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With one or two exceptions the new moves are quite a welcome addition to Lara's repertoire. The tightrope walking is very basic and not much of a challenge, and the gymnastic parallel bars swinging is a little overdone in the animation department to the point of being ridiculous. The ability to search cupboards and desks is very neat (although I think Lara's far too polite in the way she shuts the doors behind her -- given her visceral nature you'd think she'd really shred a room in her desire to find items). The excellent grappling hook gun unfortunately makes its only appearance in the final set of levels in the tower block, and this makes you wonder why more wasn't made of it earlier as it adds a great deal to the exploratory nature of the game. The unarmed combat promised for the game is far less than Oni-like and boils down to nothing more than set pieces which are basically little more than a new type of puzzle in themselves. For example, you can sneak up behind certain guards to chloroform and incapacitate them, but not all the guards as you can in NOLF -- you're limited strictly to the ones that the game says you can get.
There are other minuses to the game of course -- some new, some which have been present since the first games. As in TRLR there is no in-game brightness or gamma control which can leave TNT-card users groping their way around in the dark -- the only solution for which is to hike up your card's brightness in the Windows settings. Again. you can see Lara doing things in the scripted title cutscenes which you can't have her doing during the game. This is misleading and probably a good idea of what TR ought to be like rather than what we've been getting for the last few iterations in the series (it's like seeing a particular dish on the menu and then being told it's not available tonight). You still can't skip the in-game cutscenes to continue playing at your own pace -- you are stuck watching them through to the end and this doesn't work given that some are linked to difficult puzzles which you're going to have to repeat over and over until you get it right. The same also goes for the cinematic camera angles which occasionally pop up to supplement the chase-cam view -- you can't break free of them, even to use the telescopic function on the guns -- and they make it harder to actually work your way through the game at some points. TR's advantage over the static camera adventures was that the chasecam is more user friendly and controllable, but the developers appear to be taking a step backwards with these static views. The continuity often leaves you wondering too -- the FMV before the tower block levels shows Lara shooting her way in with a (silenced, of course) Desert Eagle yet after it ends she only has the MP5 to get her through the levels.
Special note should be made of the save-game bugs on some levels. If you save in the "wrong" places certain future puzzles and sections are insurmountable and all you can do is go back to a previous save-game and work on from there. Fortunately most of these errors have already been found and catalogued on the excellent walkthroughs at www.tombraiders.com and www.tombraiders.net/stella. No word as yet from Core-Design if they plan on releasing a patch to sort these out.
The secrets this time around involve the collection of golden roses -- if you get all 36 the 'special features' in the options menu will become available and you can see early development sketches and pix of the next generation Tomb Raider game that is currently under development (all of which are available on the usual TR websites anyway). One bad thing about the secrets though is that one on the tower block levels can only be reached provided you kill an innocent civilian and take the resulting change in path through the map -- if you spare him he opens a door for you and you then can't reach the secret... it just feels wrong and slightly backwards.
Finally, the level editor itself looks like a complete beast of a program to learn. Fortunately, included on the disk is an excellent and well written beginners manual in Adobe .pdf format (weighing in at a mere 119 pages!) which makes light work of the complexities of this beast. Please note that the editor will require an additional 300MB of hard disk space on top of what the game itself requires. As far as third-party support is concerned, a few sites devoted to user created levels have appeared and the first efforts are already out there for downloading: check out www.trlevels.com for more. There's also a level editor forum at www.tombraiders.com for any extra help you might need besides. |
Tomb Raider: Chronicles Demo
