Uncharted 2: Among Thieves

The sequel is regarded as the peak of the entire series and one of the reasons to own a PlayStation 3. Nathan Drake follows the trail of Marco Polo's lost caravan and the Cintamani Stone, which takes him from the streets of Nepal through snowy mountains to the mysterious Himalayan city of Shambhala. The game opens in the middle of a disaster, with the player waking up in a train car hanging over a cliff, and only later learning in flashback how they got into that situation, which instantly sets the cinematic tone for the entire story. Naughty Dog significantly improved the cover shooting, added more dynamic acrobatics including the famous sequence with a train falling off a cliff, and delivered a denser, more cinematic narrative with well-developed characters like Chloe Frazer or the villain Zoran Lazarević.

New this time were also full-fledged stealth sections, in which enemies can be silently taken out from cover or pulled off a ledge, so for the first time the player has a genuine choice in how to approach an area. Combat also plays out in vertically built environments where climbing and shooting intertwine, and the player moves from the street to a rooftop within a single firefight. Multiplayer extended the game's lifespan with both cooperative and competitive modes. Critics gave the game near-perfect scores, with many reviewers calling it the best game of the generation, and it still appears in lists of the greatest video games of all time.

Uncharted 2 showed just how far storytelling in video games could go, and became the benchmark for production value for the rest of the PS3 generation. Technically, it demonstrated how an experienced team could squeeze cinematic effects, environmental destruction, and fluid animation out of the Cell processor, at a scale of scenes that wasn't common on consoles at the time. The game's influence is visible in later action-adventures across the entire industry, and it firmly placed Naughty Dog among the absolute top game studios. The sequence with the train hanging off a cliff became one of the most-cited moments of the entire generation and demonstrated how Naughty Dog could combine scripted action with a sense of complete freedom of movement, which influenced the design of set-piece moments in dozens of later action games.