Tomb Raider: The Angel of Darkness

"You mean I have to obey the laws of physics? What have you done to me?!"

I'm as much as a tomb raider fan as any other person, not because of the reason you're playing the role of a model, but because it is a good series. Owning almost every pc game in existence, what choice did I have but to buy the ever-hyped Angel of Darkness? I had heard that there would be some interaction with characters in this episode, but I wasn't fazed. Every new game has a small addition, so this couldn't hurt it, right? RIGHT???

The tomb raider series has always had good story lines, or at least had understandable ones. You always controlled Lara, the animated model adventurer, out to save the world from an ancient evil. However, this one fails miserably. First off, the story is thrown somewhere in the series. The end of the last revelation had Lara trapped in an Egyptian pyramid, and Tomb Raider: Chronicles had her funeral, so it seemed that she was gone forever. All of a sudden, here she is in France! What happened? This is never explained in the game, so that bugged me. The story has Lara seemingly killing her colleague Von Croy. She doesn't remember the evening very well, ironically, and the police are after her. The story progresses extremely slowly, and doesn't make much sense at all. Even by the time I finished the game, I still didn't understand half of what was going on.

The graphics are average for the time. It's detailed, but not overly detailed. One of the games few saving graces. The music and sound are also average.

Like I said in the beginning, every game in the series has a new addition, this one having interaction with characters. The problem is the balance the game has on it. You don't actually interact very often in the game, making it feel more like a gimmick than a part of the game. They instead make an entire 2 hour level based completely on it, with stupid tasks to make money you never use. Another addition, the RPG element is the icing on the cake for this game. It turns out Lara has to obey the laws of physics in this game. She has to get stronger to do various things, meaning no more superhuman strength. Apparently opening cupboards is supposed to instantly make you stronger. The game rarely focuses on the actual game play the series has, i.e the shooting/puzzle genre, which usually is a good balance between shooting and dodging and puzzle solving, and even then it's bad. The bosses are all overly hard, and the levels focus on precision jumps and other ridiculous feats. Couple that with nasty glitches, such as losing all your weapons on one level if you save, and you've got the worst in the Tomb Raider series.

With the aforementioned precision that is constantly used, the game is very hard, but it's much harder to play the game than to beat it.

This game was doomed before it even begun, due to the major plot hole of Lara coming back to life. This game can be described by 2 words:

Total disgrace.

Reviewer's Score: 4/10, Originally Posted: 09/19/05