Last night Chris and I headed out to the beautiful Muvico theater in Rosemont, IL JUST outside of Chicago to get an advance look at Uncharted 2: Among Thieves and to play in a Multiplayer tournament for the game. For the first hour we hung out in the “digital den” full of tables, comfy couches and about 8 TVs all set up with PS3s. Five of the TVs were running the single player campaign, and three of them were displaying various trailers and cinematics from the game. First thing you notice is that the game is very pretty. Everything looks incredible, the backgrounds look like paintings, and the character models are near perfect. I’ve seen footage of the game on the Internets, but that doesn’t do the game justice at all. You have to see this game in 720p, it’s incredible.
Now, part of the reason I went was because I was not a fan of the mechanics of the game. I thought shooting was bad, fist fights didn’t feel right, Nathan controlled like a truck, and it took wayyyy too many bullets to take down an enemy. Well unfortunately I was noticing some of the same things here. They seem to have tried to cover up the problem of enemies taking too many bullets by giving all the enemies bulletproof vests. Granted, they did seem to go down a little easier, but not every time. It seemed weird and random. One enemy would get shot by a pistol and go down, and the next would take a grenade and two full machine gun clips before dying. We would see this happen a number of times through the night.
Once the lounge portion of the evening was over we were moved into one of the theaters where they had 10 TVs set up at the front for the tournament, and commercials for the PS3 played on the big screen. Now part of the reason why this theater was chosen for this event was because it has a Sony 4K Digital Projector, which is supposed to look stunning. Unfortunately the night before a power surge killed the video card in it, and we were going to have to watch the game be played on a standard digital projector. Regardless the game still looked incredible on the big screen. It truly is a cinematic experience.
We were shown 4 sections from the single player campaign. The first was a gun heavy section through the Himalayan mountains, and I kept watching, waiting to see how many bullets it would take to kill enemies. Once again it seemed random, but wasn’t nearly as bad as what I had seen on some of the TVs in the lounge. We also saw a platform heavy level that showed Nathan navigating the inside of a cavernous chamber. Like he was inside a mountain. An AI friend helped him pull some switches and move some levers, it seemed like it would have made for great co-op, but for story reasons co-op is a separate experience. We then saw the much talked about “train sequence” where Mr. Drake has to navigate inside, around, and on top of a moving train, that culminates in a fight with a helicopter. Finally, we were shown a story heavy escort mission, I wont ruin too much, but you have to escort a character out of harm’s way, while staying out of harm’s way. Through the whole escort, buildings are crumbling, you’re being shot at, and there just tons of moving pieces. It looks like something out of a 200 million dollar action movie. It’s quite a spectacle.
Then it was tournament time, the first round was Team Deathmatch, and I couldn’t wait to get my hands on the controller. When it was my turn, I found that the characters still moved awkwardly, and I’m still not a fan of the Dual Shock 3. The control scheme makes you contort your fingers in weird ways just to throw a grenade while aiming. I almost killed a team mate trying to lob a grenade. The game still looks really good in multiplayer. They tried to tell us that it looks just as good as single player, but honestly it’s not as good. Still very nice though, it definitely has the feel of Uncharted. So of course one of my gripes is that it takes, a ton of ammo to kill another player, and I felt that for team deathmatch, a 10 second respawn timer is a little too long, but in the end it’s solid deathmatch. Unfortunately my team lost in the 1st round and I had to sit by while I watched the tournament go on, but it was still interesting to see a video game tournament in a movie theater. Some of these people must have been playing the Multiplayer demo morning, noon, and night, cause they were really good. Something that sort of differentiates Uncharted Multiplayer from other games is the ability to climb. A lot of the areas in the game are climbable and make for good sniping spots, or just places to hide. The really good players knew all these spots.
Uncharted 2′s multiplayer has an XP system of sorts. In true Uncharted fashion you earn money for kills, and that translates to XP. You can then unlock new skins for your character and “boosters” which are a lot like Call of Duty’s perks. It’s got a good system and I’m under the impression that Naughty Dog is going to support it as much as humanely possible, but I just can’t see it competing with Modern Warfare 2, or even Killzone 2 for that matter. I think it would be fun, but only with a group of friends and I can’t see my friends making a habit out of playing Uncharted 2′s multiplayer. Time will tell on what kind of community springs up around Uncharted 2.
My final thoughts are this, if you own a Playstation 3, you owe it to yourself to check it out. Even if like me, you didn’t enjoy the first game thoroughly. The graphical boost to the game is beyond impressive, and we hear it all the time, games trying to be more like movies. Well, Uncharted 2 succeeds at that by a large margin. I can’t speak for the entirety of the game yet, so I’m not going to make a final judgment on if it’s a system seller, or if it needs to be in your collection, but from what I have seen so far this is a very refined product from a very hard working team. Let’s hope the entire game is as stellar as the things I have seen so far.