The Climb

I started playing Uncharted 2 over the weekend.  I'd received it, along with Assassin's Creed II, for Christmas but I'd not had a chance to open it before now, as I was playing through ACII.  I'm about a quarter of the way through the game and I'm really enjoying it.  As with the first game, the story and the voice acting (does Nolan North ever say no?) are spot on and it is probably the best looking game that I've ever played.

However, after 30 hours of ACII, I found the lack of freedom in my climbing quite jarring.  I'd been used to having Ezio climb all over the buildings of Renaissance Italy with impunity but found that Nathan Drake was very picky about which bits of scenery he was prepared to shimmy up.  A few times over the weekend I couldn't work out which way to go and I used the 'hint' button, to hear Nate say stuff along the lines of "I reckon I can climb up that signpost".  To which my reply was "well, what's so wrong with that nearby wall that you'd want to climb a rickety, free-standing lamppost?".

I think, to a certain extent, this difference is explained by the environment being somewhere that the gameplay takes place in ACII, whereas in Uncharted 2 the environment is  part of the gameplay.  In ACII there were a couple of areas where planning your route was challenging but, on the whole, Ezio's free-running was quite straightforward (though never a chore). In Uncharted 2, pathfinding is a big part of the game and there are 'right' paths that you have to follow.  Sometimes this 'corridor' effect is well-hidden - the opening 'train wreck' level did this excellently - but sometimes less so, as in the jungle levels.  Logically a jungle should be a playground of climbing opportunities but that wasn't what I felt when playing them.

This isn't a criticism of Uncharted 2 - it is a great game and the combat is particularly enjoyable -  but it does seem a backward step for games that Drake can't leap up to what seem perfectly good handholds on ruined buildings.