[quote name='Vanigan']The first segment of the game, after the initial short gunfight, has a very long segment of just exploration, platforming, and discovering ancient ruins with your pal Sully.
While the game does get more combat focused later on, and I did find myself wishing for another long stretch of just that, there was enough platforming in there to make it enjoyable.
Frankly, Tomb Raider's platforming was pretty tedious at times, although Legend had a lot of good exploration based platforming puzzles. If they could combined the more fluid platforming and gunplay from Uncharted with the puzzles of Legend, they could easily come up with a longer game.
The problem here is appeal. To do this, the game has to appeal to both gamers while not leaving either one behind. For action gamers, the gunplay is good, but sadly the puzzles had to be very toned down. For platforming puzzles gamers, there's less there admittedly, I think they should have included a lock on targeting for gamers that aren't into the combat as much. Then they could provide two difficulty settings, one for combat and one for puzzles. Higher combat settings means no lock on, more waves more difficult AI routines. Higher puzzle difficulty means exploring larger sections of areas and deciphering clues without a book to instantly tell you the answer.
I hope this happens for Uncharted 2 now that they've got a lot of the base content creation out of the way.[/QUOTE]
I appreciate your input. I played past the Sully part, to where your plane crashes. You then happen upon dozens of heavily-armed people who come at you from several inconvenient angles, and dying respawns you in a different corner than you started in -- thus confusing you.
After a bit of this, I realized I was having no fun and my sealed Mario Galaxy and my still-not-beaten Assassin's Creed were beckoning.
As I said to that troll guy whose name escapes me, I'm glad other people are digging the game. I tend to be more of a melee guy, because of my own personal background, so I can tolerate swords more than guns. And again, this just wasn't what I was expecting. Sony sent a big book of promo stuff and most of it was pictures of lush jungles or animated characters. There wasn't a single AK-47 in the bunch.