Sorry Lara, but i'm going to
rip you a new asshole. Through a review of course,
rather than literally. Perhaps i'm just the
wrong sort of gamer to be playing jumping puzzle
games. Perhaps I should stick to shooters only.
But I played it, so I'm going to review it.
Anniversary is the eighth game
in the franchise, hot off the heels of Tomb
Raider: Legend, both developed by Crystal Dynamics
who have taken over the franchise. They went
on to release another Tomb Raider game in 2008,
then Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light which
is more action-oriented than puzzle and our
now working on a complete reboot of the franchise
with 2012's Tomb Raider, yet to be released.
All previous games up until
2006 were developed by Core Design. I played
one of the early ones, I'm pretty sure the original
Tomb Raider 1 from 1996 or it's sequel. I don't
think I ever finished it, so it can't have been
a great game, but I do remember some awesome
looking scenes.
Anniversary is a remake of
Tomb Raider 1. Same story, same levels but obviously
beefed up, same puzzles. You can definitely
tell too, because the cliched 90's style of
gameplay is present, such as find the key to
open the door. Numerous levels in Anniversary
have you trekking around hunting for, in essence,
keys to continue your merry way. It's not ground-breaking
material here, and i'm surprised the franchise
doesn't get a harder time on it's simple old
school puzzles.
What makes Anniversary and
probably the entire Tomb Raider series fun,
is the scaling and jumping your way through
the levels. Getting to great heights and backflipping
over to an almost hidden crevice behind you,
all way above the ground. It's all very cool.
Cool, but not exactly realistic. For instance
in the third episode you spend three huge levels
getting through this obstacle course to get
the artifact, then Lara simply strolls out of
the room through it's back exit, which doesn't
even have a door, to her motorbike waiting 20
metres away. Why didn't she go that way in the
first place? Who made all these strange obstacle
courses and how exactly are the bad guys getting
through them? It's all a little unrealistic.
The levels all look pretty
good. Critics suggested Legend looked much better,
which is a shame. Sequels should get better
as technology progresses, but it is still the
same engine. Sometimes it does feel like corridor-room-corridor,
but the settings help to make the environments
look great; Peru, Greece, Egypt and the Lost
Island. All typical Tomb Raider themes. However
it doesn't have much grand outdoor beauty or
detail. In comparison to Crysis and it's outdoor
scenery, Anniversary looks years older. In fact
King Kong wow'ed me more than this game. The
Crystal Dynamics engine definitely isn't the
best looking from 2007, but it does cut the
mustard at least.
Now to what really irked me
off with Anniversary, if the above wasn't enough
already; four things.
Firstly the combat system.
It's rubbish. Fighting animals is not fun at
all. They constantly knock you over and you're
swearing at Lara to get the hell up so you can
attempt to resume the fight. You can shoot blindly,
hold a key to auto-aim, which is unreliable
at best, or go into shooting mode where it zooms
in on Lara and you get a target, but you can't
move. It's terrible! Just give me a normal target,
none of this auto-aim bull. Lara also moves
extremely slowly. I was forced to use a high
speed cheat to speed her movements up. Especially
when you're having to repeat puzzles over and
over again. I also put god-mode on too, because
after the first episode I was WAY over the awful
combat and just wanted to focus on the jumping.
Which brings me to number two;
frustration factor with some of the jumping
puzzles. 90% of the game is fine, but there's
just a few jumping parts where it doesn't seem
to work well, especially using the grapple hook.
One such jump with a grapple I probably repeated
30-40 times before I finally managed it. Another
I tried a good 20 times before I managed to
fluke it. It's not fun getting through 15 jumps
only to miss the last one and repeat all over
again.
Number three; checkpoints.
This game features the most idiotic checkpoint
system I've ever encountered. If you run over
a checkpoint spot you've previously been to,
it'll save overtop of your existing checkpoint.
To explain how this is a bad thing take the
T-Rex level as an example. I'm at the pit unsure
how to proceed so I backtrack incase I missed
something, suddenly falling down a slope and
back into the T-Rex arena, which I'd already
completed previously. And a new checkpoint saves,
overwriting my last one. Now I have to spend
ten minutes climbing out of the arena all over
again just to get back to the top of the slope
where I previously was. However, you can do
manual saves at checkpoints. It doesn't save
your currently location, just the previous checkpoint
again. I was doing this regularly so I decided
to go back to my previous manual save, which
just happened to be right at the beginning of
the T-Rex fight. Checkpoint. What?! Another
checkpoint just got saved overtop of my previous
one? Now I have to fight the T-Rex all over
again and climb out of the arena because of
this terrible checkpoint system. Which brings
me to the last point...
The boss fights. There's four
of them and in order to complete them you need
to do bullet time. Bullet time is supposedly
easy, you get the enemy infuriated and when
they charge at you simply press a movement key
and roll at the same time. I probably tried
this over 100 times, not once EVER did it work.
I have no idea why not, others seem to do it
with ease, but it just wouldn't work when I
tried it. It meant the first two boss fights
weren't possible without cheats. The last two,
in the final level of the game, weren't possible
at all, even with cheats. Ridiculous.
So overall what did I think
of Tomb Raider Anniversary? Well the levels
all looked pretty good. Not groundbreaking and
won't be on any best-of lists in 2007 for it's
design, but good enough. And while the puzzles
and jumping dynamics were good for most of the
game, there were some really frustrating points,
not helped by terrible boss battles and no quick-save.
Not to be forgotten rubbish fight scenes. I
wouldn't play any other Tomb Raider games unless
I knew it was going to look utterly amazing,
so Legend and Underworld off my list. I don't
like to be frustrated, hence a low score for
Lara, and some vaseline.
