Tomb Raider: Underworld What Game COULD Have Met My Expectations?

I know it’s been a long time since this game’s release, but the first time I played it a few months back I was so disappointed that I resolved not to review it until I had played through all of Tomb Raider: Legend and then Tomb Raider: Underworld again. Tomb Raider: Legend was, and maybe still is, my favourite game of all time. I have played through it start to finish 4 complete times now, and I still get weepy at the end every time. I think it is without question one of the greatest stories ever written for a video game, and also some of the best voice performances. Add to that some of the best platforming around and some great combat and you’ve got the recipe for a near-perfect game. I’m happy to say that Tomb Raider: Underworld is no longer a disappointment, and I’m very happy I played through it a 2nd time. Anyone that’s experienced any form of media long enough knows that expectations play a massive role in the perception of what you experience. If you go into a movie thinking it’s going to be incredible, most likely you won’t enjoy it as much as you thought you would. If you know nothing about it and it turns out to be decent, you’ll leave thinking it was one of the better movies you’ve seen in a while. In retrospect, it was impossible for the story in Underworld to satisfy me on a first play through. My expectations were so high I don’t think anyone could have met them. I don’t even know what ending I was hoping for, to tell you the truth, I just knew that the ending I got left me angry beyond belief. I want to keep with my no-spoiler policy, but suffice it to say that I needed to replay Legend and watch the cinematics for Anniversary to really understand what I was seeing. I’ll leave it to say that the story is a good conclusion to the Legend cliff-hanger. It wasn’t as amazing as I had hoped it would be, but it was a realistic and believable end that I think, much like Lara, took some time for me to accept. Enough about the story and expectations, though, let’s talk about the game itself. This was a huge improvement on the Legend engine in some ways, and a massive step backwards in others. The graphics and sound have made massive leaps forward, providing some of the best lighting and water effects I’ve ever seen in a platformer. The controls, however, were a nightmare. I can’t even begin to tell you the number of times that I leapt to my death simply because the controls were unable to interpret my desire. On my first play through I thought it was just that I was out of practice, but given that I played through Legend and started Underworld not 5 minutes later, I now know that the fault rests with the developers. Throughout the entire play of Legend, I think I lost my footing and fell to my death MAYBE 3 or 4 times the entire game. In Underworld it happened every 5 minutes at least. The controls in this game are unforgivably bad in comparison to its predecessor, but are par for the course when compared to all the other platformers out there so it’s hard to be TOO critical. I just don’t understand the backwards step, is all. Legend had some of the most solid controls ever and I don’t understand why they had to get so junked up. Not to mention the bugs. Holy shit this game had issues. It seems at least once an hour Lara would get stuck in some strange infinite loop where she would take a step over and over. After about 10 second of that she would magically jump out of it. As a programmer, this clearly demonstrates to me that they put in code to detect the glitch and force the avatar out of it rather than fixing what caused the glitch in the first place. It’s either rushed or lazy development, one of the two. I’m willing to give them the benefit of the doubt and say that because of the awesome increase in environment detail and manoeuvrability, they encountered some last minute bugs that made it into the final release with a hacked fix. They’ve had plenty of time to fix the problem since, however, and there’s been no update. I saw panthers get stuck in loops and then fly a hundred feet in the air. I saw Lara fall through the ground a few times. I saw the camera get stuck in a position where Lara couldn’t be seen twice, and perform God knows how many random fast movements that are entirely disorienting. Some fantastic changes to the game, however, were improvements in the rope Lara uses. They did a great job in making it work as a real rope would, and I understand that the upcoming DLC will use it much more than the game did. Everything about the platforming is a little better in this title too, except for the unfortunate control problems. When Lara is climbing a rock face it really feels like scaling a wall as opposed to hoping from point to point. When the controls worked, they were awesome, but Legend had a much better ability to interpret your intentions and not have Lara jump off into the middle of nowhere. I think the motorbike sequences are an improvement as well. On my first play through I thought that Legend had the better bike sequences, but that was only in my memories. Upon playing Legend again I can see how shallow they were, especially in comparison to the perfectly meshed experience that the motorbike offers in Underworld. The difference, really, is that instead of being linear action sequences, the motorbike was provided as a means of transportation across large zones. Let’s examine that in more detail. Much like the changes to the motorbike from linear to non, the entire game seems to have undergone a similar change. In Legend, when you heard a checkpoint pass you knew that you were progressing as the levels had a very definite start and finish. In Underworld, when you hear a checkpoint pass, it pretty much only means that you’ve moved on to another key area, not necessarily finished with the one before it. In the same way that the motorbike experience was made less linear, the entire game was made so as well. In Legend each level felt like long platforming sequences separated by short puzzle solving challenges. In Underworld, ever level felt like one massive non-linear puzzle. Even when cruising around on your motorbike, you’re just moving around a massive puzzle gathering the pieces. Also, almost every level has a dig-yourself-in-then-get-yourself-out approach, where you have to track backwards through the entire level you just walked through to get out, whereas in Legend you were often moving from one area to the next. You get a lot of auxiliary improvements in Underworld as well. The Sonar Map is an awesome addition, allowing you to see and navigate around a computer generated 3D map of your current area. This is possibly one of the greatest things ever added to a sandbox platformer, yet I didn’t use it as much as I would think. There is a nice Journal section in this game as well that lets you read more detail if you want it, something that a role-player like myself loves whenever it’s available. There are some auxiliary decrements as well, like how you select a secondary weapon at the beginning of each level and then are stuck with it, with limited ammunition, until then end. I much preferred the system in Legend which allowed you to pick up your enemies weapons. The inability to replay cinematics is really unfortunate as well, as this was a heavily used feature for me in both Legend and Anniversary. I read an interview with the producer about why there were no cinematics, and he said it was because they all happened in real time with objects that moved and changed, like a health pack that had been dropped. Well, I can tell you from personal experience in the past few days that it was exactly the same in Legend (I saw my health packs left behind in cinematics), yet I could still replay those cinematics. Again, as a developer, I can tell you this is a pathetic excuse. It should be nothing to set up default options that allowed the replay of cinematics, and they obviously just didn’t have time. The save system is one of the worst I've ever seen, taking up save spots for your autosaves that can never be deleted or written over. I ended up with one game saved on spot #3, and another saved on spot #23, which is really quite stupid and annoying.

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