The only issue I have with the narrative is how incongruent all the violence is with our heroes' personalities. In a way, this is a testament to how well Naughty Dog has constructed their characters, as this thought has never occurred to me in any other game. Drake is a witty, light-hearted guy, but the way he and the other characters joke around before and after dealing death to dozens of baddies leaves a rather odd taste in your mouth. Even Elena, who is a reporter pursuing Lazarevic because of all the massacres he has committed, gets in on the action, shooting up several mercs along the way. By the end of the game, I had killed over 1,000 people. It really does pull you out of an otherwise believable and identifiable cast of characters. The over abundance of fighting is a shortcoming of the medium in general, but Uncharted 2 makes it far more noticeable than the rest.

No matter how well a game is written, it will ultimately fall flat if there is no substantial gameplay to back it up. The original Uncharted was no slouch in this department, but Naughty Dog has managed to streamline the entire experience for the sequel. The SixAxis debacle that forced you to aim grenades and balance across logs using motion controls is long gone. In addition, the cover system has been completely revamped, allowing Drake to easily slide into and transition between different pieces of cover.

Shooting mechanics have been refined as well. As opposed to the first Uncharted, Drake now gets a firing reticule when shooting blindly from cover, making the feature actually useable. Despite the huge increase in weapon selection, none of the guns feel redundant and the heavier weapons feel especially empowering. Enemies no longer feel like bullet sponges and go down in a reasonable amount of shots. While in the first game headshots would not always register as such, the hit-boxes on enemies have been tweaked in Uncharted 2, allowing for much more precise shooting.

In some games, the platforming and puzzle sections serve to provide some downtime from the action. This is not the case in Uncharted 2, where the platforming is just as harrowing as many of the intense gunfights (and that says a lot). With each jump over a vertigo-inducing chasm, you'll be second-guessing yourself, wondering whether or not you can clear the gap. The puzzles have also been ratcheted up a notch—no longer do they boil down to a 'look at one page in Drake's journal for the answer' system as they did in the first title. Instead, you'll have to piece together the clues from an entire diary that you can flip through. While neither aspect is particularly innovative, both are well executed and help breathe some variety into the game.

The big updates that Naughty Dog has spoken about are the emphasis on stealth and transversal combat mechanics. While both features were present in Drake's Fortune, neither was fully utilized, and this hasn’t been remedied much in the sequel. Despite Naughty Dog trumpeting these gameplay mechanics pre-release, neither has a significant impact on the game. The stealth element leaves a lot to be desired—Uncharted 2 kicks off with a very janky stealth sequence, filled with moments that will leave you scratching your chin as to how you got caught. Why Naughty Dog started the game with such a slow piece that's really non-representative of the rest of the game is beyond me. Transversal combat is also expanded upon very little from the original game—you can still shoot from just about every position, though now there are melee takedowns from just about every angle.