Romancing the Cintamani Stone

My recent backlog-burning has been going pretty "Meh", so I'd been looking forward to playing a good game again. And Uncharted 2 delivers well-enough.

The PS4 Collection's graphical update is still looking good five years on, and Naughty Dog's banter-filled storytelling is still top-notch, even if the dissonance is hard to ignore.

On the flip side, while I've long been "over" Uncharted's combat - I switch to the Explorer difficulty by default - the amount of it is more groan-inducing than I'd remembered. Drake's body count is just absurd, and pumping round after round into wave after wave of enemy goons becomes a distracting chore between story beats.

And while the climbing and parkouring controls mostly work well, the moments when they don't stand out. Especially since the last few areas of the game seem to have so many of those moments. Unclear map directions and misleading climbing cues may be non-critical shortcomings, but they're shortcomings just the same.

I still love how the Uncharted franchise channels the spirit of Indiana Jones-style globe-trotting adventure, but as the series has aged, I'm not sure if Among Thieves is as critical an entry as it once was. I skipped over the first game for this round of replays; next time, I might skip the second, too.

Progress: Finished on Explorer, again.