Game: Uncharted 2
The sequel to the amazing Uncharted. Uncharted 2, delivers more on every front to become one of the greatest games of all time, let alone 2009.
Uncharted 2 is what a great Indiana Jones movie is like. Ancient artifacts, witty dialogue, bad guys aplenty and tons of action to keep things moving along.
You play as fortune hunter Nathan Drake on an adventure to find treasure and along the way, things get complicated, blown up and shot at. Not necessarily in that order.
The game focuses on the cinematic single player experience. It is a third person shooter with a great cover mechanic that allows you to have some great gun battles. The characters banter with each other all the time and the dialogue is great and really helps to sell the moment.
You don't have to have played the first game to play this one, though the first game was great so the smart move would be to start with it.
Multiplayer was done really quite well, though the lag was pretty bad. I could see it being a lot of fun if it wasn't for that ever present problem.
One of the reasons that this game is so great, is that the voice actors aren't just reading lines from a page. They are on a montion capture stage acting the sequences out and these actions are imported into the game. It's this level of detail that makes Uncharted 2 shine.
Overall:
One of the best single player experiences I have ever had in a video game. You could take the game and convert it into a movie with very few changes and it would do great. This easily falls into the 'must play' category. :-)