Uncharted 2: Among Thieves/Tree of Life

Elena has been badly injured, but you have no choice except to stop Lazarevic from gaining the power of the Cintamani Stone. The conclusion to the game plays out much differently than what has come before, as the developers eschewed a strategic battle, special platforming maneuvers or puzzle-solving in favor of wild running and gunning. The final showdown pits Drake against an overpowered Lazarevic, where nicely honed FPS skills will come in handy. Ditching the more realistic enemy AI model from the rest of the game, Lazarevic is a standard, "damage him to see successively more powerful incarnations" boss, a familiar archetype from the very beginning of gaming on 8-bit systems.

Save the world
Head down the cliffs to the grotto at the bottom, where you'll find the wellspring of the blue resin, which it turns out is actually an elixir for eternal life. Instead of shooting him in the head before he becomes invincible, Drake will wait until Lazarevic has drank his fill and gained immortality before shooting the incredibly flammable substance and blowing everyone up. It causes a huge explosion, but of course Lazarevic is protected by the magic of the resin, so he will get up and begin hunting you down.

You're in a circular area surrounding the flaming, blue pool of resin that will kill you if you stay in it for more than a second. There are plenty of spots to get cover and places where you'll need to climb up a short ledge to keep moving. There is also a small chasm on one side that you'll need to jump over to pass. All over the grotto are large, glowing resin pods. Lazarevic will chase you down, blasting you with his shotgun. Thehttp://strategywiki.org/w/skins/common/images/button_headline.png only way to damage him is to shoot out a resin pod while he's beside it and catch him in the blast. The closer he is, the more damage it will cause. Keep running away from him – backwards, if you can – and shoot pods behind you while running. Don't bother wasting the time to aim with psx: L1, unless you can also hide behind some cover, and grenades are also fairly useless here. If Lazarevic catches up to you, he'll grab you and smack you around. Mash psx: S when indicated and he'll throw you away. This encounter will damage you quite a bit, so if you're not at full health, you might die. You'll also want to avoid sticking around the resin pods yourself for very long, as Lazarevic's shots have a fairly wide spread and you'll take a lot of damage from the resulting explosion.

After causing enough damage, Lazarevic will stumble and a small cut scene will play where he yells at you. This happens three times altogether, and after the first two he'll start throwing grenades behind and in front of you. Obviously you'll want to avoid those, but they don't change your tactics any as you'll still just need to blow up the regenerating resin pods while he's near them. After the grenades, he becomes faster and throws more grenades, and when you finally get wear him down a fourth time, it's all over. This fight will be made easier through repetition as you learn where the good spots to stop and turn around are, and a certain amount of skill or dexterity in quickly acquiring your target while moving.

Tips

While you can easily keep on running indefinitely around the map without getting killed, there are two main factors that contribute to the difficulty on this level: 1. It is natural for you to set the camera to face forward when you are running forward. However this makes it impossible to keep track of Lazarevic's exact location while he is chasing you on your back. It is difficult to plan which pod to shoot in advance when you are always losing track of him. 2. Although the track in this level is essentially circular, there are multiple paths sitting next to each other. Often there are a "higher" path and a "lower" path on the same segment of the track, and also close to the chasm the track forks into two separate paths. This means that Lazarevic would not necessarily retrace your exact path, making him much more difficult to track.

Try the following to improve your odds:

- Be wary of his shotgun, but do not get paranoid. In the first two phases of the fight, when Lazarevic is not throwing grenades at you, try to turn your camera backward to see where he is as much as possible when you can find a relatively straight, clear path ahead of you. If you've totally lost track of him, you may actually want to stop for a couple of seconds so that he could catch up (but only in the first two phases).

- Every now and then when you turn your camera back to find Lazarevic but cannot locate where he is, try looking towards the middle of the map. If you still cannot find him, start running again and look for him later.

- When you are running up to a pod that looks to be "promising", start turning your camera around as you are running past it. It may be too slow to stop and turn the camera after you have run past the pod.

- When you think you may be risking survival to take an opportunistic shot (e.g. you have missed your first shot at a pod and you could see Lazarevic coming close to the pod), survival should take precedence.

- Beware of the forked paths close to the chasm mentioned above. If you are focusing too much on tracking Lazarevic on one of the two paths, he may be ambushing you from the other.

- If in doubt whether Lazarevic is close by a particular pod, just shoot the pod regardless.

Most importantly, you would just need to familarise yourself with the map to a certain extent before you could have any realistic chance of beating him.

If you are really struggling with this level, there is a sure (but cheap) way of beating Lazarevic available on youtube. It involves hanging off the ledge of a square block in the map, and luring Lazarevic into jumping on top of the block while you shot the pods around it by shimmy around the ledge.

Back to the girls
During the fight, the whole place was coming down around you, and now that's it's over you'll need to get out of there. You'll find yourself in front of a bridge, so head across it as it crumbles. Your job here is to jump at the correct times to make it over the gaps being created. Toward the end of the bridge, your viewpoint will flip and you'll be running toward the camera, but the same moves apply. When you make it back to your friends, you'll be attacked one final time by a Shambhala guardian, and you'll need to shoot him while sliding down the tilting bridge in an interactive cut scene. That marks the last player-controlled sequence of the game. Continue watching the movies to see what happens with the characters after the dust has settled.