So Uncharted 2. What to make of it. Let’s get the positives out of the way first. The visuals and particularly the environments are very well put together; it’s not simply that they’re lovely, or large and reasonable immersive, but that there’s a clear and strongly stated aesthetic at work. The art direction is superb. This extends to the audio, which is consistently excellent — ambient noises are appropriate to the story, and are well executed. The game itself does have a quality of immersion that I felt missing from the first one; I found myself surrendering to the game world more often than usual.

Even the voice acting was well done; well varied and competently executed. The game is a third person shooter with some agreeably minor platforming elements. That’s fine, as the genre conventions are adhered to none too slavishly. I also found it fairly easy, meaning that there were few punitive dick-waving IN YOUR FACE sequences designed to frustrate the more causal gamer. It also resists the plague of “open-world” non-sense; it is nicely linear and progressive, meaning that you are never at a loss as what to do next. This is becoming increasingly important to me as I realize that the world of games is splitting into those designed as social media — the online-only titles like Halo; those meant to express underlying OCD by introducing unholy quantities of programmatically generated “content” to appeal to the completists and autistics who chase achievements; and those games that have a narrative focus and try to involve the player in a non-coercive guided experience towards a conventional narrative resolution. I throw my lot in largely with the latter, although all games can bring pleasure.

But the unquestioned progress made by Naughty Dog in squeezing high-quality visuals from their engine has released them from the bounds of a healthy, natural humility, and the cutscenes are an unmitigitated horrorshow. You have never been down in the bottom of so uncanny a valley. It is horrible and makes me hate hate hate hate hate all of the characters with a kind of wild Bacchanalian frenzy. I want to see them torn to pieces by a horde of wine-crazed Maenads. I want to see their rubbery greasy faces melted off by the Arc of the motherfucking Covenant. I want in short the ability to play the game completely through in the over-the-shoulder third-person.

The story is also mediocre. You hit some excellent set pieces, and some beautiful environments, but the whole is much less than the sum of the parts. The connections between set pieces is thin, and the overall story is too baroque to not distract. It’s hardly terrible, and I give Naughty Dog considerable props for not resorting to standard video game puerility; think of the movie it could be made into as a bad straight-to-DVD sequel to National Treasure 2.

I would also venture that the control system could stand to learn from Gears Of War, which retains the state of the art in the over-the-shoulder gameplay, and the camera still makes bad decisions, leading to the Long Walk more often than one would like. I may be just being nostalgic, but I seem to remember that this problem has been solved. Why the continued trouble, video game companies?

This is not to run the game down; it’s excellent, if derivative stuff, and I would recommend it as a mild purchase/strong rental. Naughty Dog’s commitment to cinematics is to be admired, if not commended, and currently, there’s nobody doing a better job at aping cinema.

Recommended, but it makes no waves. It is no closer to a new aesthetic than Doom III, albeit much better executed. If you’re looking for a predictable, bland gaming experience that will not even attempt to stretch the boundaries of what video games are, this is as good a choice as you will find.