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Tomb Raider: angel of darkness
ANGEL of darkness, like most heavy budget games, carried a lot of hype with it. Rumors that Sony had sent the game back to the development studios as the first version was not exactly “up to par”. There were stories that the gameplay mechanics had been completely reworked and Lara Croft would be more Solid Snake than Lara Croft. Promises of a cinematic experience were made left, right and centre with gameplay emphasizing more on stealth than just climbing blocks of rocks. As they say, promises are made to be broken.
Angel of darkness is irritating. Actually it is more than irritating, it is frustrating and irritating. While I was playing this game, I nearly cried because of the painful controls. To put it simply the controls are horrendous. You move the mouse, and a whole second later, Lara will gracefully turn around waiting for your next move. Then you press the up key and another second passes before she moves. Wow, what were eidos thinking before they let this atrocity out of the bag? In a game that regularly involves you to make pixel perfect leaps and bounds, such a control scheme is totally out of the question.
Let me give you a small example of this control when used with in the game. In the start, Lara is running away from guard dogs and policemen, as she is now accused of a crime that she did not commit. Oh the originality of the story, only second to the control scheme. First of all Lara does not run, she trots. Yes people, her life is on the stake here, rabid guard dogs are running after her, snipers from helicopters trying to hit her beautiful head from all corners, and all Lara does is trot. Kind of like a deer. Still, here I am pressing hard on the up key while dear Lara trots away from the weird looking dog chasing her. Suddenly Lara hits a wall, as the keys weren’t pressed at the right moment to avoid the bump.
To turn Lara around, one has to press on the directional keys and wait. Slowly but steadily Lara turns, as the dog catches up and bites the life out of her. In my panic, I press the gun key expecting Lara to pull the guns out at the same slow rate, but to my surprise, she hyperactively pulls the gun out and puts them back in, approximately five times in one second. By that time the odd looking dog had turned Lara into a Scooby snack, thus making the game end prematurely.
The graphics are meant to be cutting edge here. Full support for Direct X 9.0 cards like the Radeon 9700/9800 and Geforce FX is present and accounted for. Older cards are supported both in terms of Pixel Shader 1.1 and 1.4 support and fixed function processes. So how does it really run? Well pretty bad actually. There have been numerous reports on the web about the game having problems with the Geforce FX series of cards, including the high end 5900 Ultra.
The game ran just okay on my Geforce 4 Ti 4800 SE, only slowing down in places where there was heavy rain. I initially had a problem with the menu screen, which was not being rendered at all. After several attempts, it turns out that the game engine is incompatible with quincunx antialising method employed by NVidia. Turning that off removed the problem. Still a lot was left to be desired, as most people in Pakistan don’t even have a Geforce 2 under their hood, let alone a GF FX or Radeon 97xx card. Despite its support for advanced shader effects, Tomb Raider doesn’t look no where as good as the other games supporting DX 9.0 / PS 2.0 standards (namely Half-Life 2, Doom 3).
The sound on the other hand is a complete masterpiece. There is a full orchestra running in the back ground, and each and every effect is beautifully detailed in the game. Tomb Raider takes advantage of the Audigy line of sound cards by giving full support to the EAX 3.0 standard. This means that you get a full surround effect of up to six speakers! The sounds are very accurate and you can feel the effects encompassing you, provided that you have the right setup. The voice acting is pretty good too, with Lara sporting a british accent. The rest of the cast sounds pretty authentic too.
What differentiates this offering of Tomb Raider from the previous ones, is the inclusion of adventure game like elements. There is now a complete dialogue tree system that allows Lara to question and answer the various non-player characters in the game. As a whole the dialogue tree tries to reflect two sides of Lara, the angry side and the friendly side. Each dialogue proceeds to produce a different result from the NPC that Lara is interacting with. Although the consequences of such a system are not as profound as those present in regular adventure and role playing games, nevertheless it is still a pretty welcome addition to the rusty genre.
So what exactly is the story of this much hyped game? Well apparently the time is set before Lara died in Tomb Raider 4. The game starts off with Lara receiving a message from her mentor, asking for help. She comes to Paris, and in a weird accident, ends up (apparently) shooting her mentor. From there on wards she is on the run, hiding and asking questions. The story unfolds via rendered movies and in game cut scenes.
The designers have tried really hard to provide Lara with a solid personality, and have miserably failed. Lara sometimes acts like a “too tough to handle” 90’s woman and sometimes like the “I need to be comforted” sort. And such a paradox of a personality occurs through out the game. With the popularity of lead game characters such as Solid Snake, Max Payne etc. leading to increased sales, Lara’s designers thought that giving Lara a brooding past would put her in the same category of coolness as the before mentioned protagonists. Wrong again. Although the history of a character does come into account, it is the general playability of a game that allows gamers to relate to the lead character. If Max Payne did not have good play mechanics, the game would not have generated so much kudos. Having a “cool” character is just not enough to create the persona you want in the head of the gamers.
So to sum it up, Tomb Raider: AOD is a product that sounds really good, looks okay but plays worse than grand ma on a rainy day. I do recommend this game to those people with flashy new graphic cards, to check out the new pixel shaders in their chips, by running this game in full force. For the rest of us of ordinary folks, I would highly recommend avoiding this game. Don’t even buy it as a doorstop. If you are really craving for some good tomb raiding go and buy the latest Indiana Jones game. That game is far better than this mutant.
Hardware specification
Minimum specs: PIII 500MHz or equivalent, 128 MB RAM, 4X CD-ROM, 300 MB, 32 MB TnL Graphics card.
Recommended specs: PIII 1.5GHz or equivalent, 256 MB RAM, 8X CD-ROM, 128 MB PS 2.0 enabled graphics card
Reviewer’s specs: AthlonXP 2200+, Geforce 4 Ti4800 SE 128 MB, 512 MB DDR, SBLive!, 17” Viewsonic. Settings: 1024X768, Pixel Shader 1.1 enabled, Full texture and geometric detail, 4X antialising, 4X anisotropic filtering, EAX 2.0
DSDC Rating: 40%
The writer
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