It's hard to put into words
You can't review a game 3 days after its release date and call it 'the best game I have ever played' and expect people to take you or your reviews seriously from that point onwards. I am aware of this. The fact that I even have to be thinking about this says a lot about how much I liked Uncharted 2.
The original Uncharted was my introduction to the PS3 and having sat down overnight with a friend and played right through it I was very impressed. There was some trouble with the combat, with enemies taking seemingly hundreds of bullets each to fell and a fair amount of what I have come to call 'grenade surgery' where enemies will throw grenades and without fail they will land either right next to you or occasionally will actually land directly on you. In retrospect I found it more funny than annoying anyway. Everything else about the original game had me very excited, since it was so good it almost had to mean the coming of a new AAA series I could look forward to every few years.
Flash forward two years and here is that first sequel, Uncharted 2: Among Thieves. Every one of my very few problems with the original has been solved and every single aspect of the game has been improved so drastically that it is hard to even believe it came out in the same console generation, let alone only two years. The most immediately striking thing about the game is the graphics. This is the best looking game in existance. Let me repeat that and bold it: The Best Looking Game In Existance. I have seen people on forums claim that the graphics do not impress them. These people are either lying or they have never seen a videogame before. Simple as that. The jungle areas are the most impressive, but every area in the game keeps up a very high visual standard.
The cutscenes, voice acting, storyline and the characters in general are absolutely superb. It's great seeing these characters again and it's really surprising to see this quality of storyline in a videogame. If this game were an Indiana Jones style adventure movie, it would be the best one so far. You heard me. The storyline itself isn't super original, so this all comes down to the strength of the acting and the presentation of the action. These are almost unmatched in videogaming.
The quality of the action throughout the game keeps it genuinely exciting throughout. In any other game something explodes or a character makes a jump and it's just something that happens. In Uncharted 2 every single one of these moments is an amazing experience. The incredible action setpieces start out correctly, with Drake climbing up a train car which is hanging over the edge of a cliff and falling to pieces and if anything they improve from there. I'm not going to spoil any more of them, just play the game. Uncharted 2 is good enough that I would probably go as far as recommending someone buy a PS3 and a HDTV just to experience it.
Now we come back to my opening paragraph. How good does a game have to be, how much better an experience than anything in memory before you can feel comfortable calling it "The Best"? I have been thinking about little else since the opening moments of the game. Game of the Year? Almost certainly. Hard to imagine it being topped. Best game of the generation? Probably.
I have been trying for three days to think of a better overall game experience than Uncharted 2 and I have been unable to.