Uncharted 2: Among Thieves opens with Nathan Drake hanging from the underside of a train carriage, bleeding, as the wreckage slides toward a cliff. It is a cold open that tells you exactly what Naughty Dog built here: a game that treats climbing, shooting and falling as one continuous piece of showmanship. The 2009 PlayStation 3 release is the second entry in the Uncharted series, and it remains the moment the franchise stopped being a promising imitation and became the standard other action games were measured against.
Trailer, via Naughty Dog.
Marco Polo’s Lamp and the Istanbul Museum
The story starts two years after Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune. Drake, voiced by Nolan North, is pulled into a job by former associate Harry Flynn (Steve Valentine) and Flynn’s associate Chloe Frazer (Claudia Black). The target is a Mongolian oil lamp tied to Marco Polo’s doomed 1292 voyage from China. The plan is to rob it, cheat Flynn’s client, and keep Polo’s treasure.
What follows is a museum break-in in Istanbul. Inside the lamp: a map and a flammable resin. Burned, the resin reveals that Polo’s fleet was shipwrecked in Borneo while carrying the Cintamani Stone out of the fabled city of Shambhala. Flynn then double-crosses Drake and leaves him to be arrested.
Three months later, Chloe and Victor “Sully” Sullivan (Richard McGonagle) break him out. Chloe’s information reframes everything: Flynn works for Zoran Lazarević (Graham McTavish), a Serbian war criminal hunting the stone.
Borneo, the Phurba, and a Temple in Nepal
In Borneo, Drake and Sully infiltrate Lazarević’s camp with Chloe planted as a mole. Drake learns the stone never left Shambhala. The trail runs through a temple holding the bodies of Polo’s crew, a phurba, and a map showing that whoever carries the phurba gains passage to Shambhala through a temple in Nepal.
Drake and Sully escape after Flynn and his men corner them. Sully backs out. Drake and Chloe push on to Nepal, a country ravaged by Lazarević’s mercenaries, where they run into Drake’s ex-girlfriend, journalist Elena Fisher (Emily Rose), and her cameraman Jeff (Gregory Myhre), who are tracking Lazarević themselves.
At the Nepal temple, Drake and Chloe use the phurba to uncover Shambhala’s location in the Himalayas. The sequence is where the game’s structure pays off. Every earlier mechanic — the climb, the cover, the puzzle solved from Drake’s journal — has been teaching the player a vocabulary that this stretch spends.
Cover, Climbing, and a Journal Full of Clues
Uncharted 2 is an action-adventure platform game played from a third-person view. Drake jumps, climbs and scales narrow ledges and wall faces. He carries up to two firearms, one single-handed and one two-handed, plus a limited supply of grenades. He picks up weapons and ammunition from slain enemies, automatically swapping out what he was holding.
Combat runs on cover. Drake takes position behind corners or low walls and fires aimed or blind. He can also shoot while moving. When enemies have not spotted him, stealth works: a sneak attack knocks a foe out in one hit, and Drake can pull an unsuspecting enemy over a ledge while hanging from it.
Puzzles lean on Drake’s journal, which supplies clues. A hint system, when switched on, points toward the next objective. Across the campaign sit 100 special treasures and one secret relic, hidden or placed in hard-to-reach spots.
Collecting them, and completing certain feats, earns medals. Medals pay out in-game money for unlockable disc content: concept art, game movies, and cheats such as guns with infinite ammunition. A large share of the medals also feeds the trophy list. It is a rewards loop that respects the player’s time rather than padding it.
Naughty Engine 2.0 and the Jump Online
Development began right after Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune succeeded. The team drew on Marco Polo and his expeditions through archipelagos and eastern Asia — a research thread you can feel in the Borneo camp and the Nepal temple.
Naughty Dog built an updated proprietary engine for Among Thieves, running exclusively on the Naughty Engine 2.0 system. Those improvements enabled extensive motion capture, more in-game cinematic sequences, and the series’ first online multiplayer component.
That multiplayer matters more in hindsight than it did at launch. It turned a single-player showpiece into a game people kept playing after the credits, and it set the template for what the studio would build next.
Game of the Year, Six Million Copies, and a PS4 Re-Release
Among Thieves drew acclaim for its narrative, voice acting, graphics, technical achievements and cinematic quality. It took Game of the Year honors from numerous publications and award events. It is treated as one of the most significant games of the seventh console generation and among the greatest video games ever made.
It sold more than six million copies worldwide. It was later re-released on PlayStation 4 as part of Uncharted: The Nathan Drake Collection. A sequel, Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception, followed in 2011.
Uncharted 2: Among Thieves is a 2009 action-adventure game developed by Naughty Dog and published by Sony Computer Entertainment for the PlayStation 3.
The Verdict on Uncharted 2
The case for Uncharted 2 as the best of its generation rests on a single quality: it never asks the player to choose between spectacle and control. The train sequence, the collapsing building, the Nepal temple — these are set pieces that stay playable. Naughty Dog’s motion capture work and cinematic framing get the attention, but the cover system and the climbing are what hold the thing together.
The weaker parts are real. Stealth is thin next to the shooting, and the treasure hunt is busywork dressed as content. The multiplayer was a first for the franchise, not a finished idea.
None of that dents the achievement. Uncharted 2 took a franchise that could have settled for imitation and made it the reference point. Six million copies and a shelf of Game of the Year awards are the record. The train hanging off the cliff is the argument.
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