Ok, so I’m less than 10 seconds in and the game has already failed, contemptibly — I can’t skip the asinine frame story cut-scenes. Holy Christ, people, your writing is terrible, your plotting is terrible, and the whole idea is sub-Mario Brothers in terms of narrative. Can’t I just get on to the running through Florence stabbing dudes in the face?

Also, terrible uncanny valley problems; bad movement animations, and I’m still in fucking Canada. People, I bought this game because it’s not a standard stupid third-person solipsistic One Lone Twenty Year Old Saves Creation, but rather because I can climb around the buildings of a neurotically reproduced sixteenth century Italy. The longer you subject me to the former before I get the latter the MORE I HATE YOU.

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.

OK, so it gets pretty bad. Once you knuckle down and get into the meat of the game, the main play mechanic is a series of encounters structured as RTS-lite battles. The framing is clever, of course — this is one of the cleverest games I’ve played in a while — but the implementation of the RTS elements is pissweak.

You have a few units, a unit cap, a resource to be harvested, and waves of enemies. The problems are legion; unit-level command controls are bad (expected on a console controller); the units are messy — when should I use roadies? when should I use headbangers?; there’s some conceptual difficulty with your avatar — should I fly around the battlefield directing traffic? Or land and kick ass? Neither is particularly well executed, and what you don’t have that any sort of RTS game requires is a view of the entire battle theater. This decision, to base the game narrative in terms of this poor play mechanic is really a serious weakness — there’s nowhere to go with it; you stomp from one stage to the next, meeting these dumbass encounters with controller-mashing, because there’s no depth to the play.

Too! The side missions are really not missions; there’s a sit in a bucket and shoot at things one; a chase down overworld creatures one; an ambush opposition metalheads one. They’re clearly throw-ins to pad completion length, and it wouldn’t surprise me if they were programmatically generated for all the thought that’s gone into them.

So what’s good about it? There’s surprising depth to the story, given that it reads like a stoner metalhead just pulled his most ridiculous albums off the shelf and arranged them by theme. As I said before, there’s a respect for the source material that I think is rare — I may occasionally listen to Hydra Head pseudo-metal but I have a strong core belief in the redemptive silliness of “The Thing That Should Not Be“, and the last metal show I was at was The Haunted. In other words, I may not be a lifestyle metallist, but I’m no Ritual Roasters-style bike messenger poser, neither.

The voice acting is very good; it feels much more like movie dialog, with characters interacting in a way that seems much more like actual dialog than the typical disconnected stream of words you get in video games.

Overall, I’d back off a purchase recommendation. I haven’t had any real technical issues with it yet, and the aesthetic is as good as any I’ve seen in a game this year. If you can just sort of button-mash through the encounters, you’ll see and hear a lot of cool stuff. Perhaps this is the very definition of a rental title, then.

So far, it’s great; for all the humor, they’re taking the goofy metal aesthetic at face value — sure, it’s dumb, but it’s also epic, a combination well understood by c.f. Mastodon, or Judas Priest; but one that leaves the Mission hipster ironist largely unmanned, without a wink-wink nudge-nudge surface to grasp on and sneer off of.

The game mechanic is a little USPS for my tastes, with mild pursuit of R. Jack Black actually lends some character to the big budget voice acting, which is rare and welcome. The overworld is a bit dry. Haven’t found many “side quests” yet. Still largely unconvinced by the genre of “open world” games, which worlds tend to be cramped small and boring. More direction in a better crafted experiential environment, please (see, Mass Effect vs. Bioshock, for an example.)

Overall, though, it’s pretty enjoyable in the three or so hours I’ve farted around. Almost no penalty for dying, which is good because the car controls are pretty much just pants.

More later, but it’s a welcome surprise.