This is essentially a less polished, less original take on Uncharted 2, but with a vastly superior melee system and vastly worse shooting sections. In fact, the shooting was so horribly terrible to play that I tended to just run around punching everyone. The melee is a take on Batman's best-in-class mechanics, but with the addition of environmental interaction (think slamming someone's head in a fridge door) and much less smooth (clipping and camera issues, among other things). The shooting though. Dear lord, it ruined Uncharted 1, and nearly did Uncharted 2, and they still haven't learned their lesson here. Random one-shot kills are frequent, and all enemies immediately shoot you with pinpoint accuracy if you so much as get seen from a kilometer away. I turned the difficulty all the way down to "Very Easy" and I still died frequently. Some of the worst shooting in any game I've played, and yet a larger percentage of the game was made up of it than Uncharted 2.
The one thing that this series does amazingly well is platforming and story. Both fall into formulaic predictability here. The fifth time Drake hangs on a metal pole that suddenly bends, it gets a little annoying. The twentieth time? Please. It's not awful by any means, but it isn't very thrilling. The story is even worse: nothing is really explained, including Drake's motivation for risking his life (despite the question being brought up numerous times). Is Drake really the good guy? The only reasons he could be doing all this are ego and money - arguably as bad as the villains' motivation. The ending is the same one as Uncharted 2... no, really, the exact same one. At no point did I ever really care.
Despite all this, the annoying thing with this game is how amazing it could've been, and yet how so very far from its potential the little mistakes it makes send it. It's basically the least original sequel that the incredible Uncharted 2 could've gotten, and that's a damn shame.
