Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Angel of Darkness

"What in the world were they thinking?"

The Leap to PlayStation2

Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness, the sixth installment of the critically acclaimed Tomb Raider series, was indeed an ambitious project. It was supposed to be the most revolutionary game in the series, the beginning of a new image for our hero Lara Croft. The result? A dreadful, dreadful disappointment. An embarrassment to both Eidos Interactive and Core Design alike, causing Eidos to even fire Core Design and replace it with another company.

Even after putting off the release date multiple times, the game was obviously rushed and unfinished, cutting out massive parts of the game and leaving gaping plot holes that you couldn't jump across even if you did a running jump. Did this game suck because Eidos was impatient? Or because Core was incompetent in working on the PS2? Probably a bit of both.

Storyline: 6/10

The story was decent enough. It is somewhat darker than the others, as it opens with the brutal murder of Professor Von Croy at his apartment in Paris, with Lara as the prime suspect. Ms. Croft, on the run from the cops, investigates Von Croy's activities, and sees that he accidentally stumbled upon some sort of evil conspiracy, and a mafia group intending to take over the world using an ungodly power. You know, the usual story. The main flaw in the storyline is certain parts where the game seems rushed or edited. For example, at one point near the beginning of the game Lara will randomly start barking at people that she wants to see a person whose name has not even been brought up in the game at all, yet she somehow learns of this person and that he can tell her what happened to Von Croy. She just probably had an epiphany in a dream, yeah that's probably it.

It also feels like there should be a lot more cutscenes in between levels, seeing that there are none that I can recall off the top of my head. In previous TRs, there were a lot of cutscenes that would explain progression from one level to the next. If not, the next level would at least start where the last one left off. There's one instance in Angel of Darkness where Lara finishes the level in an area beside a canal or some sort of waterway. Then the next level, with no way of showing us how she got there, shows her stealing away into the sewers with the intent of storming into a building (can't tell you what, spoilers), but do we know what we're doing in the sewers? No. We just follow the path and figure out later on what she was trying to do. Not to mention she changes costumes in between, showing that some amount of time passes between the two levels, which leads me to believe they planned on putting in a cutscene but were a little too DURRR DURRR to put it in before the release date.

Interactivity: 3/10

I've always liked games with a lot of characters, i.e. Final Fantasy or Metal Gear Solid. Although Lara Croft hardly ever interacted with other people outside of cutscenes in previous games, I didn't mind, because Tomb Raider is just that awesome. In this game, she does talk to people a lot. There are a couple things that bother me though. Almost everyone Lara talks to, and I'm really not exaggerating here, dies shortly after talking to Lara. There is one level where Lara can go around town and talk to various people, and most of them live, but outside of that level, EVERY single person dies. It just became such a routine thing that it started to get on my nerves. OOPS spoiler. Oh well, I wouldn't consider it a spoiler. You can kind of tell after a little bit how everyone associated with the conspiracy except for Lara is hunted down shortly after she talks to them. Is Lara cursed? With all those evil artifacts and whatnot she's messed with over the years, I wouldn't be surprised.

Something else that got on my nerves was character movement during conversations. Now if you actually decide to play this game, I want you to remember what I'm about to say and look for this. Every time Lara says something, she will cock her head a few seconds after beginning her sentence. Every time. Her facial features, other than moving lips (one of the few improvements from previous installments), are otherwise motionless and void of any expressions. All male characters, similarly, will do a thing that I have never seen in real life, but is apparently very common in the TR world, and that is they will raise their right arm with their fingers somewhat curled, open their fingers, and put their arm down. Then they will do it again in a few moments. Like I said before, it's just so routine and expected that it annoys me.

In addition to all that, Tomb Raider was never the kind of series where you go around a town and gather clues from interesting (hardly) and well-rounded (yeah right) characters about what you're trying to do. It's not that I'm against change, but Tomb Raider is not supposed to be like that in my opinion.

Oh and Kurtis Trent. He's not a bad character. Kind of irked me that he's advertised as ZOMG A NEW PLAYABLE CHARACTER LARAS NEW BF, and he doesn't do that much.

Environments, Graphics, and the Like: 8/10

The environments and graphics actually weren't that bad. A lot of people will complain that Lara is a "tomb" raider, not a "town" raider, and that there are too many urban environments. It's not quite as much a big deal to me. In fact, some of my favorite levels throughout the TR series take place in cities and other urban environments. To this day I still cannot decide which level of TR3 is quite my favorite, but I know it's either London (a completely urban environment) or South Pacific Islands (full of wilderness and tombs). I could go off on a tangent and list all the urban vs. wilderness environments in the TR series, but I must force myself to stay on topic. My point is that Tomb Raider is just as fun whether she's running through buildings and across rooftops or if she's getting down and dirty in the long lost tombs. In Angel of Darkness, you have to go through quite a bit of urban area before you even get to the Parisian tomb, but it gives you a sense of accomplishment to finally get there. And I have to admit, the Parisian tomb is one of the most bad ass tombs Lara has raided. But to keep this spoiler-free, you'll have to take my word for it.

Another note here, again dealing with the flawed continuity of the game. Lara wears several different costumes throughout the game. Of course, that's what they normally do in Tomb Raider, and I like variety, in fact my favorite costume of hers is the brown coat she wears to Tibet in the second TR (I'm a loser, I know). The thing is though, she seems to magically change costume in the middle of the game. I've already explained where she changes costume in the middle of a continuity hole. But during the second half of the game, when she's in the middle of the enemy's fortress, she walks into a room wearing pants, ending the level. The next level starts in the same room, and now she's wearing shorts.

WTF.

I guess in the middle of this life-or-death infiltration mission, that the FATE OF THE WORLD was riding on, she decided to take the time to change her clothes. It's a bit silly. If they had something like, um, I don't know, a CUTSCENE, where they actually show her cut off the bottom part of her pants or something, it wouldn't be as silly.

Sound: 9/10

I haven't much to say about the music. It's a great deal more symphonic than previous games, which is fine, although I preferred previous soundtracks. I did enjoy the music though. Of course, fumbling around in a crappy game with such serious music is rather comical, but I'm not sure if that's quite the right emotion they were going for.

Gameplay: 1/10

Most of the above elements are flawed in their own ways, whether minorly or majorly, but what video game doesn't have flaws? They would be easy to live with. The gameplay, however, is what really killed TR6. I mean, after the release of this game, the Tomb Raider franchise was an inch away from total cancellation. People were FIRED over this. Why? Because the gameplay was just utterly horrible.

The controls are simply awful. Before TR6 came out, I don't think I've ever yelled at Lara in the middle of a game. In the PSX installments it was fairly easy to traverse ledges, make precarious jumps, etc. In playing TR6, I often found myself having trouble just walking in a straight line. I'd get so frustrated that I'd start shouting horrible things at Lara, such as "No, don't do that you moron!", "I don't understand why you're being so stupid" and my favorite, "Why are you such a ****ing idiot!"

My first pet peeve is that they swapped the roll button with the jump button. I can't tell you how many times I have set myself to jump over a precarious ledge, and instead, she rolls to her death because I pressed the square button like I've been doing FOR THE PAST EIGHT YEARS, which is a hard habit to get out of. My second pet peeve is that there is somewhat of a lag with the control stick. If she's facing left and you move the control stick right, she will wait a moment, swivel around, wait another moment (probably taking a rest since I'm sure that swivel just knocked the energy out of her), walk a few casual steps, then break into a jog. You can make her run immediately and skip the walking part, but you really have to be aggressive with that joystick and probably end up damaging it. Oh well. The warm up walk is probably good for the old girl anyway. Don't want to pull a muscle. But her inability to go immediately where I tell her is rather annoying, especially if I'm trying to run away from a ghost or something equally abhorring and she's taking her sweet time -_-

Similarly, she takes more time to draw her gun, so when you encounter an enemy, you might tap it, see that she's not pulling it out and, thinking you tapped the button too lightly, tap it again. Now she will put it back once she draws it. There have been a few times where I encountered an enemy who shot Lara to swiss cheese as she practiced drawing and putting away her gun. "No, don't do that you moron!"

They also changed the gameplay system by having Lara climb boxes, ladders, etc. just by pressing up against them, rather than pressing X to command her to do so. It is somewhat more convenient, however, it causes more problems than it fixes, mainly because you may unintentionally press her up against a railing while you're running across a catwalk or something, and Lara will suddenly decide to vault railing and fall to her death. It is a pretty grim situation, after all. I'm sure she just decided it was too much to handle and suicide was the only option. "I don't understand why you're being so stupid."

In addition, if you're climbing down a ladder onto a narrow ledge or something, you may try to walk past the ladder, just to have Lara try to climb it. You wait a few seconds until she finishes getting on the ladder so you can press X to drop off and try again, only to have her do the same thing again. And again. "Why are you such a ****ing idiot!"

The beginning of the game has Lara in an alleyway between a few apartment buildings, and you have to scale up the escape ladders and such to get on top of one of the buildings, do a few things up there, then climb down the other side. This is the "training level". I cannot tell you how many times I died here for such stupid reasons. I would have loved to be someone sitting and watching on a nearby rooftop or from behind a window in delight as this obviously mental women tries to climb up the wall as she jumps or rolls to her death. Sometimes, she will simply walk off a ledge.

Lara is supposed to be well educated, knowing many languages and being very cultured and whatnot. If Lara, such an above average individual, is no smarter than a lemming, where does that leave the rest of us? The inevitable doom of the human race, that's where.

Oh, and bugs. Tomb Raider has always been infamous for its bugs, i.e. in previous installments Lara might occasionally fall through the floor, or pick up an item but have it disappear from her inventory and become unretreivable. You'd think they would have fixed this for the new game system, but no, there's still bugs. I used four game saves, and cycled through them every so often. NEVER, NEVER, NEVER play this game with only one gamesave. I once knelt under a staircase to get an item, when suddenly Lara got full body tetanus and could no longer move. If I had only one gamesave, I would have had to start over. There was another area where I entered a room by opening a closed door. I went in my inventory, but when I came back out, the door was closed again and guess what. She can't open it from the inside. Load and restart biotch.

Overall: 4/10

How would I sum up this game? Very sloppy and thrown together. In the TR family, Angel of Darkness would definitely be the mentally challenged cousin. Now I've played through this game up to the end, and of my own free will, so it couldn't have been that horrible. It still feels like a TR adventure to me. The story is mediocre, the environments are cool enough, the music is wonderful. the interactivity is... nothing to brag about. The gameplay alone is what crapped all over this game. Stiff, annoying controls that severely hinder gameplay and make Lara rather prone to death, in addition to bugs that just degrade the game.

Playable? If you're a die-hard fan like me, you might enjoy it. If you're new to the series, I imagine the sanity-breaking gameplay and hard-to-overlook plotholes would drive you absolutely bonkers. If it consoles you in any way, none of the other TR games are as bad as this one. It still blows my mind how Eidos could have even released this game the way it is. If more time was put into it, I'm sure it would be a great game. It really feels like a few more months of work could have made this more enjoyable.

Old fans: Rent it and try it out.
Newcomers: I don't recommend this game. Play any other tomb raider game besides this one.

Reviewer's Score: 4/10, Originally Posted: 09/03/08, Updated 09/09/08

Game Release: Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Angel of Darkness (US, 06/20/03)