Console and control woes

Cirque du Soleil hires Shamu

Combat is even worse. While Lara may be some kind of jujitsu specialist these days, the new hand-to-hand combat mechanics are difficult to employ with any success. Maneuvering into position so that you can hit an enemy is more challenging than actually hitting him. Attack options are so simplistic that you need to do little but mash buttons. And graphical slowdown makes every close-range fight seem like some kind of surreal underwater dance routine. Think Cirque du Soleil at Sea World. Fighting with guns is exactly uses the same old auto-targeting system, so there isn’t any real challenge there unless you like the ducks-in-a-barrel approach.

Even when you’re not duking it out, this control clumsiness gets old fast. When you’re dealing with a game that features a death-defying leap every few minutes, it’s not a bad idea to give the player precision control over the character’s movements. Yet I never felt like I was in complete command of Lara. Right to the end, I’d have to mess around for the longest time before feeling confident enough to try even routine jumps. Of course, I fell. Often. If not for this review assignment, I’d have given up on Angel of Darkness before the end of the tutorial level.

Grilling the locals

More 20 questions

So I noticed

Blurry, dumb bad guys

At least the game is clear about some things. Enemies are as dumb as dirt. They always run directly at you and dodging fire or taking cover is a concept as foreign as an arranged marriage. This seems like a negative, but it’s actually a blessing in disguise given the horror-show controls. The game always points the way forward. Objects that can be picked up shine intermittently, just like in the old Alone in the Dark games, so you never have to hunt pixels. Lara is intuitive regarding her surroundings. Walk up to a ladder and she’ll hop on, ready to climb. Leap to a ledge and she’ll grab on with both hands to pull herself up. It’d be easier to appreciate these refinements, however, if I weren’t so sure that Core added them just to compensate for the awkwardness of everything else.

Finally, even the presentation values aren’t up to snuff. Cutscenes seem to have been directly ported from the PlayStation2 version of Angel of Darkness. They’re blurry enough to make you doubt your eyesight, or reconsider your current contact lens prescription. There is more of an attempt at creating a story than has been seen in past Tomb Raider games, although poor voice-acting and the inexplicable decision to characterize the heroine as an unlikable, angry bitch make it tough to sit through some of these scenes. Graphic quality in the game itself is also second-rate, with fuzzy textures and a lot of clipping. This is a marginally better looking game than its predecessors, though since they were always a good two years behind the times when they were released, that’s hardly a compliment.