"Wretched"

Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness

I am not a religious man. Yet, I feel it fitting to begin this review with a short prayer.

Dear Supreme Being (tm), oh wisest overseer of leisure activities, grant me the patience to finish this game. And yea, though I am forced to walk lest I fall into lava, and though mine avatar responds not to my commands with precision, give me the strength not to linger unhealthily on the overemphasized attributes of mine avatar, but to focus upon the needlessly difficult and contrived puzzle before me, and thereby progress to the next predictable yet inane plot point.

Amen.

Hi there. If you looked in on my prayers, you might have an inkling of what I'm about to tell you re: Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness. Let me say up front, this is a great game... for 1996.

There are many, many things wrong with this game. So many that I feel obliged to tell you what is good about this game first, just to get it out of the way. The graphics are not bad. *That's it*.

Now I'll break down the broken down mess that is the rest of the game.

- Controls: Horrible! I hope you don't judge me too harshly, but just to illustrate the point, I died three times in the *tutorial level*. Three times. In the tutorial level. Three... It's a tutorial level! How can you die in a tutorial level?! Horrible controls, that's how. You control Lara's movement with the analog stick. You can also force her to walk by clicking a shoulder button. In order to not step off a ledge, Lara must be walking. If she is in the default mode (in which she runs), she will step right off and plunge to her doom. Also, jumping is horrible. Sometimes she knows what you're telling her to do, and will jump forward. Sometimes she doesn't, and will jump sideways (once again booking brunch with the aforementioned doom), or straight up (and usually just look a little silly doing it). Either way, jumping is an all or nothing gambit - you can't control the distance or height of a jump. If you've played any of the PSone Tomb Raider games, the controls are pretty much like that. They do not appear to have been updated in any way, other than switching basic movement to analog. Stiff, clunky, spotty - inexcusable for 2003.

- Plot: Horrible! It's one of the most contrived, generic plots in recent memory. It simply does not feel like any effort was put into making Lara's adventure a cohesive story. Events are tied together loosely, if at all, through poorly scripted interactions with various NPC's. And, to make the plot category a total stinker, let me share something - this is the first time since the original "Zork" adventure in which I have suffered an automatic death by choosing the wrong response to dialogue. And it came when Lara said something as innocuous as "don't jerk me around". This caused an uppity frenchman to shoot me dead. It didn't start a larger argument, it didn't enter into a negotiation minigame or a battle sequence, it just triggered a cutscene in which he pulled out a pistol and shot Lara in the face. In what crazy world do people shoot you in the face for saying "don't jerk me around"? It's not as though I insulted his mother or questioned his sexual identity. This is not Eddie Murphy's "Raw" material, folks. That phrase should not get you shot dead, especially not if you're a world famous explorer packing heat. Awful!

- Sound: See plot for the most grevious injuries. The quality of the sound is fine. It's what people say that boggles the mind and makes me think this game would be just as effective were it completely silent. Not to harp on the point, but dialogue interaction is just completely stupid.

- Gameplay: Horrible! Even if you manage to wrestle with the controls to the point where you can passably move Lara in the general way you want her to, even if you ignore the plot and the stupid, stupid dialogue scenes, even if you don't just give up after falling to your death for the umpteenth time because Lara jumped when you wanted her to crouch, there's still nothing here to write home about. The entire game is the same stuff in a different location.

Combat is straight up stupid. It consists of pulling out a gun and shooting things that Lara auto-aims at. And, in the middle levels, it also happens to be completely useless - shoot an enemy till it falls down, and since these enemies are of the walking dead variety, they just get back up. So, you spend a minute or two dancing around an enemy, shooting it in the face, to buy you maybe a minute to study the puzzle in the room before it gets back up and starts harassing you again. You're better off just ignoring the enemy and sparing yourself the ammo. (Disclaimer - I have not yet finished this game, so the ending levels may actually require combat).

Puzzles are either mundane and uncreative lever-pulling or else jumping puzzles made needlessly difficult by the spotty controls. And sometimes, during simple exploration, it's not entirely clear where you need to go. In the original tomb raider games, this was made fairly obvious by the different texture of interactable environments - you could pick out the stuff you could do stuff with from the stuff that was just there to block your path. Not so here. The graphical update has erased those boundaries, so now you're pretty much just searching for the appropriate place to jump, climb, swim, pull, etc until a little hand icon pops up indicating you should do something there. And if you choose wrong, more often than not you die.

Somewhat related to the plot, early in your adventure you receive a notebook, in which there are a certain number of notes written about the quest by the previous owner of the book, as well as (presumably) a number of blank pages on which Lara automatically writes about her adventure. In many games such a device is an invaluable tool to solving puzzles and keeping track of plot. Lara, apparently, has some sort of code she like to employ (I guess to foil her little brother's attempts to read her diary), because every page that gets written after you receive it is included in apparently random order. There's no rhyme or reason to how she organizes her thoughts. A clue or plot point can appear anywhere in the journal, so when it comes time to consult it for necessary clues to a puzzle, you have to cycle through the entire thing and try to decipher which pages you need and which have already been used.

The thing that drives me absolutely batty about the game is the severe affliction known as video game logic. Back in the 90's, and even the 80's, it made sense to do certain things certain ways in video games, because they were established norms. You break barrels to find items. You find a random key at the end of a mazelike series of passages and just know it belongs in the door back in the first room you entered. If it moves, kill it. etc.

Modern games, though, have moved away from video game logic. As graphics have improved, so have AI routines, game design, and puzzle design to virtually eliminate the need to use the supportive crutch of video game logic. But this game is absolutely rife with it. Some examples...

- Did you know there's an archaeological dig under the Louvre? Neither did I. But there it is - complete with inane puzzle in the center. Also, the Mona Lisa is equipped with a poison gas trap. Just thought you should know should you want to view Da Vinci's masterpiece.
- At the bottom of an ancient tunnel, sealed for centuries, guarded by undead minions, is an iron gate, behind which is *a shotgun with two boxes of shells*. The ancient gauls were apparently proficient with thrown hammers, battle axes, necromantic rituals, and the spas 12-gauge.
- The French often employ the ultra-safe "kitchen cabinet" to store their currency. They also have more rare, ancient gold coins than they know what to do with, because they are littered about a back alley. I haven't been to Paris yet, so maybe a kind reader could inform me whether their streets are actually paved with gold, because that would explain why the citizens just leave gold lying around on the ground and fire escapes.
- You spend some time (in the early game at least) collecting cash and valuables to sell at a pawn shop. There's even two spots on the streets of paris where small piles of cash just respawn, meaning if you were of a mind to, you could accumulate an infinite supply of money. It doesn't really matter, though, because there aren't any shops to spend it at. At least not that I've seen so far.

Ugh.

Oh yes, there are also some bugs. Occasionally, when you step from a higher place to a lower one, you can get stuck in a falling animation. If you save when this happens, god help you, because you now get to start over from the beginning. Hooray!

So, let's summarize. The puzzles are generic and unimaginative, the difficulty imposed through either a completely unobvious solution (eg, pull a lever in Brooklyn to open a door) or through the wonky controls. Moving Lara is no picnic, combat is uninspired and pointless. The plot is contrived, the script is asinine, and the whole game suffers from the worst case of video game logic this side of 1998. The only thing that remotely redeems the game is the graphics, and they're not exactly amazing.

Even at bargain basement prices, I cannot recommend Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness. Unless you're a diehard Lara fan, the game is just too aggravating and pointless to waste your time on.

I give it a two, because the guns smoke a little after you use them, and I think that's neat.

Reviewer's Score: 2/10, Originally Posted: 07/17/06