The Trappings

Over the past couple of weeks I, rather belatedly, picked up a cheap copy of the first of Naughty Dog’s Uncharted games, Drake’s Fortune. I completed that and waited with baited breath for the second instalment to be released, which it was on Friday. That scuppered my weekend plans. Here is my comparison of the two. By ‘comparison’ I mainly mean ‘opinion’, ’spoilers’ and ‘lies’ – you can find plenty of accurate information about both of these games elsewhere if you require that kind of edifying, relevant waffle.

In the wake of last year’s shattering of the rose-tinted Indiana Jones greenhouse of bliss I had previously been living in there was a large treasure hunting-shaped gap in my life. Treasure hunting has long been a dangerous pursuit. Anneka Rice was the only treasure hunter ever to ply her trade without some sort of firearm – even the later Skyrunners all had a BBC issue Walthar PPK strapped to their calf. That’s not to say Rice wouldn’t kill someone for the type of gold hoard recently unearthed in Staffordshire. She would. So would Nathan Drake, the protagonist in Naughty Dog’s exceptional pair of Uncharted offerings.

Drake’s quests to recover near-mythical antiquities form the structure of both games – the first, Drake’s Fortune, sees you on the trail of Sir Francis Drake’s El Dorado and the second, Among Thieves, sets you on the lookout Marco Polo’s Cintamani Stone. You’re ably assisted along the way by recurring characters Victor Sullivan, a womaniser, and the lovely Elena Fisher, a journalist who gets caught up in your antics after trailing you for a documentary. There are additions to the ranks for the sequel, with the rolling cast helping you along the way as the story progresses to it’s beautifully lush new environments. My particular favourite of the new companions being Tenzin, for reasons I will explain shortly. All the personnel, as you’d expect from games clearly well funded, are excellently voiced and fairly well rounded – although there are a few early moments in Among Thieves where you might question Nathan Drake’s motives but if you did so you’d probably be missing what most of this game is about – looking incredibly pretty and letting you shoot things while hanging from ledges.

The ledges, rather than the shooting, were the reason I was drawn to this game in the first place. I have an incredibly soft spot for games that allow me to shimmy along a window ledge, up a bit of loose brickwork, before leaping on to an overhanging rafter and just hanging there for a bit until I want to get on with the satisfying task of swinging back and forth to gather momentum and make the final lunge toward a pillar, where I will land with the balletic grace of the young Soviet girl I always dreamed of being. There I will rest and consider my next move. Which will hopefully involve more ledges. I haven’t enjoyed doing it in a game this much since Ico.

Nor since Ico have I felt as much fondness for the supporting cast as I have for the main character – the second title, Among Thieves, even goes so far as to borrow the idea of having a companion who can’t speak your language with you for part of the game, except this time it’s a Tibetan man named Tenzin and not an endangered princess. Unfortunately you can’t just grab hold of his hand whenever you feel like you need some physical contact. You have to make some pretence of nearly missing the other side of a jump across a ravine in order for him to reach out and clutch your cold, wanting, fingers. Tenzin wears gloves to make it obvious he’s not into hand holding. Drake incredibly manages to forgo gloves throughout the whole of both games, which, considering you spend a lot of time touching rough surfaces does have implications for the coarseness of his mitts and might be the reason Tenzin wants no part of the inevitably gnarled claws you sport. You can’t just stand still, holding hands with Tenzin and admiring the scenery. Tenzin wouldn’t allow that. Yorda would.

Aside from not being able to hold a Tibetan man’s hand there is little that I didn’t like about these action-adventure titles. The biggest exception being the somewhat predictable fashion of progression in enemy’s difficulty. My major bugbears with the excellent first game, Drake’s Fortune, come, like so many of my anathema, in the form of mutants. Most bugbears are mutants – neither bug nor bear, some symbiosis of the pair – but the monstrosities that got my hackles up in this game are more traditional mutants. Spaniards, to be precise. Mutant Spaniards. Not that all Spanish people are mutants, they just happen to be mutants in later levels. It’s a fairly natural evolution of enemy combatants to move from gun-toting mercenaries to something more supernatural, I just happen to dislike shooting anything non-human in gameland. I prefer not to have to shoot anything at all. Give me a plank of wood and I’d happily smack a mutant with it.

Very little changes in terms of gameplay over the two titles. The combat and movement seem near identical with the developments apparently being made in level design. There are parts in the second one subtly expanding on the more enjoyable deviations from the regular duck and cover elements – the best examples are the sections from each that involve shooting from moving vehicles. Drake’s Fortune keeps you static as you shoot from the back of a Jeep driven recklessly by Elena, where Among Thieves requires you to leap from truck to burning truck while dodging and returning gunfire. Ace.

The stories in both games are separate so you could easily just pick up the second and not feel like you’ve lost a huge amount of plot. However, like in all good series where each instalment can stand alone and hold it’s own, there are a few nods in the sequel to events past. None of them impair on the enjoyment of the second one and are there just to give those that notice a quick smile – most notably while flicking through Drake’s diary, which acts as a thinly-veiled and fairly essential guide to solving the puzzles that halt your ledge-swinging progress.

From my perspective these two games have some of the most beautiful scenery and moments I’ve seen on my PS3 – with the exception of the BBC’s Planet Earth on Blu-Ray. If you like brain-achingly difficult puzzles or non-linear plots then these games probably aren’t your cup of tea but if you’ve got an Indy-sized hole somewhere in your being and a Playstation that’s feeling unused it might be worth giving it a go.