Uncharted 2: Among Thieves

The gameplay is extremely shallow but it's decent enough if looked at as an Indiana Jones movie made into a game. Has a fun cast, neat set pieces and really nice looking locales. A shame that the actual game itself is a barebones cover shooter with the shittiest platforming ever.

Honestly, one of the best games of all time. This is game is peak Uncharted (although I think 4 gets very close). Lazarevic is such an iconic villain with a brilliant performance by Graham McTavish, and the rest of the cast delivers an outstanding performance as well. The narrative structure of this game I think is the best designed of them all, and technologically, it was a massive leap over the first and still looks fantastic today.

great visual and set pieces but kind of soulless

My favorite of the original three.

For better or worse, turns up everything the first game did. More spectacular set pieces and action, more drawn out combat encounters with bullet-sponge enemies that approach tedium towards the endgame. The addition of stealth combat definitely enhances things at least.

Bland story, repetitive combat, boring puzzles. I played it in 2022.

towards the end the difficulty ramps up mainly via making every enemy heavily armoured which for me made it more challenging in an annoying way than challenging in an engaging way. but thats really my only complaint in an otherwise fun game.

an improvement on the first game in the series

Same as the first game. Puzzles and lack of a radar meter. Difficulty settings from easiest to hardest so about 5 settings. Liked it a lot better when it first came out.

Uncharted 2 is pretty much the closest you can get to playing Raiders of the Lost Ark. This does have it's drawbacks as the game can never truly reach above interesting spectacle but that spectacle is simply stellar. Naughty Dog took the original's formula and managed to not just one-up but two-up themselves in every way.