Previews// Uncharted 3 Beta

The Uncharted 3 beta is totally happening now. People are out there climbing stuff and killing people. Maybe you're already in there. Maybe you killed me and gloated over my virtual corpse (I probably deserved it). Despite my ineptitude, I've been playing it.

There are only two maps to play through, but people are clearly enjoying it. I've seen plenty of players at the level cap of 25 (and have seen reports of players who mysteriously surpassed it) on my slow, painful crawl up the rankings.

The two maps in question are an airstrip and a château. The château certainly takes the prize for 'best-looking' – it's a dilapidated old... well, château, set in a jungle in the arse end of nowhere. The lighting on the map is pretty stunning. It's good enough to have much the same effect as watching Wish You Were Here or Sky Holidays or whatever TV outlet they show holiday programmes on nowadays – you actually want to go there.

Of course, you're not in the Uncharted 3 beta to take in the scenery. The air strip map is the better of the two in terms of actual combat. It's well-balanced, has a nice vertical spread and gets the added bonus of a high-speed chase at the start of Team Deathmatches in which you're forced to try your shot from the back of moving vehicles.

As well as Team Deathmatch, you get a Free for All mode, Hardcore (which takes out boosters and kickbacks), Three Team Deathmatch (you and a buddy against two other teams of two) and Co-op Arena, which is the now-obligatory co-op mode in which you face down hordes of enemies.

The two features that really stand out in the beta are kickbacks and power plays. The kickback is a pre-selected bonus – say, the ability to spawn an RPG from out of your arse - that you'll get when you reach a pre-determined number of medals. And the medals come thick and fast – it doesn't seem to matter how badly you're doing, Naughty Dog seems determined to send rewards your way. You'll get them for various things, from uninterrupted killstreaks on one end to staying under cover for a certain amount of time on the other. And, sooner or later, points mean prizes! It certainly keeps things interesting.

The power plays do a very good job of keeping matches on an even keel. If one team's slipping a little behind a power play gets introduced. This might give one team the ability to see the other, it might mean that all of a sudden everybody looks like a skeleton so you can't tell who the hell you're shooting at. In any case, it keeps a team match from being a one-sided slaughter-fest.

The beta's not perfect. The biggest flaw is probably the melee attack. You'll charge up to someone and, certain you're in range to smack them, find you're windmilling into the air. This typically ends with you getting the shit knocked out of you. This typically doesn't feel very good. Still, that's why this is a beta and not the finished product.

The climbing surfaces are also a bit hit and miss. In the air strip, particularly, there are spots that look perfectly scalable, but as you make the jump you find that you were actually dead wrong and you're being shot in the back. But, again, there's plenty of time for that to be remedied.

My favourite mode so far is the co-op arena. Away from the frenetic chaos of the competitive modes there's a more intimate feel and the time you need to strategise with your teammates. Play alternates between 'seige', in which you need to group in a fixed area and only kills made from that area will count, 'survival', in which enemies keep coming at you and you keep killing, and 'goldrush', in which you have a short window of time in which to shift some treasure from one part of the map to another as enemies obstruct you. Occasionally in 'survival' you'll be held up by one straggling baddie that you have to hunt down and it feels like your game's being pointlessly delayed, but beyond that it's a very satisfying mode.

A few faults aside, the Uncharted 3 beta is promising good things for the finished product.