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Red Moon · 21-11-2008, 11:02 PM

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Tomb Raider Underworld

The concept of Cool Britannia now seems laughable – a discredited chunk of spin from a previous century. Its standard bearers haven't fared too well. The Spice Girls are no more, Tony Blair is no longer one of the most powerful men in the world, and the country is generally too busy trying to scrape a living to bother about being cool. However, one of Cool Britannia's standard bearers continues to beaver away, doing what she does as well as ever: Lara Croft.

Indeed, in her latest starring vehicle, Tomb Raider Underworld, Lara has never looked or moved better. Since it's the first Tomb Raider game designed for next-generation consoles from the outset, you'd expect it to look good, and it doesn't disappoint. And for the first time, Lara's movements are governed by motion capture, rather than hand animation, so she moves in a more deliciously gymnastic fashion than ever.

If anything, Lara's movement is the key aspect of Tomb Raider Underworld. Looking at the game dispassionately, it would appear to lack a killer innovation, something that adds a new twist to the franchise. But that's not necessarily a bad thing. The franchise is incredibly successful and changing it radically just for the sake of it could render it worthless.

And when you get stuck into Tomb Raider Underworld, it swiftly becomes clear that it is designed to appeal to a generation of gamers – surely now in their 30s – who grew up with Tomb Raider and fell in love with Lara's attributes and attitude.

It's easy to detect the hand of Toby Gard, Lara's originator, who is now back in the fold at the game's San Francisco-based developer, Crystal Dynamics. Gard and co have taken a back-to-basics approach, assessing Tomb Raider's best aspects, so in Underworld you get huge, engrossing and epic puzzles that involve much leaping, swinging and climbing from Lara, a strong storyline, the usual shooting of endangered animals and rival treasure hunters, and no more.

The boss battles, which tended towards the fiddly and invariably involved tedious periods of button-bashing, have been abandoned, as have recent Tomb Raiders' occasional timed button-pressing. In Tomb Raider Underworld when, say, you're standing on a pillar and it starts to collapse, instead of having to push the X button and the A button at specified times, you just have to react and jump before plummeting to a rag-doll physics demise. Tomb Raider Underworld always feels more logical than its predecessors.

There are new aspects to the game, which do impinge on gameplay. The first level, in the Mediterranean, for example, has Lara leaping off her gin-palace with, for the first time, an aqualung, before solving a puzzle that takes place entirely underwater. If anything would strike a chord with Lara fans, it's that aqualung. We've all caused her to drown agonisingly in the past through inept underwater manoeuvring.

For the first time, too, she can free-climb (although only on visually obvious areas studded with hand-holds), and she can stand on all but the narrowest ledges. All things that in Tomb Raiders of yore, Lara should have been able to do but couldn't.

The shooting engine has been mildly tweaked so that now, as you kill enemies, Lara has an adrenalin meter that fills up; clicking the right stick with an enemy targeted brings about a slow-motion period during which her shots also do extra damage. With full adrenaline, you can also set up a head-shot by pressing X in proximity to an enemy. The net effect is a shooting system that feels familiar but is more controllable than in the past, and the adrenalin comes in particularly handy when you're faced by multiple enemies.

Lara's grapple has been tweaked so she can use it to abseil, and as it now conforms better to the laws of physics you can, for example, catch it on a rock and cause it to topple. Some swing-poles can now be slotted into or pulled out of holes, adding a new dimension to some of the traversing puzzles, and Lara can now balance on horizontal poles. She has also acquired a wall jump, which features quite heavily.

The replacement of hand animation with motion capture brings a number of subtle improvements to the way Lara moves, which don't necessarily have much effect on gameplay but do make her movements much more believable, which in turn increases your pleasure in manipulating her. For example, she will stumble momentarily after a long, tricky jump, or put her hands up to stop herself if you deliberately make her run into a wall.

Again, these sound like tiny, incremental improvements, but they really are at the heart of what Crystal Dynamics is trying to do with the franchise. It's easy to describe who will most enjoy Tomb Raider Underworld – gamers who derive pleasure from nailing Lara's gymnastic, gravity-defying moves, and those who find solving huge mechanical puzzles satisfying.

It's not perfect, though. Indeed, the game has a glaring flaw. And, sad to say, it's one that has afflicted every Tomb Raider game: the camera. Mostly it's OK, but sometimes it goes completely haywire (although you can always exert a measure of control over it, using the right joystick). Given that the direction in which Lara moves is governed by the camera's direction, this is a pretty major flaw.

Unforgivably, when stitching together a sequence of moves, you sometimes have to wait for the camera to catch up before you can coax Lara to jump in the right direction. You learn to work around this when it happens, but it's not something you should have to do in a 21st-century game.

However, in terms of graphics and storyline (which we won't go into in case you buy the game), Tomb Raider Underworld is unimpeachable. All you really need to know is that, if you're a Tomb Raider fan, you'll absolutely love it and almost certainly agree that it's the best Tomb Raider game yet. If you're new to games, you'll enjoy it as long as you find Lara attractive and don't merely crave a wham-bam, full-on action experience.

Indeed, despite all its visual polish, its gameplay is rooted in a time when videogames were more sedate and cerebral. If that appeals, then Tomb Raider Underworld will satisfy; otherwise, you will find it disappointing.

Source: The Guardian