Tomb Raider Underworld

Now that Crystal Dynamics have taken over development duties of the Tomb Raider series, some have embraced the new ‘rebooted’ Lara enthusiastically. Some, however, see the reboots as being far removed from the original vision of Tomb Raider – with an emphasis on platforming and puzzling rather than shooting things.

With Crystal Dynamics third outing (previously they worked on Tomb Raider: Legend and Tomb Raider: Anniversary) you’d think that the team would’ve honed their craft enough to make this new game a serious evolution over what has gone before. The truth is, it’s not really. It’s incredibly pretty and there are some seriously beautiful visuals and level designs on show – but much of the core (excuse the pun) gameplay still remains wholly unchanged since the last two iterations of this legendary game series.

We pick up the tale with Croft Manor in flames, and Lara on the run from her own backup team. The dash through the burning ruins of Lara’s home acts as a nifty brush-up tutorial to take you through Lara’s basic moves, before time tracks back a little and you’re launched into the proper storyline. Without giving too much away once again you’re embroiled in the quest to find out what really happened to Lara’s parents, and once again the evil Natla Corporation have got mixed up in the plot (mainly to ensure that Lara can exercise her perfect pair of…Desert Eagles on a slightly more interesting enemy than the local wildlife).

Tomb Raider can be separated from recent upstarts such as Uncharted: Drakes Fortune in the fact that, even from the outset, it’s blisteringly hard. Due to some pretty useless mapping (Oh look, a wireframe sonar map of my locale, real useful!) and awkward path finding, you can spend a lot of time with Tomb Raider Underworld – A lot of time wandering around aimlessly wondering whether the poly-clipping and lighting bugs are actually clues, or vice versa.

Even when you resort to the “Helpful” hints in your journal, they go along the lines of “I need to find something to turn a wheel here” followed up by the more verbose “There’s a wheel here, I need to find something to turn it”. Lara seriously needs to sack her support team.

We’re told that this is the first Tomb Raider game that features proper motion-capped animation for Lara. Crystal Dynamics do seem to have put plenty of effort into the visuals of the game, and despite the aforementioned bugs, Tomb Raider: Underworld really does look the part with plenty of lush vegetation, undulating water and crusty, crumbly ruins to get immersed in. The main character modelling and animation has been tightened up a tad since Tomb Raider: Legend / Anniversary. At times though, the animation verges on the freakish. For instance, when Lara is climbing up a climbing wall her freakish long legs spring out sideways at impossible angles. It’s oddly jarring and breaks your concentration for climbing bits.

Each chapter feels solidly designed with a variety of contextual and logical puzzles to get your tomb-raiding teeth into, and thankfully they’re satisfyingly vague without being impossible to work out at times as opposed to being insultingly simple as in Drake’s Fortune. Level-design wise, Crystal Dynamics have done a stunning job with some superb set pieces being shown off even relatively early on in the game (you’ll see what I mean on the first chapter when you find a certain underwater denizen).

Another nice feature is that there seems to be a lot less gunplay this time round. Sure, Lara will face off against various plastic-armoured goons from time to time courtesy of the Natla Corporation, but the emphasis seems to be more on exploring and puzzle solving, something that the series really needed to get back to and something else that really jarred in Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune.

The main question to ask of such a time-worn and variable-quality gaming series such as Tomb Raider is “Has it evolved? What new tricks does it bring to the action-adventuring table?”

The answer would have to be a firm “Not very much”. Even down to a few really awful and awkward vehicle-based levels, this is very much a visually pepped up version of Tomb Raider: Legend with Crystal Dynamics perhaps consciously making the effort to make the games sequential and linked, so there are echoes of the previous stories tacked into Underworld.

Lara is as gymnastic as ever, so she can leap, swing and go hand-over-hand across the landscape with ease. Yet at times she seems to get horribly stuck and with the camera flailing around like a drunken 6th former at a media studies class, you can get really annoyed really quickly when things go awry (see that weird Step Aerobics move? They must’ve spent ages mo-capping that because you see it a LOT in the game when Lara can’t quite figure out how to unstick herself from the scenery).

Camera failings have always gone hand in hand with the Tomb Raider series for years though and they still haven’t quite cracked the problem yet, so expect to take the odd blind leap of faith here and there, as you always have. All in all, movement wise, something feels wrong – Lara feels at times like she’s stuck on fast-forward and can’t quite control her body’s over-enthusiastic and rather haphazard reaction to the scenery and your controls. Remembering the gentle sedate pace and rather nicely tuned control methods of the early games, Underworld plays like it needs some serious tweaking to the pace of things, particularly when any finer control work is necessary for pixel-perfect jumps and moves.

The amount of detail poured into the most pointless things can also grate. Lots of effort has been poured into atmospheric details, like the fact that Lara can get grubby and dirty (or wet) during the course of a level. Yet sometimes she’ll run smack bang into invisible walls (for instance, at the start of the game she can’t even get at the controls of her own boat for one reason or another!)

All the best visual work in the game lies with the utterly fantastic scenery. There’s no V-synch issues either, which is a definite bonus – something Drake’s Fortune couldn’t seem to manage so kudos to Crystal Dynamics for making sure that it doesn’t happen, even in this PS3 version of the game.

Though Lara’s new kit and caboodle might feel fresh, essentially there’s still a serious lack of invention or pushing the boundaries. It doesn’t feel like the developers paid attention to the various criticisms of their previous outings so Underworld plays it far too safe, merely retreading what has gone before and not offering any shocks or different twists that might’ve made the game essential beyond people just collecting and playing Tomb Raider games for completist’s sake.

That said, it’s playable and technically accomplished enough to offer a better gaming experience than Drake’s Fortune in so many ways, and there’s still something intriguing and inveigling about leaping into Lara’s world of crumbling ruins and steamy tropical vistas. Perhaps it might be worth playing the demo and basing a purchase decision on that rather than this review but there’s more than enough game here for your money but don’t expect anything ground-breaking or succinctly different to the recent two Crystal Dynamics Tomb Raider efforts.

Our rating

7/10