I did it, guys. I actually went and did it. Those of you who've been following the Backlogtober 2015 blog series since it began will recall that on the last day of September I set out a list of ten games I intended to beat in the month of October, all in the name of cutting down my colossal Pile of Shame. Well, last night I beat Uncharted 2: Among Thieves, the tenth and final game on that list. Throw in the unscheduled time with Lara Croft Go in the middle of the month, and that takes my total number of games beaten this month to eleven. That's eleven games, in twenty-eight days - an incredible record, and one I'm not sure I'll surpass any time soon. Let all the nay-sayers (mainly me, I think) hang their heads in shame!

A quick aside before I get stuck into talking about Uncharted 2 in a little more detail. A couple of months back I posted a blog detailing my thought process for deciding which next-gen console I'd end up purchasing before the year was out. After leaning over either side of the fence to get a good look at what each camp is offering, I think I've finally chosen the PlayStation 4, which I'll be ordering when I get paid on Friday. A big swaying factor was discovering this bundle on Amazon, which includes a 1TB PS4 with Assassin's Creed Syndicate, Watch_Dogs, The Nathan Drake Collection and a PlayStation TV, all for just £30 more than the base 1TB console. AC Syndicate looks like the best Assassin's Creed game in a long time, and the PlayStation TV would open up the possibility to look into (an admittedly small percentage of) the Vita's library without needing to fork out for a console, as well as enabling me to play my digital PSP games on the big screen. Watch_Dogs wasn't brilliantly received, but it's hard to argue with in the context of the bundle if you think of it as a free bonus.

That just leaves The Nathan Drake Collection, which, if my experience with Uncharted 2 is anything to go by, is a very worthy inclusion in the offer. When I played the original Uncharted: Drake's Fortune a couple of years ago, it seemed like a competent action-adventure title with pretty visuals and a ton of the trademark Naughty Dog charm. I enjoyed it, but couldn't help feeling like the whole thing felt a bit like a playable tech demo, a foundation that teased players with a glimpse of what might be built upon it in the future. Having finished Uncharted 2 last night, I can honestly say that it delivers on the original's promise, iterating upon the first game's solid mechanics and hiking up the production values exponentially to deliver a tight, thrilling experience that kept my heart lodged in my throat for pretty much the entirely of my eleven-hour play-time.

Where Uncharted 2 really excels beyond its predecessor is in its action set-pieces. Sequences like traversing a moving train, or contending with an attacking helicopter on the rooftops of Borneo, provide the game with a level of spectacle that was largely absent from the original Uncharted. These scripted action sequences are thrilling to play, awe-inspiring to watch, and impossible to forget. Uncharted 2 feels like it deservedly earns the moniker of 'interactive movie', and I don't use that term in a derogatory way either - it's this element of interactivity that makes them so genuinely thrilling to experience.

As great as the huge set-piece moments in Uncharted 2 are, possibly my favourite thing about the game is the comparative subtlety of some of its character-driven moments. Nolan North delivers another fantastic performance as Nathan Drake, but it's his interaction with the other voice actors (particularly Emily Rose as Elena Fisher) that really drew me into the story of Uncharted 2. There's a natural flow to the game's dialogue, and the characters talk over and play off each other in realistic, believable ways that I don't typically associate with video games as a medium, which so often take an unnatural 'one-line-at-a-time' approach to dialogue. These performances lend the whole experience an authenticity that I've only seen in a handful of other titles, and none of those have done it as well as Uncharted 2 does.

That's not to say the game doesn't make any mis-steps at all. Combat, while functional, still doesn't feel quite as tight as other games of this ilk, a fact that's particularly noticeable coming into this off the back of the smooth-as-butter experience of playing Metal Gear Solid V. The shooting feels a little too loose and imprecise, and the enemies are pretty bullet-spongey (although this may have been a side effect of me opting for the Hard difficulty for my playthrough). While the game's traversal-based puzzles are fantastic, I do wish it had leaned a little more heavily on proper puzzle-solving at times, rather than offering obnoxiously plain solutions to the few genuine puzzles present through Nate's handy-dandy journal. These gripes are minor in the grand scheme of things, though. The combat is still more fun than frustrating, and I can appreciate that dropping more demanding puzzles in Drake's path might have damaged the game's largely perfect pacing.

I unreservedly loved almost every second of Uncharted 2. Even now, almost twenty-four hours after finishing it, I'm still thinking about those memorable set-pieces and asking myself over and over again why I left it two-and-a-half years to finally get around to playing through Drake's second adventure. I'm not sure if I'll be playing the next chapter in the Uncharted series on PS3 for the sake of continuity, or making the switch to the next-gen versions when my PS4 arrives, but one thing's for certain - I sure as hell won't be waiting another two-and-a-half years to check out Drake's Deception. It's also rekindled my interest in the upcoming Rise of the Tomb Raider, which I'll most likely pick up the Xbox 360 version of at some point shortly after release - I'd sooner play a last-gen version than wait a year for it to come to PS4, and the 2013 reboot played just fine on 360 so I've no reason to think the same wouldn't be true of Lara's next outing.

I'm still not sure what the last few days of Backlogtober will bring. Part of me wants to revel in the victory by cracking open a hundred-hour JRPG and losing myself in it for a month or two, but the other side of my brain is thinking I could put these final days to better use and keep to the spirit of the initiative by beating something else. Right now the likeliest candidate is Burial at Sea, the two-part story DLC for BioShock Infinite that I downloaded earlier this year but still haven't played yet. Regardless of the path I decide to take through the rest of October, I'll probably throw together an end-of-month retrospective looking back on the whole Backlogtober experience, which you can most likely expect one day this weekend. Until then, thanks very much for reading. Take care duders, and I'll see you around.

Dan

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Currently playing - Pokémon Alpha Sapphire (3DS)