You may have seen our run through of The Eye of Indra and Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune. The idea is that some people may not have had the opportunity to play all the Uncharted games, being as they are on a different generation of consoles. Sure, you could look up a walkthrough on YouTube, or you could play your way through Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune on PS Now, but what you really want to do is get up to speed by reading this website.
Uncharted: Among Thieves
Often hailed as being the best in the series to date, the second full game in the series picks up Nathan’s story about two years after the events of Drake’s Fortune. Nathan is down on his luck and looking a bit miserable while drinking in a beachside bar. Along comes a guys with an English accent (accent alert!) whom Nathan embraces. Harry Flynn attempts to rope Nate in on a heist that he is being paid to carry out but Nate isn’t having any of it. Turns out that Nate has already broken into the museum (in Turkey) and only just made it out alive. It’s a three person job. In walks Chloe Fraser, and she is confident, sassy and gorgeous. She knows Nate. I mean she really *knows* Nate, but for some reason she doesn’t want Harry to know that she knows Nate.
The item they have been asked to steal is an oil lamp which was a gift from Kublai Khan to Marco Polo which likely contains a clue to the lost fleet of Marco Polo. (Background; Marco Polo left China with 14 ships and 600 people. Only 18 made it home and the lost ships have never been found.) It all seems like a jolly good idea to the three of them, and they chink their beers over the plan to dick the employer (Zoran Lazarevic) over. However, while Harry isn’t looking, Nate and Chloe make a plan to run off together without Harry. Then they have sex.
The museum heist goes OK, right up until the moment Harry pulls a gun on Nate and leaves him to the mercy of the museum guards, who are all a bit annoyed with him. Three months of Turkish prison time later, Sully finally gets around to bribing the prison guards to get Nate out of jail. And in walks Chloe, and not surprisingly Nate isn’t happy with her as he assumes that she helped set him up. But she vows she didn’t, and why wouldn’t we believe her, eh? In the intervening months, Harry and his new best pal Zoran have followed the clues found in the oil lamp and found the ships from Marco Polo’s fleet. But they have not yet found the Cintamani Stone which they all now believe to have been in Polo’s possession. The Cintamani Stone is, by all accounts, massive, and a sapphire. This is the real treasure everyone wants.
Off Sully, Chloe and Nate trot to Borneo in pursuit of Harry and chums. Nathan soon works out that the Cintamani Stone isn’t in Borneo at all but in Shambhala, also known as Shangri-la. It is not long before the three of them have discovered a phurba (ancient ritual dagger) with a map to a city (which wasn’t a city 800 years ago) in Nepal that will probably lead them to Shambhala. The phurba is the key to the whole thing. And, hey look, along comes Harry Flynn, who has guns and a bad attitude. He takes the map, the phurba and double crossing Chloe, who double crosses them again and allows Nate and Sully to escape with all the good stuff. Sully decides enough is enough and heads off someplace warm where, presumably, he can flirt with women half his age.
Nate heads of to Nepal to meet up with serial side switcher Chloe, and it isn’t long before he is being shot at. There are even helicopter pilots with a desire to kill him, too, this time. Chloe comes to Nate’s aid with a rocket launcher and they flirt with each other. Something about Nate ‘being happy to see her’ or something. Anyway, they are briefly separated again, but they are apart just long enough for Nathan to run into his ex; Elena Fisher. What the goodness hell is she doing in a war torn city in Nepal, you might ask? She is on the trail of a war criminal whom NATO believes is dead. Guess who? Zoran Lazarevic. Nate looks a bit green at the list of his crimes, but keeps schtum about his involvement. In bundles Chloe who instantly senses the atmosphere, and like a real class act makes light of the situation. “She broke your heart…” “Maybe I broke hers.” “Oh, yes, Casanova.” Poor Nate. There’s more to him than handsomeness.
Anyway, Chloe lets the cat out of the bag about her and Nate looking for Lazarevic, and strangely enough Elena is not impressed. Cue; helicopter. And they all run to safety. And by ‘safety’ I mean the temple that Nate and Chloe were looking for in the first place. Elena is not impressed. She and her cameraman, Jeff, wait outside the temple while Nate and Chloe delve inside for clues, which gives them ample opportunity for Nate to have an internal crisis about whether or not Elena and Jeff are an item. They find what they are looking for in said temple (the map to Shambhala) and get the hell out. Zoran’s army had followed them in, shooting poor Jeff in the stomach in the process. Nate, being the good guy that he is, allows Jeff to lean on him while Elena and Chloe shoot the bad guys. Chloe is not impressed.
Just when they can go no further, in walks Harry Flynn. Chloe switches sides again, but it looks as though Harry is starting to doubt her loyalty. Goodness knows what Nate thinks. Lazarevic is next to walk into the room, whereupon he murders Jeff. Because he can, and because he is nasty. He towers over Nate (who stands his ground) and removes the phurba from his possession. Harry takes Chloe away “to the train”, and Elena and Nathan do a runner.
Once they are out of immediate harm’s way, Nathan informs Elena that he is going to go after Chloe, because Harry has her and Harry is a dick. Elena isn’t impressed, but she knows Nate; she can’t change his mind. Ultimately she helps Nate onto Lazarevic’s train, and we are reminded once more why Elena is simply amazing. There is a lot of fighting on the train, as well as some ground-breaking gameplay mechanics and just as Nate is having the life throttled out of him by Lazarevic’s head henchman, Chloe turns up and saves the day. It’s funny, because Nathan spends an age hurling every bit of the war criminal’s arsenal at the guy, and barely scratches him, and along comes Chloe with the worst goddamned gun in the game and kills him with one shot.
Anyway.
Chloe orders Nate off the train, because she “didn’t ask for this”. Nathan is all; “do you know what I have been through to rescue you???” They have an argument. I think Chloe is still a teensy bit jealous of Elena, to be honest. And who wouldn’t be? Along comes Harry who has a good laugh at it all, and then shoots Nate in the abdomen. Nate looks like he might cry, but Chloe prevents Harry from finishing him off. In order to escape, Nate blows up the train. It is his MO. Narrowly escaping his own death, a wounded Nathan climbs out of the ensuing wreckage, fends off survivors from Lazarevic’s army, and finds the phurba in the snow. (They are in Tibet now, and Tibet is cold.)
Nate blacks out.
When he comes around he is in the home of a guy with whom he shares no common language, but clearly, this is a good guy. He is shown to another home in the mountain village, and is immediately jumped on by Elena who followed the railway line and found the wreckage, and eventually the nearby village. Nathan has been unconscious for a couple of days. And Elena is delighted to see him alive. Also in this house is Karl Schaffer, who, like Nate was dragged almost dead into the village seventy years ago. He was also looking for the Cintamani Stone then, but all his crew died. And now here is some criminal treasure hunter with the key. Schaffer thinks this isn’t going to end well, but Nathan is pretty much the only option to put it all right again. Nathan is ready to go home (and thanks for the medicine, by the way) but is entreated by Schaffer and Elena to help out. If he doesn’t, Lazarevic will get to the Cintamani Stone and life on Earth as we know it will cease to be, such is its power.
Tenzin, the nice guy with the medicine and warm bed, took Nate to see the remains of Schaffer’s crew, and Nate twigs that it was in fact Schaffer who deliberately killed them, in order to stop them getting to the stone. Nathan is beginning to understand. On returning to the village, Tenzin and Nathan find it under siege from Lazarevic and his lot, and Schaffer is taken hostage. Elena and Nathan feel a little bit guilty as they pretty much led them all there. Well, Nathan did, but Elena is too nice to blame him entirely. So off Elena and Nate go after Schaffer.
They follow Lazarevic to a big creepy monastery in the mountains, and find Schaffer. But it is too late, as he dies there with them. Nathan and Elena find the entrance to Shambhala, and look who turns up, but Lazarevic with his best buddy Harry Flynn and Chloe Fraser. Lazarevic has finally figured out that Chloe is on Nate’s side and just as he is about to murder Nate and Elena up jump some massive weird blue men who start shooting crossbow bolts at everyone. Nate, Chloe and Elena take this as their cue to get the hell out of Dodge, and off they go in the confusion. At this point Chloe wants to find the exit and go and get drunk, but Elena shuts her down by saying they have to finish what they started. And Nathan is on Elena’s side.
The three of them eventually reach the centre of Shambhala, and what they think is the Cintamani Stone, but Nathan thinks something is wrong, and works out that in fact it isn’t a real stone, but a metaphor. The weird blue guys were in fact guardians who have drunk the sap of the massive tree in the middle of Shambhala which gives super human strength. And this is really what Lazarevic wants. At which point Harry Flynn staggers in congratulating Nate on his powers of deduction. Harry has obviously had the shit kicked out of him by Lazarevic, who also gave him a grenade without the pin. Harry is full of self-pity, so he drops the grenade, killing himself and seriously wounding Elena, who approached him because she wanted to help him. Chloe carries Elena as far away as she can, while Nathan goes and give Lazarevic what he is due. Lazarevic does a good speech about how he and Nate are not so different, after all, how many people has Nate killed, yada yada. Nate ends him, though, and Shambhala starts to fall apart, because this is Uncharted and everything falls apart. He escapes and is reunited with Chloe who is still with Elena who is fading very fast. Damn that stupid Harry Flynn.
The final scene shows Tenzin and Nathan leaving offerings at the village shrine for Schaffer, and perhaps Elena. But oh my goodness, thankfully she is not dead, but recovering. Sully has turned up, because he is Sully and Nathan needed a friend. Chloe directly asks Nathan whether he loves Elena, and he indirectly says he does. Chloe knew it, really, and she slopes off with no hard feelings. I could make a very awful joke about Sully’s hard feelings as he follows Chloe home. “You are a dirty old man, Sullivan!” calls Nathan after him. He and Elena chat about how scared Nate was that she was going to die. Finally, they snog.
The final part is here…