TOMB RAIDER: ANGEL OF DARKNESS (PS2)


Lara Croft returns - but do we care?

By MARTIN KINGSLEY

Maybe it's time Core moved on, eh? Admittedly, their main cash cow --I mean marketable heroine-- has made them rich. Very rich…Very very rich…OK, OK, exorbitantly, decadently, utterly rich.

There, happy now? Good.

But, while Hollywood says differently, you cannot stay alive by simply relying on the same formula time after time after time, making occasional cosmetic tweaks for the sake of it.

The whole Lara Croft thing is starting to get a bit tired, honestly, and even the most brain-dead of fanboys will eventually have to come to the realisation that there is actually a physical limit to how big those boobies can get before they actually attain their own place in the credits and need separate agents to negotiate screen appearances.

Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness (AoD for short) is not a bad game, as such, but then again, it's definitely not the revolution we were supposed to be getting and, judging from the masses of bugs I'm seeing even now, methinks that somewhere along the line the boys in the boardroom started exerting pressure on the programming team to compile the code and get ready to release before Christmas.

A second possibility, remote though it maybe, is that Core Design have gotten tired of producing Lara Croft games just as I have gotten tired of playing them, and just assembled a few new textures and animations and then got the work-experience kid to cobble together a few lines of code whilst drinking massive amounts of coffee in a half-hearted attempt to justify their also-massive production budget.

Either way, AoD does not really live up to the hype that has surrounded it all through the development cycle, and instead offers us more of an evolution than a revolution.

The story line starts up some time after The Last Revelation, with Lara once again out and about. During a heated argument with her mentor, Werner Von Croy, in Von Croy's Parisian apartment, someone or something knocks her out and then, in rather grisly fashion, does away with Lara's aged guru, leaving her to take the rap for it when Paris' finest conveniently show up at the door as she awakens, covered in the old man's blood.

From there, things move quickly from simply clearing the Tomb Raider's name to obtaining the five Obscura paintings, rumoured to have mysterious powers, and once again saving the world as we know it.

Ah... The great themes never change, do they?

So, you're not going to get much out of the story, let's put it that way, eh? That leaves the gameplay to entertain, yes? Speaking in the broadest terms possible, the gameplay is good.

It's just that every other element connected with the game seems to want to conspire against it in a concerted effort to ruin the experience for the player.

Take, for instance, the control scheme, or lack thereof. I have never, in my short existence on this earth, seen a game that takes so long to respond or handles so inadequately, except for maybe "Plumbers Don't Wear Ties", a game that had so much failing to go for it that you could only score it using a negative rating system.

You can attempt to turn forty degrees and end up spinning a full hundred and eighty, or vice versa, and you will be utterly AMAZED at how long it takes this girl to get into first gear when you try to move forward. It's slower than trying to get a car moving by hitting the rear-bumper with a sledgehammer.

You can spend nigh on a minute trying to get into position just to climb through a bloody window, and don't even get me started on jumping, an activity that nearly resulted in my throwing the PS2 through the floor-to-ceiling windows of my fifteenth story apartment, where it would have flown down into the night before inevitably striking the sidewalk at an appreciable fraction of light speed in a shower of sparks and black plastic.

Camera angles don't help at all and, thanks to the game's predisposition to putting the camera in some really weird places and also thanks to the fact that AoD uses directional movement (the various directions of Up, Down etc are related to which way the camera is facing at the time). It's worse than Resident Evil, I tell you!

Thankfully, Lara has auto-aim. This is something of a consolation.

Oh, and now she can beat the living crap out of various enemies should a gun not happen to be handy, although there are only a few moves to be performed in a close-combat sense and they aren't exactly all that original, so this quickly becomes nothing more than a novelty in an industry where novelty is not enough to assure you a place on the podium.

Oh, and there's a stealth mode, where our Lady-of-Bountiful-and-Really-Bouncy-Assets gets to creep around like Solid Snake or, at least, Solid Snake in tight-ass jeans.

*becomes fixated on television* Mmm…Jeans…*drool*

Unfortunately, the stealth mode is probably the most pointless addition to AoD yet, in that you can usually just run past rooms of patrolling guards without triggering an alarm, and also in that there are certain places that will cause an alert regardless of whether you had stealth activated or not. Sometimes, I really hate scripting...

While we're on the subject of scripting, it would be wise for me to mention the various bugs that afflict this latest fruit of the Tomb Raider franchise, most importantly its tendency to freeze at random junctures, and the screwball way AoD deals with enemy corpses, although I suspect that's more of an 'unannounced feature' than a bug.

Anyway, out of all the console games I've ever put through the big black box, the total times all those games together have frozen up on me I could count on the fingers of one seriously mutilated hand.

Angel of Darkness iced over no less than four times in the time I spent with it. Jeepers creepers. Now, if I remember correctly, the reason most people buy consoles in the first place is so that they DON'T have to deal with frozen games. How deliciously ironic.

On the dead body front, corpses have a propensity for disappearing even as you look at them. Oh, and they have badly applied rag-dolling, bouncing around like contorted mannequins before flickering into oblivion.

It is almost immediately obvious that the Core team have been experimenting with some really good acid.

On a slightly less hallucinatory note, we have, for the first time in the history of the Tomb Raider series, a secondary character to play. He's a burly bloke going by the name of Curtis Trent, and he's got the use of a few interesting abilities, but nothing spectacular.

Actually, the most interesting thing about him, to my mind, is the oh-so-heavily-modified pistol he's always lugging around; it looks less like a handgun and more like some kind of miniature weapons platform.

Methinks he is seriously overcompensating for something so clearly Freudian that its not even funny. OK, maybe it is just a little bit funny.

Hee hee!

Getting back to the subject at hand…AoD is a pretty game. Not retina-bursting by any turn of the imagination, but pretty nonetheless.

Some definite polygonal renovation has gone on with Ms. Croft, cosmetically speaking, and it shows, really it does. Some of the environments are also very pretty and animation is definitely on the up-and-up, thank you very much, although you'll spend so much time grappling with the controller that you may very well miss a lot of the graphical improvements the first time around.

Finally, a lot has been made of the new character improvement element of Angel of Darkness. Sorry to disappoint all those D&D nerds out there whose idea of heaven involves a statistics table on one side of the screen and a to-scale model of Lara on the other, but it is just not going to happen.

See, the way the whole thing has been implemented leaves a lot to be desired, really. The way it works could be described as the following: You find certain sections in the level that generally require either particular items or particular physical skills to pass.

The first level is a perfect example, in that you have a locked closet, a crowbar and a narrow area of ledge. You can't open the locked closet without the crowbar, and you can't cross the ledge unless you have a better strength rating.

So, you take the crowbar and force open the closet, netting yourself a gun in the process. This exertion causes Lara to become stronger, which in turn allows you to then shimmy across the ledge with your newfound strength. And so forth.

Plenty of these situations crop up during the time you'll spend with Lara's latest outing, and, while a few of them can be genuinely interesting, most tend to err on the side of tedium.

On the "closing comments and looking for something to say" side of things, AoD comes with a trailer for the upcoming Tomb Raider 2 flick (the Cradle of Life…no comment) and a "Making Of" section which covers various bits and pieces of AoD.

Despite all that I've said here, Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness is not a bad game. It's just not very good. It's mediocre, and, when you consider how long it's been in development, that's just not good enough.

Mediocrity is not what we desire from the gaming industry, mediocrity is not what causes inspiration, nor is mediocrity a cause for celebration. I'm not asking for the latest, greatest, most utterly ground breaking game ever to hit the shelves, guaranteed to educate and enlighten.

I'm just asking for someone to care about what it is their putting out for us to play. Is that too much to ask?

ORIGINALITY 65%
SOUND/GRAPHICS 80%
PLAYABILITY 65%
ENJOYMENT 65%
OVERALL 70%