I think I may very well be the only man alive that does not like the Uncharted games. It is a lonely feeling, made all the more bitter by the reactions I get when I say I don't care for them, and by the $55 I spent on Uncharted 2. Alas, the praise for the games was so universal that I bought 2 just as I was about to start playing 1, so that I could experience them back to back. And I think I actually like the sequel less than the original, which even puts me in the minority when talking about the games relative to each other.

A significant portion of my hate stems purely from personal taste. This portion has to do with combat, which is a significant chunk of the game. I do not care for first person shooters, nor do I care for their third person counterparts which are almost entirely like first person games. When you aim, the character is mostly removed from the screen, rendering the game virtually first person. I don't like cover mechanics anymore than I like the shooting mechanics. I never bothered to play Gears of War because I didn't have to to know that I would not care for it. I could try and explain my dislike for such gameplay elements, but it really doesn't matter - I hate (pseudo) first person shooters.

Thus, when I'm forced into a firefight by Uncharted and have to spend minutes crouched behind cover, occasionally peeking out to fire off a few shots and take down a few enemies, I get pretty annoyed. I just don't care for it. As a side note, I found that this seemed directly contradictory to my absolutely love of Resident Evil 4 & 5. Thankfully the original Uncharted sort of came to the rescue on that one by sending me against enemies that didn't fire back (melee only), negating the need for cover and removing a large portion of my ire. Mowing down zombies that cannot fire back is far, far more fun than playing duck-and-cover with a squad of similarly-armed commandos. Uncharted taught me this.

I hated combat so much, in fact, that I very nearly didn't finish the first game because of it. I dropped the difficulty to Easy within a few hours of starting the game, knowing that I wouldn't make it through it otherwise. Even on Easy I nearly didn't beat the last chapter, which is a rather infuriating firefight featuring an invincible boss who can instant-kill you. Oh, the curse words I screamed during that sequence. Actually, I let the game play itself for ten or fifteen minutes on that chapter as I prepared dinner one night, happily listening to the sounds of Nathan Drake getting shot down again and again and again, sad death-scene music sound utterly joyful to my frustrated ears.

Thankfully, Uncharted 2 introduces the Very Easy difficulty setting, which I gratefully switched to almost immediately. It's one of the areas of definite improvement from first to sequel, as it makes you all but invincible, which allowed me to go through the game punching commandos to death. I would have vastly preferred a button that immediately killed all enemies, but at least it's something of a compromise. Very Easy also reveals hints more quickly, which is just as welcome as being nigh invincible, and brings me to the other things I hate: the games' platforming. Combat is one half of the gameplay, which I hate, and platforming is the other half, which I think is poorly executed and crappy, and by and large, I hate it too, leaving me with almost nothing in the game to enjoy.

The Uncharted games are basically heavily cinematic adventure games. That is what they are, that is why they sell, and that is why people love them. It is also why they are shitty games. As anyone who has played a "heavily cinematic" game knows, such games are highly scripted, which means that the game will only allow you to do exactly what it wants you to do so that you can trigger the next highly scripted event. You are guided from event to event like water flowing through a series of pipes. You cannot deviate from anything in the least, because the game is simply not built to cope with that. You have to have all your weapons stripped from you by something before the chapter begins, because you cannot carry a rocket launcher in with you from an earlier mission. You can't do that because you cannot blow up the helicopter until you reach the 20th train car, and you can't do that because if you did it before then, you wouldn't have a dramatic run along the top of the train as the helicopter is gunning for you. And you especially can't blow up the helicopter before that because it needs to crash into the 19th train car, throwing you off of the track and starting the next chapter.

Unfortunately, the restrictions that come from the game being so cinematic carry on into the platforming sections and even the combat sections, too. As a note, do not play Assassin's Creed 2 before you play Uncharted. I made that mistake unwittingly, and it certainly helped to increase my simmering anger at the game. Assassin's Creed 2 is the game in which you can climb anything. Uncharted 2 is the game in which it looks like you can climb anything. During any given platforming sequence, there is one and only one route you can take.

In the bombed-out shell of one particular house, I was tasked with climbing to the remains of the third floor. "Oh, no problem," I said to myself, looking around the room. "I'll just jump up to that door frame right there, jump over to the window, climb up it, jump to that ledge, those bricks, and I'm good." I jumped up against the wall with the door frame, and Drake pretended it did not exist. This scenario plays itself out over and over again throughout the game. Drake can cling onto the tinniest of ledges, holding himself up and moving along when all he has is the grip of his fingertips. But when I jumped to a cliff that was blanketed in tree roots just big enough to fit solidly into the palm of your hand, he pretended they did not exist, and plummeted to his death. And when I tried to grab onto that ledge that I swear to fucking shit was jutting out, he didn't give it a second look.

Uncharted is really a lot like the much-maligned adventure games of old, in which you had to put the tape on the hole in the fence, chase the cat through the hole, take the cat hair now on the tape from the tape, and then glue the cat hair to your upper lip to create a disguise that would let you past a wary guard. You're not figuring out how to get from Point A to Point B as much as you're figuring out how the designers want you to get from Point A to Point B and then traveling down that road they've created for you. You're not figuring out how to blow up a tank, you're figuring out how the developers want you to blow up a tank, and then doing it.

To further diminish my enjoyment, there are two more aspects of Uncharted that tie into this whole deal.

First, I personally found that the controls quite often betrayed me. I cannot adequately communicate the shock and anger I felt when, on standing on a ledge below a turning gear, I hit X to jump up and grab the ridges in the wheel, and instead of jumping up, I jumped out, toward the camera, causing me to plunge to my death once more. Or the time when I held up and hit jump in order to jump-climb to the bricks above me and to my left, but instead I went to my right. Scenarios like this played out over and over and over, with Drake doing things that, as far as I was concerned, had between little and nothing to do with what buttons I was pushing. Were it not for the fact that there are checkpoints every few feet, I never would have beaten the first game.

The other factor is that the environments in Uncharted are ridiculously rich and detailed. I'll come back to this later, but this is one of those cases in which an apparent boon becomes a curse. Sometimes the environments are so crowded with shit that I had absolutely no fucking clue where to go next. And really, when I say "sometimes," I mean "almost every ten minutes." It's easy to miss a small, thin rope hanging against a wall when you're in a huge room full of pillars and chains and flags and crates and wreckage. It's easy not to realize that you need to go through that window, over there, when you're in a courtyard that contains twenty windows, five doors, two adjacent hallways, and five ledges.

Hints come up after you wander in circles aimlessly for a few minutes, after any enjoyment and goodwill the game has built up over the last scene has rapidly evaporated. Of course, sometimes they don't, and sometimes they're not helpful. I used a walk-through with both games, and my only regret is that I didn't resort to it sooner. Again, it's often like old adventure games on the PC, but instead of pointing and clicking on every possible thing in a given screen, I would wander through a given environment, trying to jump and climb on every ledge, until I finally found the one that worked. This was how I ended a significant portion of my gaming sessions - running in circles in a futile attempt to find whatever I was supposed to do next, until I finally got so frustrated that I jumped off a cliff over and over and over again, alleviating some of my frustration by sending Drake's broken body ricocheting off of jagged icy cliffs, laughing as the other characters screamed and cried at his death.

The puzzles were similarly pointless about half of the time. On said half I simply brute-forced or walk-through-ed my way past the puzzles, and when I had the answer in hand, the puzzle still didn't make any sense.

I'm also not much of a fan of the change in tone from Uncharted to Uncharted 2. Without spoiling anything, in Uncharted, Nathan Drake is a treasure hunter who kills in self defense. In Uncharted 2, he's a thief who robs art museums and murders the poor fuckers who happened to be on duty that night. I do not like this. Further, Uncharted was largely a fun adventure, whereas Uncharted 2 is more dark and less fun. I do not like this, either.

But now that I've described in depth what I hate about the games, and what they do like shit, allow me to elucidate on what they do well.

First of all, the writing. Plot, characters, and dialog are all top notch. The plot is very Indiana Jones-esque, and involves traveling to distant and exotic locales in search of a lost ancient artifact, all while racing a less-than-noble man who would like to take it for himself. Nathan Drake, as well as the supporting cast, are eminently likable and have depth and humanity, bolstered significantly by the absolutely fantastic voice acting and writing. The dialog is witty and humorous while remaining natural, and is present outside of cut scenes - e.g. while giving your partner a boost to a high ledge, as combat is beginning, while running from a tank - which really helps to both keep things interesting and give the characters greater depth.

The music is also about as good as a human can expect - out of a video game, or out of a hundred-million-dollar Hollywood movie. I don't know that I'm going to track down the CD, but the backing soundtrack does its job fantastically, conveying the proper mood for your circumstances, whatever they may be, and making things sound sweeping and epic. The sound effects are also well done, though I'd put them more along the lines of adequate than superb.

Uncharted's most striking feature, though, is the visual presentation. Not just the graphics, but the entire visual suite - models, textures, animations, and most notably, environments. I can only begin to guess what went into making the game what it is in that regard alone. Over ten million dollars? Dozens of people, putting in a combined hundreds of thousands of hours over a few years? The games are absolutely unparalleled when it comes to the environments. They are highly varied throughout the game, never smack of copy-paste, and even a corridor that you spend five seconds running through has more detail than the most pivotal and fleshed out portion of any other game I've ever played. The level of detail in these environments is eye-popping. The sweeping views you're afforded when you reach some of the games' pivotal moments are unbelievable.

Of course, all of this is like saying that I went to a restaurant, ordered a meal, and it tasted like rotting cow shit - but the presentation was lovely, the staff was charming, and the ambiance was wonderful! The gameplay feels almost superfluous when it's not downright annoying. I probably would have enjoyed the Uncharted games far more had I watched someone else play them, or had they been a movie. As far as I'm concerned, that's not much of a recommendation.