Tomb Raider: Underworld Review - PC

5

Gameplay: 5
Graphics: 8
Audio: 9
Innovation: 2

Introduction

Tomb Raider Underworld continues the adventures of Lara Croft, grave robber and bitch extraordinaire. Underworld follows Lara in pursuit of Thor's Hammer, an artefact which she hopes will reveal the secret of her mother's disappearance many years before.

Along the way there will be some few twists and turns. Old villains will return, new ones will be made and people will die. The story is decent (but then I'm a sucker for mythology), the dialogue is of higher quality than your typical adventure story and the cinematics are rather well done.

It's a shame that the game infuriates me no end, released as a bug-ridden and flawed, unpolished and glitching mess.

Gameplay

Tomb Raider Underworld (TRU) plays like any other third person adventure title. The player controls Lara from an over the shoulder, third person perspective as she leaps and crawls her way through ruins and fights off mystical enemies and scary spiders. The first thing you will notice if you're a series veteran is the increased speed with which Lara seems to leap and climb.

The platforming is much the same as always, though Lara now has the ability to wall jump. Some of Lara's collision detection with ledges and objects is off, and on more than one occasion Lara actually fell through the pole she was supposed to grab, or clipped the target ledge and then fell to her death. That's without mentioning the camera issues, that make jumping all the more difficult. The worst of it is its inability to show what's behind Lara when she is on a wall, and given the many times the player must leap backwards off a wall to advance, jumping literally becomes a matter of blind faith.

Basic combat is mostly unchanged. The addition of melee combat is a bit off, considering that enemies either a) have ranged weapons or b) are so deadly up close that using melee weapons is a silly idea. Nonetheless the option is there, even if the hit detection is rather spotty, and plays like it could have done with some fine tuning.

The adrenalin system has noticeable tweaks. Unlike before, when these moments were triggered by enemies, now Lara must build up an adrenalin metre herself, and then get close to the enemy and press the grappling hook button, then line up the cross-hair for an easy (?) one-hit kill. Whether or not it works depends on the game's hit-and-miss hit detection, something else that could have been polished before release.

The quick time events have been removed. Rather than taking control from the player with a cinematic and prompting them to push a particular button at one point, the moments operate in real time, leaving the player with full control. Time slows down and gives the player the chance to act manually, depending on the situation. If your head is about to get cut off by a spinning blade, you must duck manually by pressing the crouch button, ...