, which is a real shame because they have a very good game system on their hands.

With Uncharted 2, I'm hearing that the game will approach 10 hours of gameplay and contain a good multiplayer inspired a bit by the leveling system Call of Duty uses. I can't really complain about the playtime, because stretching a good narrative out can be suicidal for a developer looking for credit in the story department. I still feel like something is missing, though.

Sitting on that thought, my decision was that Uncharted brought nothing new to the table, and instead brought many good game elements together in a slick package. That's excellent, and I can't argue with the praise. Yet, I've played Tomb Raider before. I've played Indiana Jones. I've played Prince of Persia. Bringing them all together is wonderful, but the impression I got from many of the gamers around me was that the game was not to be missed because it was so unique. It is, and it isn't. It's your standard "go in this direction, look for hidden things to pick up for your collection, watch this scene, and kill the 20 guys trying to jump you when you reach a checkpoint" game. There is nothing new to that formula. It may be one of the best available, but I'm hoping that Naughty Dog figures out what they have on their hands one day. It may not be the movie-like game you're used to, but here's for hoping for an Uncharted game that will allow you to spend more time exploring and traversing some immense locations.

That said, don't think twice about picking it up. It's the same thing you've always done before in your treasure-hunting games, but it's arguably the most entertaining series of the genre out there.

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