So I finished playing Tomb Raider: Underworld about a week ago. Keeping in mind that I played the PC version, and lots of what I’m about to write doesn’t necessarily apply to any of the console versions, here are a few thoughts about it. This somewhat echoes the things I ranted about it at vgmix as well, but with a little bonus! Bonuses are nice?!
My first thought after finishing it was… disappointment. It wasn’t the game they promised us many times, not even close. It looks nice, but not as nice as you would expect a “next gen” game to look. Graphics are kind of a mixed bag in this one actually. At times it looks really nice, and at times some of the textures especially are just bad, really low resolution mush. I don’t know how that happened, but there are a few theories out there, one of which I’ll talk about later on.
Mechanics in the game have been updated somewhat, but it’s mostly the same as before. You can now walk on poles (the ones you can also swing) and beams. “Great”, I thought to myself when I learned of this. However, I realized pretty quickly that it’s a pretty useless addition. Walking on beams, especially, is just annoying. Basically, when you walk on beams, you have to balance yourself with the stick as you walk. Makes kind of sense, yeah? It doesn’t translate very well to gameplay though. The beam walk is extremely slow already, and the balancing act slows it down even more, and as the alternative is to just drop down, grab the beam and shimmy yourself with much faster pace with no silly balancing acts, it just doesn’t deliver anything useful. This isn’t as big of a problem with poles though, since walking on poles is much faster and you usually get where you are going before you have to do any balancing. Now, you may ask yourself, why is it faster to walk on a pole which width is just barely your shoe width, than on beams that are like double or triple the width? Well, don’t ask me, you numbnuts, how could I know. I asked the very same thing myself. From no one in particular, mind you, but I did ask.
Other new things about mechanics include another silly minigamey thing called adrenaline shot, which I never really used. It sort of breaks the fluidity of the combat by uselessly slowing down time and shit like that. Nonsense I say. Also, the poles you can climb upwards, you can now actually climb all the way up to the top of the pole. Oh, and you can do a lots of gymnastics by alternating your roll and jump button?! Why would I want to, is the question. Seriously, what good does that do for the gameplay itself?
One new mechanics additions I did like however, was the melee combat. In itself it’s pretty useless, but as an extension to the gunslinging, it’s pretty fun. Nothing like shooting a tiger a couple of times, kick it in the face, dodge and shoot more. You can even knock enemies down from whatever platform you might be in at the time. It’s refreshing.
The story… is a Tomb Raider story. All kinds of mythology stuff jumbled together in a nice little soup that makes no sense at all. So, fun times. The dialogue is pretty silly at times, and some of the voice work is below average, but all in all it does its job. Keeley Hawes does especially nice work as Lara. But then again, she is British so that automatically makes it sound better. :D
In general, it seems to lack a lot of general polish. In my uneducated opinion, a lot of it is largely related to apparently somewhat broken collision detection. It’s the little things that really either make or break the game. In this case unfortunately, they kind of break things. For example, it’s great that ground is uneven. It’s great when you stand on it, your knee bends to adjust. These are the little things that work. Then comes the little thing that doesn’t. As in, half of the time when your knee is supposed to bend, it doesn’t, and you end up ankle deep in the ground. So, collision detection? Lots of times you end you partially inside a broken walls and stuff, sometimes stuck in an animation loop when the game can’t decide if you are standing on the ground or what. It’s just not pretty. In general there are a lot of movement things that bug me. It’s like the transition movements somehow don’t match the main movements. For example, if you run, and gradually slow down to walk, the transition between two speeds just doesn’t look right at all.
One thing that lead to many deaths during my playthrough was the fucked up wall jumps. Like, when you are hanging from a ledge and plan to jump backwards to another, Lara generally would look back, as a cue that you are now going to jump to the right direction. Sometimes, however, she just kind of looks sideways, like the animation is missing suddenly, and you will have to hope that you are pushing the right direction and the camera won’t suddenly change just as you jump, launching you into a bottomless pit or something.
Speaking of the camera, it’s the worst in the series ever. It kind of tries to adjust itself all the time to your position in your environment, but when it works, it works reeeaaaallyyy slooooooow, so you have to adjust it all the time. And when it doesn’t work, it just horrible mess of shit. Like dropping down from a beam often times means that the camera tries to adjust and flies somewhere inside the beam or something, and gets stuck there for a few seconds, until you manually move it somewhere useful again. It’s just bad.
And lastly, about the extras. There are very little extras to unlock. Bunch of concept drawings from all kinds of areas of the game, but that is it. There is no soundtest, you can’t even view the cutscene videos again, and all the grown men who like to play dress-up with Lara Croft will cry their eyes out because there is no wardrobe. You only get one alternative clothing selection for the very first mission, a white swimming suit. All the other clothing selections are selectable during the main game.
After you beat the game, you’ll unlock a treasure hunt mode, which enables you to revisit locations to hunt for treasures. But as the unlocks are pathetic, there is no incentive to do so. And even as such, the revisit location is executed poorly. If you want to revisit Mexico, you are going to have to click the treasure hunt icon, wait for the first sea level to load, after which you can go to your PDA and change the location there. That’s just bad interface design.
One other thing I should mention is that there are no traditional boss battles. The boss battles in Underworld are more like their own mini levels in a way, solving puzzles and gunning down cannon fodder guys. It’s kind of fun actually, a change of pace from the previous titles.
But all in all, it’s a huge disappointment. At best it plays like Anniversary with a few new things mixed in. Most of the time however, at its worst, it’s just annoying.
And here’s the theory I mentioned earlier.
By the looks of things, the engine is an updated version of the engine they used in Legend and Anniversary. Someone somewhere put forward a theory that they started to build a new engine for the next gen versions of the game early on, but it ended up taking more time than they expected, and as the deadline drew closer, were forced to fall back on the old engine. Since the game is coming out on PS2 as well, and it probably uses the old engine with the new gameplay modifications, it was probably an easy and relatively quick patch job to make some graphic updates here and there, and call it new. And I think it does sort of make sense. Because, while the game does look a bit better than earlier games did, it’s nothing hugely different. It’s a step forward, but a not a big step by any means.
And that is my rant for the day. And it ended up being a lot longer than I had anticipated. :D
