Tomb Raider: Underworld

For many, Lara Croft is gaming. Those early forays into 3D adventuring territory marked a lot of players’ first time wrestling with the controller and trying to accomplish something that delivered nothing other than a sense of achievement. Fast forward twelve years and we’ve seen a number of sub-par game releases for every imaginable format, a bunch of advertising tie-ins, a few comic books and two movies that were met with relative indifference at the box office. Now though, the developers promise us that they’ve gotten back to the roots of the series with Tomb Raider: Underworld.

And that is exactly what they’ve done. Lara is back and all of the elements that made the original game (and the first sequel) so much fun to play have been thrown in. Unfortunately, that seems to be about all that was thrown in. That won’t be the last time that I build the game up and knock it down right away, since to be perfectly honest, Underworld is one of the most ridiculously addictive, yet horrendously infuriating games to be released in the last few years.

Why? Well, to lead off, you have the puzzling elements. They’re always moderately challenging and always generally rewarding to complete, and at times will completely throw you off your stride and prevent your progress through the game. This is a great thing, for if there’s a puzzle that you just can’t work out, you’ll find yourself thinking about it as you go to sleep and as you’re on your daily commute until that golden moment comes where you finally hit the jackpot and you manage to unlock the next part of the game. Glorious. Or at least it would be, were the inability to solve puzzles actually something that was to do with your lack of lateral thinking, rather than the game glitching or deciding to not show you where a key component is. The first challenge is a perfect indication of this. The game prompts you to follow the glowing jellyfish as you swim through the deep blue, looking for two axles to open the door to the Underworld. You find one using this method, and then head out to find the other. Forty-five minutes of fruitless searching and fiddling about with the next-to-useless Sonar Map and you’re frustrated and head back to the door in a “if I retrace my steps I’ll see what I’ve missed” kind of style. You reach the door and lo! There it is! The other axle is sitting on the floor no more than four feet away from the door. Now, either I’m getting old, or there’s nothing in the game that even slightly suggests that that would have been the case. In fact, the game tells you the exact opposite as you swim through the strings of jellyfish on a hiding to nothing a few hundred meters away.

Elsewhere, the method of finding your away around the beautifully realised levels is generally to run until you meet an obstacle, and then find a way of navigating around or over it – just like you’ve done in the past. This works well again and despite a couple of niggles in the control system (like when you jump towards a hip-height ledge and Lara steadfastedly refuses to grab onto it until you actually jump straight up, rather than towards) it feels like good old Tomb Raider again. However (see?), there are other problems that break up the gameplay and feel like its more than the idea that’s been thrown back to the days of the PSOne. In places, the wall navigation feels somewhat hit-and-miss, and this can be an absolute deal-breaker. A stunning sequence where you’re running through a sinking ship is the epitome of frustration, as you climb for three minutes along a (now vertical) floor that you ran across just moments before. You get to within feet of the door, and there’s nothing left to grab on to. Oh, no! But wait…there’s an exposed pipe to the left…if I leap to that, I’ll be able to jump back to the door! Nope. Lara doesn’t “like” that one and refuses to grab onto it, so falls to her death. You climb all the way back up after a brief reload and still cannot see a thing to climb on to, so you try the old vertical leap to see what happens. Ah. THERE it was. That piece of floor that looks like every other panel of floor in the entire ship was what I was looking to grab on to. Damn it all to hell.

Surprisingly, despite these faults, the game is actually very, very playable. For every pointless or broken feature, there’s a genuinely impressive gameplay sequence, and for every time you have to empty thirty bullets into a drone enemy’s temple to kill them (welcome to 1996, everyone) there’s another occasion where a sticky bomb will cause your target to idiotically run towards another one before detonation. The game isn’t overly long, but the playtime will be extended by the amount of times you throw your controller down in disgust as you watch Lara expire for the hundredth time without it actually being anything to do with your skills. The secret here though, is that it won’t be long before you’re picking that pad up for another go a lot sooner than you think – and you can’t put a price on that.

Tomb Raider: Underworld absolutely reeks of polish in some places and in others it needs a good buffing. The camera is still hideous to control for large portions of time and there are a fair few blind leaps of faith that’ll need to be made because of this. But, you need to bear in mind that this was always the case. Despite all of the flaws, this is a step in the right direction for the Tomb Raider series and isn’t a million miles away from the original game in terms of fun, addictiveness and overall quality. Lara’s slightly more realistic heaving bosom and slightly more rounded and shapely buttocks will be with us all for a good number of years to come it seems, and given the direction that this game takes the series in, that’s not a bad thing – as it isn’t hard to imagine the next game being one of the best of the generation. For now though, the flaws stop Underworld from being a must-buy at what is an incredibly demanding time of year for gamers’ pockets.