Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness - 1.0.1

Dave d - Maybe you just grew up?

This game is not very much fun. I loved playing the original Tomb Raider, but no real improvements have been made since then, in my opinion. Here are the reasons I quit playing this game about 1/4 of the way through. It's boring and not very fun, and here's why:

1. Tomb Raider was great at the time, but you have to keep up with the times and the competition, and I don't think the makers of this game have done that. The graphics are not that great compared with the current FPS games on the market, and Lara can't interact with nearly enough items in the game to make it interesting. Running around town and climbing on things are not as exciting as they were 10 years ago when you couldn't do those things in any other games.

2. There were several spots in the first few chapters where I got stuck in dialogs and had no way to get out of them. In one case, I had the combination to a keypad. I hit the action button, and I couldn't access my inventory to get the combination. Worst part was that I also couldn't get out of the keypad screen! I had to look up the combination in a walkthrough on the internet to get past it.

3. Several times the game locked up and I had to force restart my Mac to get out of it -- very bad manners indeed. I'm on a dual 2.0 G5 with a Radeon 9600, so there's no performance reason that I should have encountered in a game like this with marginally complex graphics.

4. The new dialog feature where you can talk to NPC's sounds neat, but it's actually a real pain. You have to sit through their whole dialog even if you don't care what they're saying. If you've already talked to them it and then have gone back to a saved position, you're going to hear their whole story again. Some dialogs have little mini-movies that are very boring, like watching 2 guys fight after making a wager on them. That particular scene seemed like it was about 45 seconds to a minute long, and was nothing. The 2 boxers just kind of jumped around, punching each other a couple of times, then one went down. No sound, no excitement, just me sitting there bored until one of them goes down. I would have at least liked to hit the space bar or something and get out of it. In that particular scene, there's also a 50-50 chance of losing the wager, in which case you have to go back to a save game and watch the whole boring dialog and fight again. That's not fun.

5. Lara jitters a lot in the game. The graphics shudder and look bad when she makes a jump into a wall or some other thing the programmers don't want you to do. This happened in the original Tomb Raider, but should have been improved by now.

6. Lara can jump incredible distances, longer than any real person. That's fine, it's a fantasy game anyway. But why can't she jump over a 3 foot barrier, or onto a small rock? I don't care if it's realistic, just make it consistent!

7. Bad guys often come out of doors that Lara cannot open. This is annoying. They also sometimes just appear out of thin air. Again, this was acceptable 10 years ago when the original TR came out, but the best games are now much more realistic and I think you really can't get away with it nowadays.

8. Look mode in Angel of Darkness is just as terrible as it has always been in TR. Sometimes Lara can look around, sometimes not. Her looking is very limited, and slow! If I look around in real life, I can do it at least twice as fast as Lara can in the game. I don't want to spend so much time looking around, and having to turn Lara all around to see my surroundings. I want to see what I need to see and get on with it, and I want to look when I want to look, not when it's convenient for the programmers to let me look.

9. Another look issue: I can see Lara's back and even the backs of her eyeballs (?!?) when I look sometimes. This is not cool. It's also a major annoyance to see the other side of a wall, or some obstacle behind or above Lara when attempting to look. Again, this is no better, perhaps worse, than it was in the original TR. I feel like somebody is trying to coast on an old idea, and not improving it to try to meet today's challenges

9. Lara's targetting abilities are a pain, and not at all realistic. If I'm walking around holding a gun, it doesn't automatically raise and point at someone just because they're a bad person. I'd prefer to have a target on my screen like in Doom and other FPS games, and manually turn around, target them and shoot who I want to shoot. I don't want Lara turning around to aim at things. Just indicate to me that I'm getting shot at like in real life, and I'll turn around and find my opponent and shoot him myself. Just hitting the fire button is boring, and not at all realistic.

10. More ammo, please! Even though Lara self-targets, I ran out of ammo several times, leaving me at the mercy of the guys across a big area with guns. Not fun.

11. It takes way too long for some non-controllable actions to occur in this game, and others . If I get arrested, don't show some 5-10 second mini-movie of me getting arrested, just get on with it. Also, don't just let me die and quickly say "Game Over". The game is not over. You know I want to continue, so just kill me and give me my load options quickly. QuickLoad is great, but if you kill me so quickly that I don't have time to hit the QuickLoad F-key, what good is it? Then I have to wait to go to a load screen and do it the long way.

12. Lara does things slowly. I really don't care about waiting forever for her to shimmy somewhere or climb a long vine. This is a waste of time, and just seems like compensation for a game that should have more scenes and action in it. Yes, it's neat that she can climb pipes and vines, but it takes forever. If she's such a super-jock, get the vine-climbing out of the way, and get on to some intrigue and action.

Well, that's all I have, I guess. I know I've been rather hard on this game, but I think the developers have gotten very lazy, and that bugs me. Again, I feel like they're just milking what used to be a really great game, and haven't invested in new technologies and ideas in order to make it the cutting-edge game it originally was. I don't want to play a 10-year old game with a year's worth of improvements. I want to play a new, state-of-the-art game, and would be most happy to pay twice the money to do so. This game, though, isn't worth the $30 I paid for it. I'm selling it, and have no interest in getting through the rest of it before I do so.