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TOMB RAIDER: ANGEL OF DARKNESS (PC)
Lara Croft - not even a pretty face...
By MARTIN KINGSLEY
 Console
port. The dirtiest of dirty curses in the mouth of a dedicated geek and,
in general, a bane upon the mighty PC…Or something; In other words,
most console ports are crap, okay? Let's leave it at that.
In certain cases, we see good
transfers from lowly console systems, for instance GTA3 and its Miami-based-brother-in-arms
Vice City.
Now those are what every port
should aspire to be.
Unfortunately, Angel of Darkness
for PC has failed almost totally to reach that goal, instead opting to
be a cheap cop-out that deserves to be shunned without reservation.
For the first time in maybe
three hundred and forty years, I have been stunned speechless by incompetence.
There can be no other word for what I saw on my screen upon installing
Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness for the PC. The worst part is it's a 21-inch
screen.
Where to hide, where to
hide, where to hide?!
OK, I'll stop with the meanness
now, but really, there is something seriously flunked going on here. I
won't bother with the general story and gameplay outline here, because
you can check out my PS2 review of
AoD if that's what you're after, yesirree.
Anyway, moving along…nothing
works.
Speaking in both visual and
practical terms, AoD for PC is not a happy unit. The menu doesn't display
properly or even finish showing up, the screen goes black for no reason,
not to mention that the frame-rate could be outrun by a twenty-cent piece
dropped through a foot of wet concrete despite the fact that everything,
no matter the resolution, is pixellated. [Sweet! - Ed]
Oh, and the subtitles are something
akin to corrupted, with big blank squares showing up halfway through pieces
of text, seemingly at random.
 It's horrific, really,
and looks like something from the bad old days of '96; before anybody
says anything about either inadequate hardware or the porting process
from PS2 to PC, let me assure you that neither excuse is valid.
Firstly, AoD was tried out
on both a 1.3GHz Celeron with a GeForce 4 MX440 and an AMD Athlon +2200
with a Ti4200, all with the latest drivers etc. Both came up the same.
As for the whole idea of 'porting
is difficult to do', well, if Konami can do it, and Rockstar can do it,
why can't Core do it? What makes Core so special that it can't produce
a properly coded port?
That provides a terribly unstable
basis from which to work for any prospective gamer. From the second you
start the game up and navigate your way past the cluttered exterior setup
screen, you have, to quote numerous Star Wars characters, 'a bad feeling
about this'.
The first twenty minutes of
gameplay are so utterly difficult to get to grips with that many people
may just go out and buy a PS2 in an attempt to avoid the pain.
You'll get stuck trying to
climb onto a dumpster, the game will crash at least twice before you hit
the Paris rooftops, and trying to move to the menu will result in the
screen fading to black and never returning. That's bad. Very bad.
Remember, this happened on
two different computers. Two. If this was only one computer, then maybe
all of this could be waved away as some kind of malicious software glitch,
but no, this happened consecutively with totally different bits of hardware
and still I get a game that is about as playable as billiards without
a cue.
In the event you aren't fazed
by these events (which means you must have access to about three tonnes
of Prozac…gimmegimmegimme!), you'll quickly find that you
are unable to change the control system, on account of the fact that the
menu is totally screwed.
 Usually, this wouldn't
be such a problem on account of somebody without three point five hands
sprouting from weird places setting up the default control scheme.
AoD, however, has a default
setup that can cause the player the kind of grief generally reserved for
when the repo men come to take away your shiny home theatre kit.
Interestingly, the sound hasn't
suffered at all. Odd, that. Everything seems to sound pretty much hunky-dory,
which I suppose is something of a relief if you've just spent five hundred
dollars on a Sound Blaster Audigy Platinum or some such. So, at the end
of this slightly under-worded review, what do we have?
Answer: A bad looking, almost
unplayable, buggy mess of a port that personifies everything I hate about
big business.
For that, I condemn the PC
version of Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness to the deepest pit of Hell to
hang in irons next to Space Channel 5 Part 2, where legions of Amiga fans
past shall feast upon its condemned flesh for all eternity, their cries
of 'Space Invaders forever' echoing infinitely through the fiery corridors
of the Underworld.
Ain't life grand?
ORIGINALITY 35%
SOUND/GRAPHICS 40%
PLAYABILITY 30%
ENJOYMENT 60%
OVERALL 35%
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