Tomb Raider Underworld

Since I first saw Tomb Raider running on the Playstation 1 on its release, I have been a huge fan of the series. There has been a great atmosphere to the games although nothing has ever quite matched that first playthrough where it was all so new. I enjoyed Legend and particularly Anniversary, I liked where Crystal Dynamics were taking Lara. Adapting the Prince of Persia style mechanics to the series fit very well and was great fun.
So now as the very proud owner of a Playstation 3, I was very excited at the release of a new Tomb Raider built for the 360/PS3 generation.
Let me tell you that a good test of a game is my wife's opinion. Sometimes she likes to watch me play (Portal being one of her favourites) and will let me know what she thinks. At first she was rightly surprised at the poor graphics. Fair enough they are good sometimes but a lot of the time they just look like a high-def Legend with identical animation. The puzzles are as good as ever but I couldn't escape the feeling that I'd played this before, a sentiment echoed by my wife who points out that it's just like the last one. It's short too, it took between 7 and 8 hours to complete the game and I was exploring pretty thoroughly as I went. I have to add that I'm only average at gaming so it wasn't skill that got me through it so quickly.
My biggest problem with it though has got to be the combat. It is absolutely dreadful. I even felt it was better in Anniversary, like this was a step backward. There is a scene where Lara gets onto a big ship and blasts her way through a small villages worth of rent-a-goons. I was just so desperate to take cover and shoot round the corner but no! You have to expose yourself to gunfire to proceed and so you jump around hoping that hitting a moving target will be too much for the poor souls. It was awful and tedious and I just wanted to be raiding a tomb somewhere instead. The worst part of it is that (SPOILER) later on in the game you have to do it again on the sister ship. THEY MAKE YOU PLAY THE WORST PART OF THE GAME TWICE!!! To be totally honest, it's an ok game but it could and most certainly should have been a lot better. I wouldn't compare it to Uncharted although Uncharted is by FAR the better game. Uncharted is more a shooter with a small amount of platforming. Lara is mainly a platformer/exploration game (but not enough of that) and when it steps out of it comfort zone into shooter territory it gets it totally wrong. With the new Uncharted on the way and offering more platforming, Lara might be made redundant. At least she knows that a certain Prince of Persia messed up this time too...
By the way, my wife agrees with all this.

Another exciting adventure for Miss Croft in her new designer outfits, boasting motion-captured movements modelled from gymnast Heidi Moneymaker (no pun, real name), she runs, climbs, swings, swims, swishes at undergrowth, chimney vaults and fights her way dirty kneed through a maze of jungles, caves, glaciers, ships and strange ancient machinery ... but Lara need never feel alone out there in the middle of the Mediterranean, or in Thailand, Southern Mexico or Jan Mayen island in the Arctic ocean; for around any corner there is bound to be another adversary, mercenary or Colin O'Malley orchestra.

Underworld is poised for greatness, but with yet another new graphics engine developed especially for the game, fresh with the latest bugs, it presents the gamer with yet another bag of niggles. The character animation is better than before, indeed it is excellent and you have to see it to believe it, but Lara has forgotten how to walk or creep. The best she can do is run in slow motion, or at least that's what it looks like to me. Perhaps walking was not in Heidi's contract ... this practically forces me to run around everywhere, giving me no time to really absorb the fantastic artwork and impressive scenery, and possibly as a result I discover that the puzzles require no thought whatsoever. If you can press it, push it, switch it, rotate it or climb it - do it. You don't need to know why, you don't need to examine the mechanism.

Long gone are the days where you need a piece of paper to write down clues or figure out how to solve puzzles. I didn't get stuck once playing this game. This was the most disappointing aspect of the release. Despite promises of non-linear gameplay and while the graphics are generally superb (with the few usual bugs such as Lara floating in mid-air in some camera angles), the sound effects and music heart-pounding, and while the story sets up the adventure excellently - the main reason we keep coming back to Tomb Raider is for the puzzles. In Underworld, they are simply far too easy to solve by anyone's measure.

The only real genuine puzzle in the game is why, if Crystal Dynamics focused so much on the WCLD (What Could Lara Do?) philosophy, why did they fail on that point so catastrophically - to the point where Lara still can't jump onto ledges that are only a foot above her head if the game developer hasn't thought about making the ledge "grabbable", and she still jumps off to her death in stupid directions when that's clearly not the direction in which you intended for her to die! The controls continue to be the most troublesome aspect of the most recent Lara adventures, when the puzzles themselves ought to pose the greatest challenges.

Another major disappointment for me is that exploration is not encouraged. Except to find a limited variation of pick-ups and a few bonuses which unlock some rather uninspiring extras, the game is in fact as linear as they come. And with the demise of Croft Manor, there is no escape to Lara's house to take a break from the bats of Bhogavati to practise your pole-dancing skills.

However, that should not put you off buying this game. I've said it before I'll say it again, there is no other game like it on the market. No self-respecting gamer would miss buying Tomb Raider Underworld. It is a marvel to behold, we only wish the developers would go back to basics and create a game that is primarily designed to exercise the grey matter and less of the adrenaline ...

I got this game for christmas and couldn't wait, the graphics are excellent lara looks absolutely fine but unfortunately i do feel it is missing something.

With the old games there were so many more pick ups, In underworld you don't pick up weapons as you go along you choose them before you go to the next level which i don't like. Finding the pair of Uzi's randomly somewhere is part of the adventure and running out of ammo at the worse possible moment and trying to get out of that situation with some average pistols is part of the fun. The treasures are pointless they are these crystal things that unlock stuff, when before if you did a bit of exploring you'll find the secret and get a medpack and some ammo for a gun you don't have, and that would make you wonder what gun your getting next, but unfortunately you don't get that in Underworld. some of the moves lara does are pretty cool and there are some cool things she does when she's running if you press circle 3 times which are quite cool. i thought the bike part jumped a bit and other times the camera angle screws up, but i found this variable. I think my main bug is the lack of pick ups really all you pick is medpacks and things you need to solve the puzzles, no weapon add ons or anything which is dissapointing really they could of done alot with that.

I'd still buy it but keep in mind it hasn't fufilled its full potentialm, it could be better.