Uncharted 2 has a lot to live up to. From the legions of fans frothing at the mouth to the reputation left behind by Nathan Drake's first outing two years ago, whichever way you looked at it, Naughty Dog had to pull out all the stops to even consider besting their previous treasure-hunting adventure.

It's probably a good thing, then, that Naughty Dog didn't only pull out all the stops, they pretty much flattened them. There are few things wrong with Uncharted 2, but there are a few problems, and you'll just have to read on to find out. Shall we take a leap of faith into the review, then?

We'll start at the very beginning – the first impressions – and we guarantee that the first thing you'll think when you start up the game (other than 'this is taking quite a while to load') is 'woah'. The game is astonishingly beautiful. Just as Killzone 2 did when it released, but Drake's latest has definitely taken the title for 'Best Looking Console Game', outstripping anything else you can control with a controller. Not only is it marvellously beautiful, it's almost completely free of visual glitches. Short of seeing Drake lock unnaturally onto a ledge you've just jumped up to, and sometimes seeing, say, a foot go through a small object on the ground, the game is free of any visual oddities, which brings it into a rather exclusive club of games that look great and are devoid of tiny but annoying visual glitches. Whilst the game takes a while to load everything when you're starting/load a game, there are no loading screens after you get going.

Now that we've praised the graphics like they gave birth to us, we can move past things you already knew. If you managed to avoid praise to Naughty Dog's engine's looks, you have serious internet-ninja skills. The game follows Nathan Drake, of course, the wise-cracking but deeply established hero returning from the first game in all his glory. The first chapter immediately grabs you by having you wake up in a train, covered in blood. Oh, it's hanging from the edge of a cliff, too – did we forget to mention that? As you climb your way up the train, bits fall off as you hang onto them holding your breath, debris from above falls and knocks pieces of train off around you and the train itself shudders and gets ever closer to dropping from the precipice.

It's a stellar start to a game that is full of set-pieces that will have you holding your breath involuntarily, whether it's climbing trains to fighting helicopter, and the first problem we found isn't with these set-pieces, it's with the bits in between. The gunfights great, it's a lot of fun and it says a lot that it's more than suited to a multiplayer segment, but the difficulty is artificial – the shooting isn't always made harder by smarter enemies but by enemies who just soak up more bullets, leaving you to empty whole clips into single enemies as they walk menacingly towards you with inexplicably accurate-at-distance shotguns.

Another problem, which leads on from the previous, is that when the game does get extra difficult, whether it involves helicopters or ballistic-gel enemies, it gets really, really frustrating. At these points, it's less likely that you'll die once and much more probable that you'll die over and over until you start to cuss like a sailor every time it happens. In fact, it got so frustrating at these points that, when we finally managed to get past the section, rather than a sense of accomplishment, we just felt relieved to have finally done it.

Of course, this wouldn't be a problem if we were much, much better at the game, so it's probably our own fault. We were much more skilled when it came to the platforming however, possibly because we're all secretly mountain-climbers (maybe), but more likely due to the platforming's excellence. Unlike in many games in which you have to climb things, it isn't always obvious what you have to climb in U2 (that's short for Uncharted 2 and does not, in any way, involve Bono), which is a good thing because it means you need to use some deductive reasons rather than just jumping at the ledge that's sticking out like Paris Hilton in a nunnery.

Fret not though, because whilst the actual ledges and walls you must climb themselves don't always give it away, the camera has a habit of helpfully swinging around in a way that almost nudges you in the ribs and nods towards the path you need to take, so you're rarely just stood there at a loss for what to do.

Puzzles return to the game, but in much lesser of a quantity. It's clear that Naughty Dog were going far more in a thrilling direction than they were in a puzzling one, as there are only a few puzzles to solve through the course of the game and none of them are particularly difficult to solve. Whilst we miss needing to scratch our heads whilst feeling like idiots, we can't say we really hate the decision to gravitate towards more of an action-oriented game, except that, instead of some of those artificially difficult gunfights, we could have done with a puzzle in their place.

Throughout all of this, you're completely engrossed in a, well, an engrossing storyline that manages to actually make you care about the characters you're running around with. At times you're even unsure about their intentions, completely at a loss of whether you should trust somebody or whether they're lying. It's rare that you find a game with a storyline and dialogue that manages to entertain you and keep you guessing as to what will happen next, bringing U2 into that rather exclusive group of games with great stories. It's in at least two groups so far. Drake himself is an extremely deep character, he may well be a treasure hunter, but he's also an extremely nice guy, always putting saving people above anything else and refusing to leave anybody behind, much to the chagrin of someone else.

Did we mention how hilarious some of the script is? Whether one-liners from Drake to whole conversations (there's a conversation during the final cutscene of the game that is just gold), or even whilst looking through Drake's handbook at some of the pages that aren't there for puzzle-solving (one of which had a scale of scary things, the first of which was Sully's moustache). Everything about the game just oozes character, and the whole thing manages to amuse you as much as it does thrill you.

All of this and we still haven't mentioned the sound – the voice acting is excellent, there isn't a single line in the game that isn't delivered effectively. Explosions sound explodey (new word) and guns sound just like they should and, with surround sound, from wherever they should. The music is as effective as you might expect, creating urgency when you're battling waves of enemies and awe when you're about to step into a rather large temple. There's even a little bit of dread, too, in some places.

Uncharted 2 is as complete a package as you'll ever see, with an excellent single player and tonnes of replay value in the form of trophies (of course), collectible treasures and the option to buy extras, such as gameplay tweaks or making-of movies with money you make in game for, well, doing things, to a multiplayer that is rather excellent in it's own right, whether coop or competitive. Naughty Dog would have been hard-pressed to offer any more content, and they managed to make Uncharted 2 a real contender for game of the year and an absolutely essential game for everyone with a PS3

Now, we don't really like giving half-point scores, if we were going to do that we may as well use a 20 point review system, but it's unavoidable in this case. Uncharted 2 gets so close to a 10/10 we feel that we have to actually show that it does in the score, so the game gets...