Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Angel of Darkness
- June 27, 2003 09:58 AM PST
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Lara Croft has a problem, and it?s not just that she?s wanted for murder.
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Lara: Light and Dark
When Eidos first introduced Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Angel of Darkness to the world what seems like eighty years ago, they came with a lot of promises: darkly dark darkness, completely new gameplay ideas, no more endless parade of tombs, and a Lara unlike you?ve ever seen her before. Names like Shenmue and Deus Ex were flung around as models for the New Lara, games touted for their non-linear gameplay and renowned for their ability to work genuine character advancement and honest-to-goodness choice into their webs. But that was then, and this is now, and Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Angel of Darkness isn?t quite what Core seemed to be leading the world to believe. Is that a good thing? Is that a bad thing? It?s many things, really.
The Eleven Sins of Lara Croft
First the bad stuff, all in one lump sum. Most of those new ?open-ended? ideas are visible here?branching conversations, different solutions to certain puzzles, a ?city? for you to explore, strength upgrades?but in a quietly aborted form, and with the central purpose of non-linearity (i.e. to make the game more fun) almost forgotten. Take, for example, a conversation with the criminal Bouchard. You?re given two conversation options. One choice leads to the next game objective. The other leads to instantly being shot to death with no chance to retaliate?not a fight sequence, not a payout option?just death and reloading. Take also, for example, the city streets of Paris, which the first part of the game uses as a hub to connect you to the various areas. It?s meant to add to the ?non-linear? feel that you can go freely between the nightclubs, cafes, garages, and pawn shops, but there?s really no gameplay in the streets of Paris except craning your neck at textures to see if there?s a word written on them; there?s no real reward; and in the end it just feels like a waste of time.
Other new emergent Lara gameplay mechanics are simply contrived: Lara?s ?level-up? system, for example, is based not on skill, like any other level-up system in the world. It basically boils down to this: There will be a door. Lara can?t open it, saying ?I?m not strong enough.? Next to the door, there is a punching bag. She?ll punch the bag, triggering a scripted ?level-up?, and she?ll say ?I feel stronger,? and will be able to open the door. There?s no skill; there?s no ?experience?; it?s just a glorified switch and door puzzle.
Then there?s the fact that the game is clearly unfinished. The enemy A.I. is insanely stupid, ignoring you outright or attacking you when it?s physically impossible to launch an attack. Hand-to-hand combat is buggy enough to be discounted as useless, and little illogical things like Lara?s inability to step on a rat that?s draining her health bar through her feet are annoyances (unless they?re funny); but a whole lotta little things add up to a lot.
New stuff aside, this is still mostly the same old Tomb Raider, the same sort of puzzle-intensive ?tombs? with a nightclub or biological research facility skin. Be it in an ancient tomb beneath the Louvre, or in a criminals? underground lair, finding switches and partaking in meticulous jumps are the crux of Lara?s existence. The most obvious area for improvement in Tomb Raider has been overlooked entirely?the controls. Lara still handles like a truck, plodding along despite her apparent agile British gracefulness. You?ll still spend most of your time backing up and carefully rotating to line up jumps, accidentally falling off ledges, leaping back when you meant to leap forward because it?s never quite clear which direction you should press to get Lara to behave how you want. When you?re not doing that, you?ll spend most of your time looking at the loading screen, since you?ll definitely die a lot; trial and error is as much a part of the game as anything else, and there are no check points, just your chosen save games. Every area has to reload every single time you die.
I Sense Some Goodness Within Her
Now that the bad stuff is out of the way, there is actually quite a bit of good to be found, if you?ve got the patience to dig through the rest. While the graphics aren?t exactly cutting edge (the kinds of lighting effects and high-res textures you?ve come to expect aren?t here), they?re always clean. Occasional frame rate superslowdowns seem to randomly happen for two seconds at a time, but it?s rare enough not to be an annoyance. And while Lara?s character model looks decidedly old-school, with lots of legacy animation for jumping and walking, all the new animation routines look really cool. The way Lara climbs stairs or scales a cliff-face upside down is how all game characters doing these things should look.
Hurried voice-acting and rushed-looking cutscenes can?t hide the fact that there?s quite a compelling storyline in Angel of Darkness, too, almost enough to carry you through the game on its own. The gameplay schizophrenia and plot turns make for lots of variety, so that even if you don?t like a particular segment of the game, you know there?s something different coming soon. The stages are kept to a reasonable size, and you?ll rarely be in one area so long that you?ll get sick of it. Some of the puzzles Lara encounters are really quite nifty (clever use of security cameras, the whirling lock in an archaological dig), and there are lots of little side-quests, most of which are of value in subsequent replay. While you won?t care about the ?alternate? way to get to the Louvre the first time through, you?ll definitely want to try it the second.
Of course, the question is: will you want even get to the second? Probably not. The first play through is a huge undertaking as it is. And all of the ideas that ?work? only make you wish the rest of the game had been hammered out a little more thoughtfully.
Half A Phoenix
A lot of people will point to the glitches and bugs as Tomb Raider?s biggest flaw, but the problem goes a bit deeper than that. The non-linear gameplay was half-baked from the get-go; and no amount of bug-testing would have fixed the contrivances Core came up with early on. The Tomb Raider series definitely needed something different, and this was definitely a half-step in the right direction for Lara, but it?s not quite enough. This aborted rebirth of a heroine could very well be the death of a franchise.
