Uncharted – Drake’s Fortune is one of the early PlayStation 3 games that I enjoyed playing the most. So I was very happy when it was announced the sequel: Uncharted 2 – Among Thieves. From June 3 until June 26 Naughty Dog runs a closed beta for this multiplayer mode, which I was lucky enough to join.The beta involved two playlists and each comes with two maps: Deathmatch / Plunder and Objective Cooperative Mode.
In Deathmatch / Plunder you play with two teams. One team consists of Heroes (like Nathan Drake, Sullivan, and Elena) and the other team consists of Villains. Death match is a regular team based death match where you try to kill as many players of the opposite team, until one of two teams reaches the count limit. Plunder is a version of capture the bag, where the bag has been replaced by a very heavy treasure.
In Objective Cooperative mode you play with three players and the aim is to finish a set objective by helping each other fight through the map. At certain points in the map all three players are needed to be able to continue to the next part.
Once you have chosen one of the two playlists, the game goes into game matching mode where it tries to find other players. The game matching is one of the things that currently needs a lot of improvement: I can remember waiting for more than 10 minutes despite the fact that more than enough people were online playing the beta. Naughty Dog is aware about this problems and a soon to be released patch should solve this problem.
The first thing that you notice when the game starts is the beautiful and rich environment that you can remember from the first Uncharted game. This is one of the factors that makes the Uncharted games such a huge success.
To me, the Deathmatch game mode is by far the less interesting one of the game modes. It just does not add much to other games that offer a Deatchmatch mode. The Plunder mode is more interesting: because of the weight of the Treasure it is not that easy to bring it back to your base once you have managed to capture it.
The best mode by far is the Objective Cooperative mode. It is cooperative play in every sense, because you really need to help each other to get to the end. Villains will attack simultaneously from every side and you find yourself fighting back to back with the other two players in order to survive. When one of the players is mortally wounded, one of the others need to rush to the mortally wounded to help him revive, so he can continue the mission.
From what I’ve seen in this beta, I think the multiplayer mode really adds a great additional experience to the single player campaign that of Uncharted 2 – Among Thieves, and I look forward to playing it a lot once it is released in October.
Marco Cecilio, NoobFeed