The Tomb Raider series isn’t everyone’s cup of tea. Some people probably don’t fancy the idea of having to focus mainly on acrobatic shenanigans and only having to whip out their pistols when bats start pestering you while you’re hanging from a ledge. Others don’t particularly like having to wrack their brains trying to solve puzzles.
Then there are those who think that Lara Croft is smoking hot, but wouldn’t be caught dead playing any game that stars the virtual vixen. For those of you who understand the elation that you feel when you manage to solve a particularly complex puzzle or finally find that route through an area that you’ve been trapped in for the last half hour, then Tomb Raider: Underworld is sure to tickle you in all the right places.
Underworld is all about adventuring. There’s a fair amount of action and gunplay, but at its core, the game is about exploration. When you are forced to pull out your dual pistols, it’s usually because some tiger or bat (and occasionally some mythical enemies like the Kraken and undead guardians called Thralls) is looking to take a chunk out of Lara’s neck. Sure, you’ll occasionally be forced to fight off a few poachers or mercenaries, but the game does a great job of making you feel like you’re all alone in uncharted territory.
It’s just you, Lara and huge areas filled with all sorts of hazards and wild animals. The locations are absolutely gorgeous – whether you’re dodging panthers in Mexico, scaling cliffs in Thailand or adventuring through a massive network of caves deep beneath the ocean, you’re guaranteed tons of eye candy while wading through Underworld.
A huge part of any Tomb Raider game is the puzzle element. Underworld doesn’t disappoint here, offering plenty of opportunities to test both your puzzlesolving abilities as well as your patience. Some of the puzzles are epic in scale. In Mexico for example, you’re given access to Lara’s motorcycle (allowing you to roam free around the area until you get bored) and tasked with partaking in a number of seemingly mundane activities. That is, until you realise that these activities all ‘join together’ to become part of a much larger central puzzle.
The locations lend themselves to this sort of puzzle quite well. The environments are so vast that you’ll often find yourself venturing back and forth between areas you’ve already visited when you realise that you’d forgotten to do a certain thing that is required of you in order for progress to be made (such as picking up that inconspicuous little carving of a Jaguar head…) on your first visit.
The game almost feels like an open-world platform game with certain limitations imposed upon it. Speaking of platform gaming, Underworld has some phenomenal set pieces and opportunities to flaunt your ability to jump from one rock to another at high speeds. Some of the sequences are very elaborate:
one puzzle involves Lara having to work her way up a gigantic pillar by performing the usual sequence of swinging from poles and jumping to grab onto outcroppings, but this time with an added twist – the pillar is divided into rotating sections, meaning that you need to have split-second timing to jump up to the next section, which is rotating in the opposite direction to the one that you are on.
It’s not always easy to spot where you need to be going or what you need to be doing, because the walls that you can climb and the poles from which you can swing often blend seamlessly into the environment. You’ll often sit for ages trying to figure out a way to reach your destination, and just when you start to lose hope, you’ll spot a ledge that you can grab onto that you didn’t see before.
Lara looks great, as always, but she’s definitely looking better than ever in this new title. She’s also more nimble than she’s ever been, and her animations accurately show just how graceful she really is.
Lara gets covered in dirt after she’s rolled around in the sand, and her skin glistens after she’s gone for a swim or if she’s been standing around in the rain. She’ll push foliage aside as she passes by, and she’ll grimace if she doesn’t get a firm hold on whatever ledge she’s just leapt towards.
She’s a much more believable character this time around, but she still has her moments of insanity where she’ll attempt an impossible leap across a giant ravine on her motorcycle. Her motivations this time involve finding Mjöllnir, the fabled hammer of Thor, the Norse god of thunder (to find out why she’s looking for it, you’ll have to play the game yourself – no spoilers here).
Lara has a PDA that allows her to create a sonar map of the area she’s currently in, and it also allows her to check journal entries to do some research on her current environment and the enemies within it, as well as how many hidden treasures and relics she’s found in each level.
The game’s not perfect. There are a few minor bugs that crop up every once in a while, and Lara has a nasty habit of occasionally ignoring button presses.
The combat feels a bit artificial, but the game can’t really be faulted on this: combat is not the focus of the title; it’s merely a fun distraction. We also encountered a few potentially game-breaking glitches where wertain environmental triggers didn’t fire off specific events in the game world, leaving us unable to finish a certain puzzle, and we were forced to load from a previous saved game in order to rectify the problem.
Problems aside, Tomb Raider: Underworld is just plain awesome. The game’s new engine looks great, and you’re guaranteed to see something that’ll make your jaw drop at least once while you’re playing. The puzzles and acrobatic sequences are often fiendishly difficult, but that rewarding sense of accomplishment when you manage to beat a puzzle is well worth it.
It’s not for everyone, but in NAG’s opinion, Underworld is an absolute must have.
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