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DESPITE BEING (TWICE) DELAYED for nearly eight months Angel of Darkness is finally nearly here. The delays have apparently mainly been down to problems with the analog control and sluggish FPS on the PS2 -- besides Core's desire to put a really polished game out after the bug-ridden Tomb Raider: Chronicles. It appears to be all fixed and buffed up now though and Lara's first entry onto the PS2 with a new engine is, at least, looking good... looking very good actually.

TRAOD is much improved graphically over the previous games; this time Core have created an entirely new engine to run the game with and have used the Oscar-winning Maya program to produce the levels -- so gone are the legoblock environments of old, replaced instead by some very gorgeous looking real-life locations with some excellent lighting and fog effects.

Besides which gaming's most animated character has also gained yet more new moves to add to her already splendid arsenal of exploratory maneuvres -- all of which, from oogling the gameplay videos, are as well animated as is usual with Core's previous offerings in the series. You can see her climbing up and down reverse inclines (indeed most rough looking surfaces in the game will be climbable), shimmying along pipes, dropping to a prone position to crawl under alarm lasers, hugging walls and ledges, stealthily creeping up behind guards and knocking them out and, finally at last, she can kick and punch her way out of trouble besides -- we're not talking Oni-like levels of kung-fu destruction here but she is no longer totally dependent on the unlimited ammo pistols as her final resort.

In a couple of RPG-like additions to the gameplay she can now question third parties for infomation in her quest (instead of the usual patented-Lara Croft method of shooting everyone and picking up the pieces afterwards), and in what's being termed 'character evolution', her climbing/swimming/running abilities will improve the more the player makes her use them -- these could perhaps be the biggest changes in the game.

Through the machinations of the series's plot -- being buried under a collapsing pyramid doing nothing for her press copy -- Lara has been taken out of the tombs and placed in the modern day cities of Paris and Prague for this outing. Though you shouldn't expect to get the ponytailed adventuress's mind out of the sewers: plenty of the action is set to take place in mysterious ruins, cathedrals, laboratories all under the streets, besides some high tech action in the Louvre and fun with the crazies in a mental institute.

When we last left our heroine she had been left for dead under said pyramid, and this by all acounts has left her feeling a little more cold and dark than before -- at the beginning of TRAOD Lara goes to meet her old mentor Von Croy about a task he has for her, and she's not a happy little adventuress. After a testy exhange Von Croy is killed by force unknown: Lara is promptly accused of the murder, and the chase is on in Paris: Lara must explore, discover and uncover the villains' neferious plot whilst remaining free. At some point in the adventure she meets the new playable character in the game, Kurtis; an ex-French Foreign Legionnaire who's more of the hard core action type and armed with a really big pistol plus a mystical flying blade that he can direct through some mental psionic prowess. Whereas Lara's approach this time has a more stealthy feel, Kurtis will get roughly 15% of the game for us to sample some of the ultraviolence that comes both with his past, and his future goals.

Finally the PC version now comes with mouse control, although from checking out the video clips it only appears to work on the camera; revolving it around Lara and Kurtis while their movement is done, as is TR-usual, with the keyboard -- unfortunately the old auto-targeting is still there too, with still yet no mouse-aim for the gunplay. If all that sounds too similar to the control-system disaster that was the recent Indiana Jones game there's no need to panic, as unlike the annoying Empirical Indy method the camera's angle in TRAOD will have no effect on movement and direction -- thus, at least, semi-decent gameplay is assured even if it's not the traditional mouse-turn and keyboard sidestep method for 3rd-person-perspective PC games.

New Zealand Release date: July 11th (PS2), Late July (PC)

Latest reported TRAOD specs:

Minimum (with TnL graphics card): 500MHz CPU, 16MB graphics card 100% TnL capable/DX9 compatible, 200MB HDD space, Windows 98, 128MB RAM

Minimum (without TnL): 1.5GHz CPU, 8MB graphics card, 200MB HDD space, Windows 98, 128MB RAM

Recommended: 1.5GHz CPU, 64MB graphics card 100% TnL capable/DX9 compatible, 3D soundcard (EAX2/I3DL2), 200MB HDD space, Windows 2000/Windows XP, 128MB RAM

Show me the screenshots!