It’s been a while since I sat down to write this opening bit before playing the game of the day. It was never a regular framing device but, in this example, I think it’s worthwhile to let anyone reading know where I stand on Tomb Raider before I start.
The original Tomb Raider is one of the best games of all time. The series’ puzzle-platforming debut offered atmosphere and exploration on a level rarely bettered, and a level of control over your character so detailed that it’s since been somehow re-framed as a bad thing by consumers used to modern, context sensitive, hyper-streamlined movement requiring the bare minimum of input from a player.
This masterpiece was followed by a technically far superior sequel that was only slightly less brilliant than the original - although the signs were there of the directional miss-steps the franchise would soon take. Tomb Raider III was iterative in every regard except one: ther was a marked increase in violence and it was the first game to clearly focus more on shooting people. Not, in case it’s unclear, a good thing.
In retrospect it should have been pretty worrying that a series had gone from revolutionary to rote in just three short years, and there are many fascinating articles dotted around the internet about what was going on at Core at the time, but the marketing machine rumbled on and this pretty poor game sold six million copies.
Console exclusivity with Playstation ended and the next two games, Chronicles and The Last Revelation, appeared also on the Dreamcast. Now, I love Sega’s final, ahead-of-its-time, machine as much as the next self-respecting game fanatic, but if you can’t see that the controller has two few buttons for this series (and Tony Hawk, for that matter) then there’s no helping you. Nevertheless, these two games brought the IP back close to the quality of Tomb Raider II, although familiarity was doubtless beginning to breed contempt from players and journalists alike, and, although the controller had enough buttons, the original PlayStation was creaking under the strain of running the later games.
Many would then consider the next 3 years as a Tomb Raider free zone. But there were actually 3 more games released under the Tomb Raider banner between ‘The Last Revelation’ and The Angel of Darkness.
The two side scrolling platform outings on the Game Boy Color brought the series back to its roots, being, as they were, incredibly stylish homages to the kind of Prince of Persia style adventures that had inspired the original game.
Then there was ‘The Prophecy’, released in 2002 for the GBA, an interesting offshoot into an isometric viewpoint.
The focus was fairly shooty and on the whole it was far removed from the puzzle-platforming elements that defined every game in the franchise to that point. With Ubisoft Milan at the helm, it was also the first Tomb Raider game to be developed by someone other than Core; The Prophecy, indeed.
And then came ‘The Angel of Darkness’.
I can’t tell you anything you don’t already know about the franchise's disastrous attempt to update with its leap to the Playstation 2. I have no new insight to the two times the project was restarted from scratch, nor can I further explain the cuts and delays that marred it’s eventual release… in fact, as per its appearance in my unplayed back-log, at this exact point in time I have nothing to say about this game at all.
Wouldn’t it be fantastic if I could say this game was misunderstood? Imagine how amazing it would be if I could explain that, 17 years later, The Angel of Darkness has aged like fine wine, that it’s actually a game so far ahead of it’s time that it just needed a decade and a half for the rest of the industry to catch up…
Weirdly, there is a fair bit in this game that has been revisited by the reboot trilogy in a more polished - if not necessarily tonally successful - way.
Lara has a stealth mode, for example, and she screams an awful lot too. She’s also particularly murderous, albeit without the ham-fisted attempt to moralise her actions by crying over a dead deer.
This, however, is about as close as Angel of Darkness gets to being ahead of its time.
The reality is that this is a lumpen mess of a game whose few moments of potential quality (in what I’ve seen so far) are unfortunately hobbled by an unavoidable and all-pervasive flaw: The controls are miserable.
I know the control scheme for the five preceding games has its critics, particularly (as I mentioned above) with new players coming to the series for the first time. Compared to the cack-handed attempt to modernise in this game, though, the original game is like controlling Lara by telepathy.
If you were to list out all the ways a control scheme could be bad, Angel of Darkness would be guilty of 80% of them, and then make up the 20% with a whole new level of bad you’ve never seen or heard of before.
The buttons are counter-intuitive, there’s lag in every action, moves are inconsistent in their execution…
On top of this, the left stick is supposed to control whether you walk or run, but you ALWAYS start off walking the first few steps, and there's a walk button anyway!?
Lara’s turning circle is painful to watch and the quick tumble turn carried over from the previous games is completely gimped as you have to change the stick direction AS WELL as push ‘square’.
The age old problem of having to be in a very particular spot to operate switches has been ‘fixed’ by having the computer take control and awkwardly wobble about into the correct position for you - which somehow manages to look and feel worse than when you had to do it yourself.
And the jumping, my god, the jumping.
Whether you're a fan or not, the grid system of the early Tomb Raiders ensured consistency. You always knew how to line up for a certain jump and what action was required. In Angel of Darkness, exacerbated by the awful walk-walk-run action of the analog stick, you never have any confidence as to what type of jump or action is required, and even when you’ve got a decent idea what’s required there’s no guarantee the game will pick up your inputs.
I’ve played the whole of the first section of this game (set in Paris) and, while the controls prevent it from being enjoyable, the story makes it borderline unbearable.
There are some decent looking cutscenes early on but thereafter the plot is revealed, after a fashion, through conversations with NPCs.
The problem here isn’t technical; the voice acting is decent, if somewhat hampered by an array of dodgy French accents. The problem here is that these conversations have been built around the idea of branching dialogue paths, but the writing of them is so scattershot and confusing that the result is comical.
Moreover, assumedly due to cut content, characters often reference events that never happen, or people you never get to meet.
Oh, and choosing the wrong option from two almost identical dialogue choices can sometimes end in unavoidable insta-death. Fun.
The music is a high point for the most part, as you might expect with most of it being recorded at Abbey Road by the London Symphony Orchestra. But even here things manage to get messy, with bombastic tunes classing with sound effects more than once.
At one point there’s even a hilariously ‘fellow kids’ dance tune, although I’m fairly confident the LSO played no part in this.
The cacophonous tune in question comes about during a fetch quest that feels for all the world like it takes up 90% of the first area.
Yes, you read that right, Lara Croft, globe-trotting, T-rex murdering, death defying Lara Croft is now in the business of collecting a mcguffin from a nightclub at the behest of the owner of Parisien greasy-spoon. Later on, having spent three hours shooting and looting guns from every bloke she meets, she makes a deal with another shady character so he can provide her with… wait… a gun?
But I digress. Lara heads to The Red Serpent nightclub to get this ‘thing’ from a light fitting, and what follows can only accurately be described as torturous.
Bear in mind what I’ve already told you about the controls when I say: Every jump is taken at a height that will kill you. Now imagine enduring those controls, with those consequences, while being bombarded by an EDM track at full volume that’s so ineffably bad that this is where I have to end this sentence.
Literally the only way to stay sane is to save before each tiny ‘event’ on the off chance that the game will decide you should die this time.
And the game forces you to ask so many questions of it’s design decisions:
Why does the smallest block of inner city Paris ever committed to silicon need to load, literally, every 40 yards? What is the point of the weird, quasi-XP system that sometimes grants Lara extra strength and sometimes does nothing at all? How does she keep her 1% fat physique when she appears to sustain herself solely with half-eaten chocolate bars she finds in the street?
In the world of video games we are prone, even more than the rest of the internet, to judging everything as a dichotomy. Games are either the best ever or worst, zero-out-of-ten or GoAT contenders, and I had harboured a secret hope that this had happened with The Angel of Darkness. I knew it wasn’t going to be great but I really wanted this to a pretty decent game that had fallen victim to exaggeration and hyperbole over the years… but sadly, that’s just not the case.
This is not just a bad Tomb Raider game, it’s a very bad game full stop.
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