Tomb Raider Underworld

In Tomb Raider Underworld Lara continues the adventure she began in Tomb Raider Legend, hunting down mystic gateways to Avalon in pursuit of her long missing mother. This time the Arthurian Avalon legends get the Lara-drop-kick for an even older Northern European source… apparently long ago it was the Vikings who truly ran the seedy Underbelly of our world. At best a sequel and at worst no more than a spruced up extra level pack, Tomb Raider Underworld nevertheless succeeds in capturing both your interest and your imagination as Lara heads all over the globe in search of little shiny cans of Viking spam.

Plotting Points by Tan(x)
Video Game Reviews by a Very Busy Math Teacher

Game: Tomb Raider Underworld
Platform: Xbox 360
Played For: 10 hours

Okay, so maybe the glistening sparkly treasures aren’t intended to be spam, but they may as well be for all that you know about them. Apparently our old Viking Masters, dominating the world with a system of magical gateways, glowing gloves and other super science paraphernalia, used their great technology to leave tiny glittering octahedrons scattered around all the world’s great ruins. As these octahedral-spam are almost always found in identical clay pots (with spiders lurking nearby… lots of spiders in this game), our anti-Archaeology tomb raiding heroine finds it imperative to visit one valuable site from antiquity after another, and promptly kick, smash and otherwise mutilate every piece of pottery she finds. Lara takes the same view on all matters of conservation, diligently shooting any wildlife she sees (the more endangered the better) and continuing her bad habit of causing ancient ruins to explode

To be fair, at least the pots she insists on smashing do look like those cheap mass-produced tourists’ junk that you find at every roadside attraction in second and third world countries. But you’d think Lara would be a little more respectful of the things when she finds them in the deepest darkest corners of long silent empty ruinous halls. Maybe she was just a bit peeved about that young upstart treasure hound Drake getting to find neat, individualized hidden treasures while she has to make due with identical generic baubles. Quantity does not mean quality, and I would much have preferred to hunt down 60 unique art pieces than 200 oversized D&D dice. Artifacts in Underworld are equally unexciting… boy, Lara must really feel rewarded for her efforts when 20 minutes of perilous dungeon trapeze work reveals to her nothing more than a little golden baseball. Not exactly a display item, and as to the value, heck, Lara’s already as rich as can be.

The more interesting items she finds are used in puzzles or as health drinks, and these all easily fit into Lara’s Heward’s Handy Haversack… oops, there’s the D&D dice getting the better of me again. I liked Lara’s new ability to pull some poles out of walls and transfer them to new holes, and as always Lara has a few new animations that add reality to her climbing and vaulting about the place. These nice little touches made the occasional graphics glitches sadly distracting… especially the issue of Lara getting stuck on little piles of uneven ground (roots, debris, etc.) and going into the Lara Unhappy Rubble Dance loop. For a game that encourages you to find hidden passages and secret clefts in the wall, Tomb Raider Underworld has surprisingly little tolerance for a player trying to take Lara off the beaten path

On the plus side, some of the locations Lara visits are simply breathtaking. The Cambodian shore and the final level were, in my opinion, particularly memorable, and I really liked it when Lara was having just as much fun as I was exploring them. This lasts until midway through the game when she has a few bad turns and she turns all angry and Goth and such. While it doesn’t spoil the fun, it doesn’t really add much to the proceedings and makes Lara look like she’s using way too much eye shadow.

But back to the environments. Happily, Lara spends much more time alone in this installment, rather than shooting hordes of generic soldiers of fortune. This lets the player concentrate more on the problem of how to get Lara from point A to point B, which seems to be the primary essence of the game play. I did miss Lara’s dialogue with her home team, though. In the last game Lara was often in radio communication with her pals at Croft Manor, allowing more interesting commentary and dialogue on each level… a major boon when you have a such a talented voice actress playing Lara.

I really loved the idea of working your way deep into a system of ruins only to find even older, more distinct or alien ruins farther below. This reminded me quite a bit of the original Tomb Raider 1… and the re-release as Tomb Raider Anniversary is still clearly swirling about the frontal lobes of the Underworld teams’ collective brains. This is the first adventure to make good use of story elements both from the original game and from a previous installment, making for a pleasing sense of continuity and ongoing adventure.

The flip side of that, however, is that Tomb Raider Underworld’s extreme brevity and continuation of the previous plotline makes it feel more like an expansion pack for Tomb Raider Legend than a game that stands on its own. This distressing impression is further served by the lack of extras, like an unlockable in-game movie viewer, Lara’s mansion tutorial level, extra costumes or just about anything else. Worse, a few things have been downgraded from the previous game. You will travel fewer places, see less story and experience far less character development than in Legend. And the new save game system that kicks you back to the beginning of a level rather than keeping you where you are… no Siree, there’s not one bit of good to that there donkey.

Maybe the developers just had to rush this one out for the Holiday season, but I have that distinct gnawing unease in my gut that the “downloadable content demon” has claimed another studio. Expect the rest of this game to be released in bite-sized chunks at extra cost over Xbox Live the next few months. Will you shell out the bucks for horse armor for Lara and extra cans of spam? Angelina Jolie would prefer you gave that money to charity.

Will I play it more: if extra levels cost x dollars, and I have y dollars in savings…