So, I'm on the 23rd chapter of Uncharted 2. I've downed helicopters, and I've blown up tanks. I've had fist-fights on the roofs of moving trains, and twisted the arms of gods. But as this epic game builds to its ultimate crescendo, I've noticed something: the elements that marked out the earlier stages - the platforming, the gentle nuggets of puzzle solving - have gradually fallen away, leaving little more than a relentless blast through dozens of heavily armed henchmen.

Where Uncharted 2's first few hours were a breezy vaunt through a series of imaginative set pieces, engaging characters and sparkling (at least for a videogame) dialogue, the latter stages of the game feel like the brakes have been applied to the narrative. My suspicions were initially aroused during the 13th chapter.

Set on what must surely be the longest train in videogame history, the luckless Nathan Drake has to haul himself across what feels like two hundred carriages of full heavily-armed henchmen, before taking down a helicopter with a train-mounted cannon. Had the train been half as long, this would have been a genuinely brilliant stage. Instead, it almost felt like one of those moments in Scooby Doo where the characters walk in front of the same piece of endlessly looping scenery.

It was while bogged down among the sniper fire and rocket-propelled grenade attacks of chapter 23, however, that I made my most surprising discovery. Flicking through my progress statistics, I found that I'd managed to kill - whether by grenade, bullet or Arnie-style neck snapping - almost a thousand hapless enemies. That's an absolutely jaw-dropping amount, particularly for a game which, until this point, I hadn't thought of as especially violent.

I'd previously likened Uncharted 2 to a kind of interactive Raiders Of The Lost Ark, a knock-about thrill ride with cliff-hanging stunts straight out of a 30s film serial. But nearly a thousand henchmen dead? That's more like a Rambo movie.

A brief trawl through the Internet later, and I discover the marvellous moviebodycounts.com, an exhaustive necrology of Hollywood's most violent films. Now, according to their figures, the movie with the most on-screen deaths is, surprisingly, the comparatively family friendly Lord Of The Rings trilogy closer, Return Of The King. At 836 screen killings, Peter Jackson's sequel is some 200 corpses in front of number two on the list, Ridley Scott's Kingdom Of Heaven.

But Return Of The King 's body count throws Uncharted 2's into stark relief. In a game I once considered to be a piece of light entertainment, and infinitely less violent than, say, Modern Warfare 2 or Bio Shock 2, I've managed to notch up even more kills than the most death-ridden film of all time. And I've not even completed the thing yet.

To further illustrate my point, here are a few more statistics. Consider, for example, John Woo's Hong Kong epic Hard Boiled, regarded for many years as the most violent gun-based movie ever made. That contained a mere 307 screen deaths. 2008's bloodthirsty Rambo comeback? A paltry 247 confirmed kills.

By comparison, I'm a mass-murderer, a genocidal maniac, and I barely even noticed. Return Of The King 's 836 murders weren't all committed by one person, after all.

Slightly concerned, I began to do a few calculations of my own. Dividing Return Of The King's prodigious kill rate by its equally lengthy run time (200 minutes, in the case of the theatrical version), I discover that Peter Jackson managed to film approximately 4 deaths per minute. Similarly, John Woo killed people at a rate of 2.4 per minute in Hard Boiled, while Stallone managed fractionally more at 2.7.

Over a play time of around seven hours, my killing spree sounds positively restrained - a mere 1.7 enemies killed per minute. So, while I can't help but feel a pang of regret for the scores of virtual henchmen I've gunned down, and the digital wives I've widowed, I can take solace in one irrefutable fact: I'm fifty per cent less bloodthirsty than Peter Jackson.

Ryan writes his gaming column every week at Den Of Geek. Last week's is here.