I still don't know where I stand on it besides that it's a fun romp. It isn't too deep as a game, and maybe doesn't need to be but even in 2010 when playing Mass Effect 2 I said to myself that it offered a better game experience than Uncharted 2, because while the animation quality was worse it still shows how Uncharted relies on entirely prescripted set-pieces, and that's what Uncharted wants to be I think. It's like a playable action movie where the props are charmingly put into place to create the illusion of realistic destruction to the audience, and it's charming in that sense.
If what you want is a sense of actually real mayhem or danger though, it all only comes from the aggression of the AI and their bullets. The rest does feel artificial to me, because a lot of the setpieces sort of move in chunks based on the player's movement where there is a timer, and if you wait too long you die as scripted and but for the duration that it can wait you also see the setpieces, as if, wait for the player to react which can ruin the illusion, and which it did a couple of times.
I think the game is influential in the implementation of real "acting" in games. Games did already do motion capture but this is the game that really made it "acting", I felt because most other games before Uncharted 2 would seperate motion captured choreographies with voice-acted dubs, and Uncharted 2 actually doesn't overdub it.
A one-time game is fun every now and then but they'll probably never be my top 10. A lot of it is flavor as well. I like my Indiana Jones esque romp but I'm more of a world-building guy and prefer to see games that offer something that can't be done in cinema.
