Character work and cinematic plotting may turn out to be the game’s stars, but what leaves the biggest impression after seeing a short developer-controlled playthrough is something else entirely: the blending of movement and combat mechanics. Occurring about a quarter of the way through the finished game, the level we see throws Drake into the middle of a bombed-out Nepalese city, a maze of streets and crumbling temples being violently torn apart by Among Thieves’ new antagonist, a ruthless paramilitary leader.

Like the game’s hero, he’s set on finding the Cintamani stone, but while Drake has attempted to sneak into town as a member of the press, and eventually had to resort to ramming his car through a guard outpost, the villain has brought his entire army along with him.

While there’s smoke in the air and rubble in the streets, war-torn Nepal is reassuringly different from most videogame urban battlefields: it’s kinetic and violent, but it’s also exotic and colourful. All of the textures in Among Thieves are drawn by hand, and the result is a city that looks coherent and artful rather than drab and photocopied. Little details are everywhere – from the flags and laundry strung between buildings, to the battered tuc tuc lying in a sad heap, or the flames blazing from distant towers.

The level itself is a fight through the alleyways and over the rooftops to meet up with Drake’s new love interest, Chloe, with a handful of encounters and a few scripted interruptions along the way, ranging from collapsing floors, through a driverless (and burning) busload of militia careening down the streets, to a final confrontation with a battered troop carrier blocking a crossroads.

While the first Uncharted would have lobbed a handful of enemies at Drake to be cleared out before putting him up against a bit of lonely clambering, Among Thieves’ real breakthrough is that it can now combine both seamlessly, allowing Drake to climb up behind an enemy stationed on top of a wall and yank him into the street below, or take out distant soldiers while lurching between buildings, using shop signs not only as handholds, but as useful pieces of cover.

Because of this newfound flexibility, the playthrough turns out to be a heady mix of endearingly graceless parkour and multi-level fighting. The platforming is far more organic than in the first game, broken walls slyly suggesting handholds without the need for glaringly obvious ledges, while the maze of partially destroyed houses and piles of rubble make for an excellent strategic battleground, with gunfights breaking out on the fly. The cover system has ditched its suspiciously useful configurations of boulders in favour of more believable scenery: an upside-down jeep, a derelict gas cooker or a slightly incongruous small city car, wheel-deep in old newspapers. Drake can make his own cover, too, flipping over a table or picking up an abandoned car door.