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If you happened to be lying around last bank holiday you might have caught the latest
attempt to shove gaming onto mainstream TV. Called Gamestars, the ITV awards show featured an audience of 10 different kinds
of people: those who understand binary and those who don't.
Well one of the gongs was presented by the latest Euro-teenager
dumped off the model conveyor belt and straight into a pair of hotpants. This 'real life' Lara was lowered into the studio
preening and posing with her pistols. Mute and vacant behind her mirrored sunglasses she handed the envelope over to the nonentity
presenter and ascended back into the lighting rig to a smattering of floor-manager-only applause.
It served as a reminder
of just how dated, how embarrassing Lara Croft and the whole Tomb Raider phenomenon is these days. Next to Vice City, Gran
Turismo and even The Getaway she could only have appeared less of an anachronism if Horace went skiing onto the stage or Ms
Pac-Man read out the nominations.
The problem isn't just that Lara as a character seems to belong to a different age
- so does her game. Not because she slipped past the original Christmas release date. The slip just emptied the promotions
coffers and exhausted many gamers' goodwill, but her efforts seems dated because as the nineties turned into the noughties,
nothing was seen or heard of her.
She was once every magazine's favourite cover and the yearly chart topper, but now
lame Lucozade promotions and late celluloid spin-offs have become her only outlet. More elusive than 2000 litres of Anthrax,
can the girl with the cut-glass accent and the cut-off shorts still cut it?
After a cut-scene of moderate polish the
game starts in earnest and you have your answer all too soon. Instantly it becomes apparent is that not only is Lara Croft
Tomb Raider: The Angel Of Darkness a mouthful of Dirk Diggler proportions but it doesn't deserve such an elongated titled.
Tomb Raider 6 fits perfectly for reasons of both brevity and honesty. Why? Because this PS2 version is a measured improvement
on the neat and petite Chronicles but not a clean break from the PSone Croft titles.
Those often-talked-about new
moves are probably the most substantial shift as Lara can now climb drain pipes and crawl through smaller gaps than ever before.
She also comes with a grip-o-meter that ensures she can only hang onto ledges for a limited time and has the ability to perform
muscle-building tasks that let her beef up her biceps and so hang on longer. But such extra tricks are mere niceties, icing,
a gilding on the orthodox cage.
The real truth is that the gameplay still revolves around solving puzzles, pulling
levers, shoving boxes and finding a succession of platforms that Lara can jump to in your quest to climb higher. It's also
painfully slow. Without the now absent sprint function, just moving Lara around the immense areas takes an age. In short,
at its most basic the gameplay could have appeared in either of the Tomb Raider series' last two incarnations.
Which
neatly brings us to the controls. If there was one fault suffered by the series and loathed by even the most ardent Crofter
it was the clumsy layout of the buttons. Which makes it all the more shocking that Core have actually found a way to make
them worse, far worse. In a perverse twist the game uses a mixture of the traditional floating 'chase' camera and a variety
of fixed positions that are designed to improve the dramatic impact. The result is that the controls flip as the view does.
Walk forwards onto a staircase and as the view changes you'll often find yourself wandering back across the screen
the way you just came. This effect is magnified as the running, walking and sidestep functions are now controlled on the left-hand
stick and toggled with R1. Turning on the spot is also equally impossible and lining yourself up quickly for a timed jump
is frustration itself. Add in the problem of the fixed cameras and simply scooping up a packet of ammo becomes akin to parallel-parking
the Titanic. How to solve the problem? It certainly doesn't take Hideo Kojima to point out that the problem that the solution
lies with the now totally unemployed D-pad.
So the game sticks closely to the formula for the previous five. Who can be surprised
by that? Too much of a departure from the traditional TR gameplay might offend fans and sharpen critics' pens, but even the
most ardent fans would have hoped for more than the piecemeal improvements proffered. First off, the much trailed plot isn't
exactly engaging, it's bountiful but confusing and ultimately of GCSE-standard creative writing.
The vocal acting,
of Lara in particular, also conveys all the full excitement of Alan Shearer explaining the five economic tests for the Euro,
while the ability to talk to other characters feels strangely random. All too often the questions you don't choose are asked
subsequently and the outcomes of conversations feel arbitary. You can understand why the last game to use this feature was
the ancient trial-and-error fest Rocket Ranger.
Also borrowed (but from myriad more modern games) is the element of
stealth. Pursuing coppers and assailants can now be dispatched with a crouching move that lets you creep up behind your target
and dispatch them with a quick throw and flurry of blows. A few kicks have also been added but they are slow and graceless
and so at odds with the rest of the solid animation. Granted, both moves are effective, if not exactly innovative features,
that at least make a difference from vaulting sideways and peppering a target with lead in the time-honoured fashion.
Mercifully
the linear structure of the previous games has also been broken up. There are two or three different routes through some areas,
promoting either skill or speed and helping Lara to build herself up. The ledge that you can't hold onto quite long enough
becomes traversible once the girl has worked out prizing open doors with crowbars. It is a neat step away from the linear
problems of the series, but it might have been better to take it to its logical conclusions so that the strength she gains
makes her a truly customised RPG-lite character, different from your friend's Lara by being tougher in a fight or able to
defeat a puzzle in a different way.
The very first Tomb Raider was a bloody huge step forward. It turned the previously
primary coloured 2D world into an immense 3D one of rocky outcrops, dank caverns and furiously complex puzzles. As the series
progressed the innovations became more incremental, the levels were stretched to unmanagable proportions and the puzzles became
often too obtuse to complete without a walkthrough or a sheer persistance.
Unlike those impossibly unfriendly behemoths
TR6 is a neater, more considered game that offers the expected graphic improvements and sweetens those sequels' harsh natures.
The puzzles are less oblique, the levels more logical and the stealth and Kurtis sections offer a much-needed break from the
leaping. However the pedestrian pacing of the early levels, the fiddly controls and the fearsomely flighty camera still means
that if you have played the entire series from day one or if this is your first encounter, Lara has certainly seen better
days.
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