Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness

Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Angel of Darkness

It’s no secret we’ve all been waiting for this one for quite some time now, but Lara Croft’s latest adventure was hardly at the centre of the games we saw at E3. To begin with, the controls have changed, which makes the game harder to get into for past fans, and plenty of unforgiving areas suggest reasons for why a brief play of the game at E3 wasn’t the best way to uncover it’s potential. Fortunately, now, after an extended play through of the game I’m feeling a lot more positive towards it, though it isn’t without its faults.

As the first ‘next generation’ Tomb Raider, (which sets you running and jumping around various locations in a third person perspective fighting people and creatures) and after the separation between the previous incarnation and ‘Angel of Darkness’, we were all expecting something quite advanced, and in many ways it is. The questions we have to ask ourselves are ‘is it a good game?’, and ‘does it hold up to the previous Tomb Raiders?’ Before I can answer those, I think I’d better explain how very different it is.

Lara has never looked this good

So this is Lara in the year 2003...

Set in a mixture of Paris and Prague, the game starts with Lara and a mysterious professor arguing about something. The lights go out, we hear gunfire, and Lara must escape. In here is our first problem, with the plot centred around the ‘Obscura Paintings’ which are being used to bring back something very evil, the opening of the plot is weak, not because of the lovely introduction or scenario, but because of the addition of what I would consider a cheap plot elongation trick. Apparently Lara can’t remember whether it was her or not who shot the professor.

Sure, it’s touched upon later and is forgivable, but when starting your long journey through tombs, churches and weirdly complex puzzles you lose faith in Lara for ‘not remembering’. Definitely a lame plot device to keep you guessing, the game does look much more beautiful. Lara herself has a lot more detail, fluid animations that tend to transition from one to another excellently, and the locations are covered in detail. The animation transitions causes our second problem… because they all occur so nicely, a sacrifice must have been made to control, since it feels very much less immediate, and more clunky. The rest of the graphics are superb though with that lovely heat wave effect being on the top of my list.

Oh, to be able to control Lara

The levels are now much more varied than in the previous games.

Instead of the tried and tested player centric control system used in the previous Tomb Raiders, whereby pushing left would turn you left, this incarnation of the series sees movement from the camera’s perspective. This means that you have to push the direction that you wish to walk, which makes very accurate turning, perhaps before a jump quite difficult.

The levels are much more varied and less blocky than previous Lara incarnations with almost every location and even room looking drastically different from the others, which is great except for the fact that the standards of how far you can jump are very hard to judge since you have no basis of reference for how far a single jump is now. Sure, you’ll get used to it, but it doesn’t make things any easier.

Hear ye, hear ye

Take Lara to Paris... but be aware that it's not going to be a romantic evening.

The soundtrack is outstanding… I mean totally incredible. It’s perfectly filmic and cinematic, while retaining dynamic sections for in-game tracks, and I love it. It is perhaps my favourite orchestral soundtrack for a game, and works fine with the sound effects, ambient and one shot. Voice acting could be better, with Lara being the best of the bunch, but the rest of the characters lacking a bit in substance and realism.

A substantial portion of the start of the game takes place on the streets of Paris, with you talking to various characters and investigating where to get your next lead from, and feels very much like Broken Sword 3 in this section, i.e. a lot of adventuring and very little action, although the small amount there is takes the established Lara style and twists it nicely into a night club. Thankfully, there are a couple of multiple ways of doing this investigation section, so it doesn’t have to be exactly the same game when playing through twice. This gives a lot of chance to interact with various Parisian characters, but many of the voices are very transparent and easy to hear the mistakes. Normal sound effects however aren’t anything to fault, perhaps with a little annoyance at Lara’s over dramatising jumping into a wall.

When you’ve got the urge to kill…

Many males have dreamed about getting physical with Lara, but it actually seems to a very lethal experience.

We’ve established that the weapons don’t sound bad at all, but there is quite a bit of variety. You’ll come across plenty of types of handgun, including an electro-stun gun which takes down anybody you come across in one swift hit (although it is meant to stun them, we can assume that they’re not getting up for quite some time considering after a short time, their bodies fade out). The rest of the standard Lara arsenal are back, which mostly still feel quiet satisfying, but the biggest weapon change is that none of your guns have infinite ammo.

In previous Tomb Raiders, your standard pistols at least would be your bare minimum of weapon, which you could fire endlessly, but here you’ll have to search out ammo for all of your weapons if you hope to use them at all. Fortunately, you now have a hand-to-hand combat system which works nicely against weaker foes, but if you start trying to take out some of your more supernatural foes with your hands and feet, you may find yourself sliced up quicker than Lara can whip out her shotgun.

Let’s use them guns

Enemies start out as merely people you have to overcome. Some are guards, others are more guards, but they’re always trying to stop you investigate some kind of archaeological find. Fortunately, the repetitive nature of these enemies is diluted with the clever locations, and being able to sneak up on them from behind for a swift takedown, but suddenly, about a third of the way through the game, you come across your first supernatural enemy (whom I wouldn’t even call a ‘Boss’). Your previous best friend, the stun gun has little or no effect on this character, and in fact he can’t even be killed (at least after wasting all my ammo on him, I’m pretty sure).

This sudden change of easy enemies to difficult ones doesn’t seem very fair in the gameplay mechanics, completely catching me off guard with something un-killable, of course if you’ve wasted all of your ammo, you’d better hope you saved your game beforehand.

Save Me

You never know, what lures around the next corner, and thus you end up saving all the time.

Saving can take place anywhere in the game, and as many times as you like, although you are limited to eight save game slots. Because there are so many annoying instant death situations, such as walking into a trap, or falling down a misjudged jump, you’ll eventually start saving madly after every little thing you do, to ensure you don’t have to go back to the top of a chasm, or kill that security guard again. The constant pull of saving all the time often wrecks the atmosphere, and makes the game something it shouldn’t be.

Perhaps the most insane scenario where Lara suffers an instant death is when you’ve finally tracked down someone you’re looking for and you enter a cinematic conversation (which incidentally breaks cinematic rules such as ‘crossing the line’ consistently, fortunately though saved by the excellent lip synching). You are given the chance to choose what Lara says, like in many conversations beforehand, and just by choosing the wrong thing, you’ll be automatically killed. If you haven’t saved in this area, you’ll have to go back even to the previous level.

Feeling stronger

Lara is on the run...

A strange attempt on originality is the other main addition to the gameplay of the newest Tomb Raider game, which centres on strength. Lara can pick up a crowbar at an early stage of the game that lets her break locks, and she can normally just kick doors in, or open particularly heavy doors, however some of these obstacles aren’t possible when you first encounter them, because you aren’t strong enough. The solution is to find another strength using situation in the same level, such as another door to kick down and do it, which will then cause Lara’s strength to rise and allow you to open the original door.

Now I’m not stupid… without an actual strength figure, there is no way to disprove that this is anything but a cheap way of trying to make the button pushing puzzle more interesting. Instead of running around to try and find a button to open a door, you have to run around to find something that will increase your strength so that you can open the door. Sounds familiar, no? That said and done, I find it strange that opening one door will suddenly give you the strength to open another, although at least it does keep things relatively original.

Looking at the bad things

Angel of Darkness is perfect for newcomers to the series.

To be honest, the game is still fun to play; I have singled out the negative aspects of the game, so that an established Tomb Raider fan will know what they’re getting themselves in to. With such extras available from the beginning as the trailer for the new Tomb Raider film, and a ‘making of’ feature for the game added as bonuses, it’s quite an attractive package overall. Even discounting the gameplay aspects I’ve mentioned, it’s not faultless, with the most apparent bug being shadows appearing in the wrong place, projected on a floor underneath the one where Lara is standing for example.

Newcomers to the series would find this one a good one to start with, considering the change in controls, and overall rise in quality of everything in the game, and will definitely have a good time. Established fans may not appreciate the game as much as they might, if they considered The Angel of Darkness to be a new game in a new series, but ultimately, Lara’s first outing for the next generation of consoles is generally a pretty great (if a different) one, after all, who can fault a curvaceous brunette athletically running and flipping around in tight fitting clothes with guns?