PS3 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 shoRead full review
