Uncharted 2: Among Thieves Review

The train is the argument. Naughty Dog builds a sequence that opens as a cutscene, becomes a firefight along moving carriages, turns into a climbing puzzle, then a derailment you play through, with no visible seam anywhere in it, and in 2009 nobody else was holding that together on console hardware. Performance capture is the other leap, with actors recorded together so scenes carry overlapping dialogue and real comic timing, which is why Drake, Chloe, and Flynn read as people rather than voice tracks laid over animation.

Nepal and the Tibetan village are technical showcases that also serve pacing, granting quiet before the next escalation. The shooting underneath is competent rather than special, with enemies who absorb an unreasonable amount of rifle fire and a cover system that occasionally sticks you to the wrong wall, and the supernatural final act is the weakest stretch by some distance. Everything before it is exceptional.