Naughty Dog may not be the biggest name in videogames, but anyone who has owned a Sony console should know the name. The Crash Bandicoot and Jak and Daxter trilogies were great. Now Naughty Dog has a new puppy, but this time there aren’t any humanoid animals running about.
Uncharted 2: Among Thieves follows the hero of the first game – Nathan Drake as he searches for the lost fleet of Marco Polo. A cool concept I must admit, especially after the first game revolving around Sir Francis Drake and the lost city of gold, El Dorado. The integration of actual history and fabricated legend is what gives the series its charm. I had the pleasure of testing out the closed beta for Uncharted 2.
I’ll start with the co-op. The levels look great and play well. One of the only complaints I had was the lack of sufficient cover, because in every section of the levels you will be attacked from all sides. This makes teamwork essential though. You need to use all three players taking cover in strategic places so as to cover every side. Boss characters drop down after a long and bloody battle in each section and it takes the combined fire of all three teammates to bring them down. So while the levels are well designed for team play, I can’t say much for the AI.
In each section of the levels there were three spawn points for enemies. Of course because of this, one player on each spawn means the CPUs can’t even touch the ground before they’re dead. The AI seemed inconsistent as well. Sometimes the AI would just stay behind cover, shoot a little, rinse and repeat. Other times it would just crouch and move slowly towards you (which I found to be a little unfair since the player gets no crouch button). All in all, unless wielding a shotgun or a rocket launcher, the AI could simply be walked up to and punched in the face, and it would result in the same effect as hiding behind cover and wasting your ammo. Which actually brings me to the melee aspect of the game.
The melee moves are flashy, but not hard. As long as you hit the Square button before your enemy attempts a melee move, you’ll do one of a variety of cool looking moves. However it always turned into a button mash sequence, so I wondered if there could be a punishing system for not hitting the button at the right time.
The co-op ends up being exceptionally short, and leaves you at a cliffhanger where another boss jumps out. The way you enter new sections irked me a little because you can climb over basically anything during gameplay, but when you need to climb a wall to get to a new section, it’s a scripted sequence where the characters climb on their own and you have to watch. I’m guessing it was the developer’s way of bypassing “load screens”. The mission format was ok, but I honestly wanted to get into some storyline stuff with others online, so I hope that the main game will also include co-op, because otherwise I don’t see many people playing it as the missions are short and the exp payout is a small fraction of what you’d get in competitive play. And that is where this beta really shines.
The two included game modes allow for a lot of fun and enough variety to keep players on the servers for a while. Deathmatch is a classic favorite and can really vary in this game. I played some matches that were fast paced fire fights and others that were slow cover battles. The maps are small enough so that you’ll always have someone to shoot, but offer enough cover that the fights don’t end immediately. Plunder is basically capture the flag, but the flag is treasure, and you can throw it. In fact, throwing the treasure is necessary on one of the maps to get it into your base. The throw system makes the mode a lot more fun, as you can chuck the treasure in the direction of your base if you start to get shot to make it harder for your opponents to move it toward theirs.
I did have some gripes with the game play though. Bullet speed is pretty slow, so many times two players shooting at each other will both die because it takes a while for the bullets to reach their target. Simultaneous deaths occur in melee range a lot too because it takes two attacks to kill, and there seems to be some kind of death lag that allows you one more attack as you are dying.
Long range kills are one of the most difficult things in the game. Bullet damage is so low that you can fire an entire clip at one enemy (accounting for missing a number of times) and still lose the fight. (I know, I was the guy you were emptying clips on) There is a sniper rifle, but with the game lacking a crouch button, you have to go to one of the predetermined sniper spots that the game lays out on the map, which causes you to be a sitting duck, especially for a grenade. Which brings me to my next point.
Grenades will kill in a huge radius. Grenades have a 3 second timer. Grenades can be thrown behind you while you are running around corners. Grenades have the best aiming system I have ever seen for a thrown weapon in a game. Basically, this game IS grenades. You are almost guaranteed one kill per life because of the grenade you spawn with. It is impossible to escape an explosion of that caliber in only three seconds, and I've tried. Rolling and jumping do nothing, if you see a grenade land next to you, you may as well just keep shooting at the one who threw it so you can get some points out of this guaranteed death. My suggestion is adding one second to the timer, even half a second to allow players a sliver of hope to survive these little red monstrosities. (EDIT: It seems that Naughty Dog has released a patch that makes grenade damage work the way it was “supposed to”. From what I can tell, the grenades no longer always kill you outright, but sometimes blow you to the ground, taking away most of your life and leaving you stunned. Regardless of the patch, a grenade still = death).
The booster system reminds me a lot of Call of Duty with its power-ups. This game has only 2 slots, one affecting your ammo, and one affecting your aim. However I noticed that every single person always uses the same setup (understandable since there are only 3-4 boosts in each category). So instead of seeing my killer's setup, I felt instead like I was being given advice: "Keep firing down the irons". This of course being the bonus "Keep firing" for extended clip ammunition and "Down the irons", increased accuracy when aiming with any weapon not classified as a pistol. It seems like the booster system will need more bonuses, perhaps unlocked by leveling up, before it realizes its true potential.
And there were times where there was a weird graphical glitch. I was aiming, walking and shooting, and it seemed like the camera got stuck on some vines or something, because there was this green and yellow coloration at the top of the screen flickering on and off. I’ve gotten up from behind cover to have my screen flicker black as well. And the water seems glitched too, because at times it will glow as if it were light, rather than light is bouncing off it, and standing in a puddle feels more like standing on a puddle. Granted it’s a small detail, but when water is deep enough for jumping in it to make a splash, I figure the soles of my shoes should at least be submerged. I assume this will be fixed in the final release though; it IS just a beta after all.
All in all I really enjoyed the game and I can’t wait to get my hands on the final release at the end of the year. If for nothing else, the multiplayer will be a lot of fun once some new maps get added. Plus, I can’t wait to find out exactly what did happen to Marco Polo out at sea.
Written by: Bramimond
Uncharted 2: Among Thieves follows the hero of the first game – Nathan Drake as he searches for the lost fleet of Marco Polo. A cool concept I must admit, especially after the first game revolving around Sir Francis Drake and the lost city of gold, El Dorado. The integration of actual history and fabricated legend is what gives the series its charm. I had the pleasure of testing out the closed beta for Uncharted 2.
I’ll start with the co-op. The levels look great and play well. One of the only complaints I had was the lack of sufficient cover, because in every section of the levels you will be attacked from all sides. This makes teamwork essential though. You need to use all three players taking cover in strategic places so as to cover every side. Boss characters drop down after a long and bloody battle in each section and it takes the combined fire of all three teammates to bring them down. So while the levels are well designed for team play, I can’t say much for the AI.
In each section of the levels there were three spawn points for enemies. Of course because of this, one player on each spawn means the CPUs can’t even touch the ground before they’re dead. The AI seemed inconsistent as well. Sometimes the AI would just stay behind cover, shoot a little, rinse and repeat. Other times it would just crouch and move slowly towards you (which I found to be a little unfair since the player gets no crouch button). All in all, unless wielding a shotgun or a rocket launcher, the AI could simply be walked up to and punched in the face, and it would result in the same effect as hiding behind cover and wasting your ammo. Which actually brings me to the melee aspect of the game.
The melee moves are flashy, but not hard. As long as you hit the Square button before your enemy attempts a melee move, you’ll do one of a variety of cool looking moves. However it always turned into a button mash sequence, so I wondered if there could be a punishing system for not hitting the button at the right time.
The co-op ends up being exceptionally short, and leaves you at a cliffhanger where another boss jumps out. The way you enter new sections irked me a little because you can climb over basically anything during gameplay, but when you need to climb a wall to get to a new section, it’s a scripted sequence where the characters climb on their own and you have to watch. I’m guessing it was the developer’s way of bypassing “load screens”. The mission format was ok, but I honestly wanted to get into some storyline stuff with others online, so I hope that the main game will also include co-op, because otherwise I don’t see many people playing it as the missions are short and the exp payout is a small fraction of what you’d get in competitive play. And that is where this beta really shines.
The two included game modes allow for a lot of fun and enough variety to keep players on the servers for a while. Deathmatch is a classic favorite and can really vary in this game. I played some matches that were fast paced fire fights and others that were slow cover battles. The maps are small enough so that you’ll always have someone to shoot, but offer enough cover that the fights don’t end immediately. Plunder is basically capture the flag, but the flag is treasure, and you can throw it. In fact, throwing the treasure is necessary on one of the maps to get it into your base. The throw system makes the mode a lot more fun, as you can chuck the treasure in the direction of your base if you start to get shot to make it harder for your opponents to move it toward theirs.
I did have some gripes with the game play though. Bullet speed is pretty slow, so many times two players shooting at each other will both die because it takes a while for the bullets to reach their target. Simultaneous deaths occur in melee range a lot too because it takes two attacks to kill, and there seems to be some kind of death lag that allows you one more attack as you are dying.
Long range kills are one of the most difficult things in the game. Bullet damage is so low that you can fire an entire clip at one enemy (accounting for missing a number of times) and still lose the fight. (I know, I was the guy you were emptying clips on) There is a sniper rifle, but with the game lacking a crouch button, you have to go to one of the predetermined sniper spots that the game lays out on the map, which causes you to be a sitting duck, especially for a grenade. Which brings me to my next point.
Grenades will kill in a huge radius. Grenades have a 3 second timer. Grenades can be thrown behind you while you are running around corners. Grenades have the best aiming system I have ever seen for a thrown weapon in a game. Basically, this game IS grenades. You are almost guaranteed one kill per life because of the grenade you spawn with. It is impossible to escape an explosion of that caliber in only three seconds, and I've tried. Rolling and jumping do nothing, if you see a grenade land next to you, you may as well just keep shooting at the one who threw it so you can get some points out of this guaranteed death. My suggestion is adding one second to the timer, even half a second to allow players a sliver of hope to survive these little red monstrosities. (EDIT: It seems that Naughty Dog has released a patch that makes grenade damage work the way it was “supposed to”. From what I can tell, the grenades no longer always kill you outright, but sometimes blow you to the ground, taking away most of your life and leaving you stunned. Regardless of the patch, a grenade still = death).
The booster system reminds me a lot of Call of Duty with its power-ups. This game has only 2 slots, one affecting your ammo, and one affecting your aim. However I noticed that every single person always uses the same setup (understandable since there are only 3-4 boosts in each category). So instead of seeing my killer's setup, I felt instead like I was being given advice: "Keep firing down the irons". This of course being the bonus "Keep firing" for extended clip ammunition and "Down the irons", increased accuracy when aiming with any weapon not classified as a pistol. It seems like the booster system will need more bonuses, perhaps unlocked by leveling up, before it realizes its true potential.
And there were times where there was a weird graphical glitch. I was aiming, walking and shooting, and it seemed like the camera got stuck on some vines or something, because there was this green and yellow coloration at the top of the screen flickering on and off. I’ve gotten up from behind cover to have my screen flicker black as well. And the water seems glitched too, because at times it will glow as if it were light, rather than light is bouncing off it, and standing in a puddle feels more like standing on a puddle. Granted it’s a small detail, but when water is deep enough for jumping in it to make a splash, I figure the soles of my shoes should at least be submerged. I assume this will be fixed in the final release though; it IS just a beta after all.
All in all I really enjoyed the game and I can’t wait to get my hands on the final release at the end of the year. If for nothing else, the multiplayer will be a lot of fun once some new maps get added. Plus, I can’t wait to find out exactly what did happen to Marco Polo out at sea.
Written by: Bramimond
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