What do you do when you feel out of step with the rest of the world? When everyone has such a high opinion of something, and you eagerly try it out, wanting so badly to agree with all the raves and accolades, but then afterwards all you feel is…disappointed? Welcome to the internet’s first non-glowing review of Uncharted 2.

Look, this is as pretty of a game as you will ever find. It would easily take home the Oscar for cinematography, or whatever the real world equivalent of graphics would be. The section where Nathan Drake is running through the Himalayan village, following the guy in the Crocodile Dundee hat, is probably the closest any 2D representation has come to making a 3D world believable. It was a technological marvel that won’t be challenge in this generation. And, yes, the voice work is very well done. It is clear that the actors take their video game roles as seriously as any ‘true’ acting job their agent may present them. It’s easy to see that everyone involved with this game (opus? Can we use ‘opus’ here? Do we need a new word for this industry’s high water points?) cared about their efforts, and poured whatever they had in the into the final, epic production.

And that could be the problem. For all the talk of a complex plot, the seamless integration of gameplay and story, and the ratcheting up of the production values across the board, someone forgot to tell the game designers that they had to up the ante as well. The first two to three hours do a fine job of sucking you (back) into Drake’s world, especially with the opening train climb interspersed with interesting and important flashback cutscenes . In fact, the game keeps you enthralled right up to the point where you are dangling from that same train, and you remember that everything up to that point was just to get you back to where this whole thing started. It’s there, however, that the doubts begin to creep in.

Since when did running through a jungle and finding the only place to climb up a rock, or over a fallen tree, constitute a challenge? And shouldn’t tight roping a narrow beam in order to cross an immensely deep crevice involve some tension? When you can’t fall off, it doesn’t. In both these examples, which you are required to ‘conquer’ more than once in the game, the player is left to wonder what the point was. Presenting a dramatic situation, and removing any risk is bad enough, but forcing the player to interact with the least interesting parts of the game, namely moving from point A to point B, seems rather sloppy.

Of course, these intermediate areas could be interpreted as breaks between the many action segments of Uncharted 2. And by ‘action segment’, Naughty Dog means fire fight. A lot of them. A whole lot of them. Sometimes one after the other. Now, this is where the UC2 shines. ND improved upon the previous game, at least in terms of control, firing, and differentiating each weapon. The battles do fall short, though, in a couple of areas. Several of them start with Drake being flanked, which while much more realistic, often devolves the fight into trial and error gaming, where the player has to remember the starting location of the baddies, as well as any guns and ammo laying about, and pick the best route to eliminating as many foes as possible. This is fine for the first two or three tries, but it quickly loses any organic feel, which is what the game seems to be striving for overall. Secondly, was ammo, especially for the bigger guns, much easier to come by? Wasn’t a big part of the original’s tension derived from a scarcity of resources when they were needed most? At no time do you have to make any critical decisions on how to approach a fight and conserve you bullets. Again, this lack of danger and risk hurts the overall experience.

The last among the issues might be the most serious. Often, with everything that was done to raise UC2 above the current level of the industry, it often felt very video-gamey. Standing out, in the otherwise well constructed train sequence, was the part where Drake must avoid the large light stands that scraped just over the top of the cars. While this makes perfect sense in the context of a video game, what stood out, and reminded the player that this was just a game, was the fact that those stands only showed up in the part that Drake had to avoid them. After that, they were nowhere to be found. Is that a small thing? Probably many people wouldn’t even realize it. But if you do, then some of the immersion credit that the story and the actors have built up has been lost, and with it goes some enjoyment.

Overall, it’s a very well done game, with some bigger than expected flaws. The game needed more things to do besides shooting and climbing. It needed more puzzles, less obvious ones, and more spread out among the levels. Fans of the first one will probably like it, though they may find themselves wishing for more than just the same thing, only easier. Star Trek was a very good movie whose flaws stood out because the entire package was fun; Uncharted 2 stands out because its flaws prevent it from reaching the level Naughty Dog, and the entire gaming community, wanted it achieve.