January 19, 2009 - One has to wonder if there’s something out there, something dark and sinister, referred to only as the Croft Curse. This nefarious evil makes any developers who work on the Tomb Raider games slowly become more obsessed with showing off Lara’s polygons than making playable games. First comes one title that’s a phenomenal entry in the series. After that, they even manage to pull off a rather surprising sequel that does what the original did, but a little better. But it’s here that things begin to sour. Oh sure, each new game that’s released does something interesting, but there’s always a trade-off, and the end result is a slow decline in the quality of product.

Underworld picks up the story that started in Tomb Raider 1 / Anniversary and continued in Legend. This means that to play the games chronologically, you need Anniversary, Legend, and then Underworld. It’s a bit confusing, but when you see those few elements that were stuck into TRU from Anniversary, namely a main bad guy, it isn’t too important to have actually played that game. What is important is that you know about Lara’s mom, Excalibur, and Amanda, since they play heavily into the story here--which basically means, go play Legend first.

However, when you’re referring to this game’s story, it’s best to do so very loosely. Essentially, this is the same story as Legend, i.e., Lara hunting mummy dearest while pursued by Amanda, complete with Lara wielding yet another mythological weapon of mass destruction. The rest of the story ends up adding nothing to the package since it’s handled so poorly. Characters are killed on a whim for “emotional impact”, and baddies are introduced only to be removed from the story with little warning. None of this stuff serves a real purpose in the game. It’s about as haphazard as a story gets without falling apart entirely.

Luckily, the gameplay holds up much better than the story does… for the most part. All of Lara’s old moves have returned, but all have been tweaked in some fashion to make them work better. Not only do they work better, but they look great in motion. Oh sure, her hand and leg movements might not match up perfectly with the wall she’s climbing, but it’s a heck of a lot more effort than you see in many games. The best part of all of this is that her movements are so organic and free-flowing that you will very rarely feel like you’re being artificially prevented from going somewhere. If a ledge looks like it’s out of reach, maybe you need to stand on the pole you’re swinging on so you can leap from there to get extra height. It might take you a few moments to figure out how to get from one place to another, and thinking is always appreciated.

What isn’t appreciated are the changes that have been dumped onto the combat system. You will literally spend 75% of the game fighting off spiders and bats, mere vermin that seek to annoy you, not endanger you. Considering that they die in onehit, the game tries to make it feel more exciting by having them attack you while you’re hanging from ledges. Lara has a new trick where she can hang with one hand and shoot her pistol with the other, which makes for some interesting situations. But it’s still boring due to simply fighting ten bats instead of real enemies.

To counteract this, they made some of the bigger enemies bullet sponges. Did you know that it takes about fifteen pistol bullets to kill your average human being? Well apparently that’s the case, so you’re better off taking out Laras’ assault rifle or shotgun and blowing them away. As if having almost non-stop access to the bigger guns wasn’t bad enough, it seems that to balance the ridiculous nature of the enemies health bars, Lara was given a one-shot kill maneuver that is easy to pull off. This leads to a seriously erratic difficulty where you’re having issues killing enemies at first, but once you get started, it’s one-shot kills for everyone!