ShareThis

Genre: Third-Person Action

Format: 2 CDs

Developer: Core Design

Original Publisher: Eidos

Mac Conversion: Beenox Studio

Mac Publisher: Aspyr Media

Minimum System Requirements: 1GHz G4 with ATI RADEON 7500 or nVidia GeForce 2MX/4MX, or 733MHz G4 with ATI RADEON 8500 or nVidia GeForce 3, Mac OS X v10.2.6, 256MB RAM, 1.3GB hard disk space, 4X CD-ROM

Review Computer: 867MHz G4, 640MB RAM, ATI RADEON 8500, Mac OS X v10.3.2

Network Feature: No

Price: $39.99

ESRB Rating: Teen (blood, violence, tight jeans)

Availability: Now

Official Website: [url=http://www.tombraider.com]http://www.tombraider.com[/url] (the source of these screen captures)

About 10 to 15 minutes into playing Tomb Raider: The Angel of Darkness (AOD), I found myself thinking, "Man, these controls suck. What have they done to this game?" Then, I remembered, "Oh yeah, Tomb Raider. No mouse. This is all keyboard."

It's been that long. For a while, there, it seemed as if we were getting two Tomb Raider games a year as Aspyr worked to catch us up with the PC. Now, it's been so long since I've played a Tomb Raider game that I'd forgotten the control system. But, like a song you haven't heard in ten years yet you can still sing along to when it comes on the radio, it all came back to me.

AOD met with heavy opposition when it was released on the PC and consoles. Apparently, it was quite buggy. Paramount Pictures went so far as to blame the lackluster box office sales of Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life on the poor reception of the AOD game, the release of which coincided with the live action movie. That seems a little harsh, if you ask me. I can't imagine a game would be so bad that it would stop 14- to 25-year-olds from going to see Angelina Jolie in a silver, spandex jump suit.

Luckily for me, I didn't see the movie, and I didn't have to suffer through the problems of the PC version. I've said it before, and I'll say it again: There are many benefits to waiting for a Mac port, not the least of which is that most of the bugs have been squashed by the time the game reaches us. And, do you know what? I'm glad this one reached us.

As you may recall, Lara Croft "died" at the end of Tomb Raider: The Last Revelation. As if to pound this home, its follow-up, Tomb Raider: Chronicles, was built around people close to Lara recounting stories of her early adventures. But, you can't kill a franchise for long, so Lara's back, and she's so dark and edgy you'd think she'd been sleeping with American McGee.

Or, at least that's what the developers would like us to think. Truth be known, AOD plays and feels pretty much like every other Tomb Raider game. I stand firmly in the belief that that's a good thing, although it's not popular to feel that way about Lara these days. Oh, sure, new moves and elements have been added, including an all new character to play, but let's set all of that up with the story.

The game opens with Lara confronting Werner Von Croy, her adversary in The Last Revelation who had left her for dead. Lara's not pleased about this, despite Werner's claims that there are more important things to worry about right now. Seems he was right, as he's dead within a matter of moments. Lara somehow blacked out during the scuffle, and not even she can be certain she didn't kill Werner. So, the Paris police are out to get her and many of her allies don't trust her as she sets out to prove her innocence to them and herself. Of course, along the way, you just gotta know that some ancient artifacts and a secret society that holds the power to pretty much destroy the planet are going to come into play.

Figuring all of this out will take you to only two locations: Paris and Prague. Seriously, who knew there was a tomb in a Paris, underneath the Louvre, even! I guess I once entered a tomb at the Met in New York, but that was just an exhibit, and I certainly didn't have to do as much jumping, climbing, swimming, and lever pulling to find my way about as Lara does in this game. I just needed a pamphlet.

To work her way through these locations, Lara has some modified abilities. To move certain elements or climb certain distances, Lara has to increase her strength. This is done by moving other, lighter elements or climbing other, shorter distances. For instance, she may not be strong enough to open a door. But, slide a big rock, and Lara will say, "I feel stronger now." Now, she can get that door open. This basically just adds another puzzle element to the game, and controls the linear flow of the levels. No big deal. More intriguing is the fact that Lara can't climb across ropes or hang on ledges forever. She now has a strength meter that depletes as she performs certain functions in much the same way that the traditional air meter depletes as she swims. When the strength meter hits zero, Lara loses her grip and lets go. I kind of liked this added bit of realism, although it did make quite a few areas much more difficult than they needed to be.

Also making certain areas more difficult are the "sluggish" controls. I've read other reviews in which people really complain about this, but I'm not certain they get it. In AOD, when you command Lara to run, it takes a second for her to do so. This doesn't seem to be a control problem, but rather an attempt at realism. People don't hop from a dead stop to a run instantly (unless said people are Barry Sanders), they build up to it. Now, so does Lara. This is hard to get used to, and has therefore drawn a lot of criticism. Unfortunately, much of this criticism is justified. Side-stepping now has to be done with the shift key, which needs to be held down for about a second before it'll register that that's what you want to do. You can't turn left or right when shift walking (walking cautiously), and you can no longer back-hop to step backwards quickly. Even worse, there's a lag after Lara stops running or bumps an object as the character seems to reset itself for the next movement command. The result makes the controls feel extremely choppy in parts.

Things get even more bizarre when you're in a gunfight, when Lara will seemingly randomly move about to get a better shot off. Fair enough, but I most of the time had other plans for Lara than what she wanted to do. Speaking of fights, Lara can now fist fight people. The abilities are rudimentary, as it's simply a matter of hitting the action key once, twice, or three times (a lady). You can sneak up on people to get close enough for a punch or kick, but there are no special moves you can then execute as in the recently released Indiana Jones and the Emperor's Tomb. Just punch and kick.

The only other glaring problem I had was with audio in some of the cut scenes. It would play horribly slow, like an old 78 RPM record played at 33 (if you don't mind me dating myself with old technology). This didn't happen all the time, and the text is written out so I didn't miss anything, but it was a bit depressing as the Tomb Raider series continues to have some of the best voice over acting around (music, too, this time performed by the London Symphony Orchestra). Beyond this, though, I found the game quite stable and relatively bug free. Relatively, in that occasionally guns wouldn't show up when Lara was holding and using them (someone should patent that technology) and that enemies would sometimes just disappear. Also, although the game is supposed to support game pads, I couldn't get it to work with my MacAlly iShock II; Lara could never turn right. I could map and use all of the buttons, but Lara would not turn right. Should I continue to blame poor game pad performance on Apple, or do the developers need to quit whining and just get the job done?

Visually, AOD is a nice step up from what we've seen in other Tomb Raider games. Lara is much smoother here than in any other incarnation (perhaps even moreso than in the movie version). The water effects as she steps out of a pool are a bit dorky, but forgivable. The levels themselves are more colorful than what we've seen, and most are quite...tall, I guess. Rather than have them expand horizontally as we're used to seeing, they expand vertically. Plenty of climbing and dropping to be done in this game. As a result, it'll often look as if Lara's climbing up or down into huge expanses of white nothingness if your graphic card requires you to have distance fog turned on.

Oh, and that surprised me. Looking at the specs above, I was certain this game wouldn't perform well on my machine. Wrong. It did very well without me having to dumb everything down. I was quite pleased.

This is about the point where I'd wrap things up, but I realize I forgot to mention that you'll play parts of this game not as Lara, but as a guy named Kurtis Trent. Kurtis has a few different capabilities from Lara and uses different weapons, but not enough to make him appear to be more than a potential spin-off character (or, so I thought...). If that's not the reason for his creation, than we'll assume it's because this story needed to be told from two points of view. Possible. Regardless, the Kurtis levels were as equally entertaining as those with Lara, so his inclusion neither helped nor hampered the game.

Tomb Raider: The Angel of Darkness, has seen much malignment. I'll argue that a lot of this is unfair, but remember...I'm a fan of the Tomb Raider series. Third-person action games are all over the place now, and some are certainly better than this (although most of those haven't yet made it to the Mac). Still, there's something to be said for going back to the classics from time to time. Angel of Darkness does not breath new life into the genre, and it won't raise the Tomb Raider series to the level of importance that it once attained. But, when it comes to finding that necessary balance of action, adventure, and puzzle solving to make a game successful, Lara Croft hasn't missed a step.

Once you remember how to control those steps, that is.

ShareThis