Video Game Review: Uncharted 2 – Among Thieves multiplayer beta demo

Video Game Review: Uncharted 2: Among Thieves multiplayer demo
Platform: PS3
Developer: Naughty Dog
Official Website
Plot: The multiplayer has no plot, but I’m sure the game does. The first Uncharted was a ton of fun to play, and I’m eagerly awaiting this title when it’s released on October 13.

The Multiplayer beta for Uncharted 2 came out this week, and I was able to sit down with some of my good web comic friends and blow through several hours of what should have been spent working on our comics, but was instead spent shooting each other’s digital avatars. The players were Steve Wallace, Phil Chan, Joe Dun, and myself. We started out in Plunder mode, which has you gathering a treasure and taking it from it’s spawn point to a chest on your team’s side. Trying to figure out the controls while someone is shooting you in the face gets old quick, but thankfully the level was large enough to be able to run around and figure out what you were doing while dodging bullets all the while.

For those unfamiliar with the Uncharted play mechanic, the bulk of the combat is focused on a duck-and-cover system that allows you to shoot blindly (with some surprising accuracy), or by exposing yourself for better aiming. You are incredibly agile, so you can jump and climb and roll all over the place. Also, your character has the ability to enter into melee combat when up close in the single player game, but in the multiplayer game they replace this with a single swing of your fist (no combos). It’s a devastating move, to be sure, and a useful tactic when up close to your enemy. You are only allowed to carry two weapons at a time: a pistol and a rifle of some kind. You also have a supply of grenades, but it appeared that the multiplayer limited you to a single grenade…at least to start out.

After the first round, we chose teams and played a deathmatch. This is a pretty standard run-and-gun situation, but the level designs make for some very interesting play depending on how you want to take out your opponents. We played to 20 kills (total for the team, not individuals), and Phil was an adamant sniper. Steve was a fan of the mini-gun, which is powerful as hell but also slows you down considerably. Joe and I were always at arms to get our hands on the grenade launcher, which is fun for the 6 or so shots that it has.

We then changed things up and went into a temple level and altered the weapons to only be RPGs. This became an interesting battle for higher ground, and really required use of strategy on the lower team’s part to gain the upper hand. The RPGs don’t require as much accuracy, but they do take time to reload.

The final match that we played was a co-op mode which had characters playing through a scenario from the game. This was incredibly difficult, as bad guys were spawning from all sides and the cover mechanic became somewhat cumbersome to use because you constantly had to flip from one side of cover to another. And some cover is destructible, so when the stronger bad guys came out (or started throwing grenades), you would have to run quickly for new cover.

When one of your friends goes down there’s a timer that pops up over their head. When the timer runs out, that character dies. But if you’re able to get to them before, you can revive them – but the longer you take to get there, the longer it takes to revive them. This means that your characters should stay relatively close to make sure that no one character is too far away or too deep in the thick of it to be saved.

There were some fun moments where team dynamics came into play. For example, after a round of baddies came in we were prompted to gather around a light post in the street. Once two characters were there, one was able to boost me up onto the sign dangling from the light post. While I was climbing along the sides of buildings trying to figure out how our team could advance, more baddies showed up and the group was forced to continue the firefight sans one more player. My ultimate destination was an open window, which I climbed in and pushed a bookshelf out of the window (which we would later use as a make-shift ladder to climb over a tipped bus). Several team dynamic situations like this followed, until we eventually ran out of time and the demo ended.

Uncharted 2 multiplayer was a lot of fun to play, and I don’t consider myself a multiplayer fan. Sure, playing it with your friends instead of against some faceless online opponent helps, and the fact that we were all on the same learning curved helped as well. I’m looking forward to the release of Uncharted 2 (October 13), and being able to play the full online multiplayer with my friends again. Be sure to check out the beta in the meantime, available for free on the Playstation Network (PSN).