Croft Manor, the palatial home of adventuress Lara Croft, goes up in flames at the beginning of Tomb Raider Underworld, the latest chapter of the long-running action-adventure series. This would have been a clever way for the designers to state that they were planning to reboot of the series, a way of saying, “this is not your parent’s Tomb Raider,” but sometimes a blazing inferno is just a blazing inferno. This is most definitely your parent’s Tomb Raider. Unfortunately, it is not necessarily your parent’s best Tomb Raider.
A Story That Never Catches Fire
The game begins with a collage of scenes from Tomb Raider: Legend that attempt to set up the story for Underworld. If you haven’t played Legend you’ll probably find them very unhelpful, but they did at least remind me of the stunning revelation at the end of Legend that Lara’s long lost mother was not dead.
It was an effective ending that made you look forward to Lara’s search for her mother. Unfortunately, the slight but effective storytelling of the earlier game has given way to sloppy, uninteresting plotting.
Lara comes across characters from previous games, although the designers work on the assumption that everyone remembers exactly what happened years ago in those other games and makes little attempt to explain who these people are or what they want. Instead, Lara goes someplace and finds something that leads her to go someplace else to find something that leads her to yet another place and on and on. Occasionally she has a chat with some bad person or other, one of whom has wings, and eventually meets her evil twin, but there’s very little sense of an actual story. If I had to sum up the plot in one word, that word would be “gobbledygook.”
Fun Game Play Melds with Under-Performing Technology
The Tomb Raider series has always been more about exploring caves and ruins than enjoying the story, and in that respect Underworld is more successful. The game has a solid share of crumbling ancient palaces and magnificent sculptures that Lara can climb around on.
The gameplay is typically Tomb Raiderish. Lara must climb walls, leap across chasms and shoot animals, gunmen and mythical creatures. There are many solid set pieces in the game, as when a giant temple-dwelling squid blocks Lara’s path and she must disengage its legs from ancient machinery before she can use a temple fixture to kill it.
A number of technical issues become apparent early in the game. For example, it can be tricky to get Lara to turn around when hanging from a wall towards the point you want her to jump to; often I would just wiggle the analog stick around for a while before she would finally turn her head. The game camera is poorly handled, rarely adjusting itself to the optimal view. Usually you have to manually set the view, and sometimes the game simply refuses to show you what you need to see, resulting in the necessity to simply guess whether there is any place for Lara to jump to.
There were other frustrations. When you die the checkpoint system takes you back to a recent location that always requires walking down a long hall or performing an uninteresting task before getting to the tricky part that keeps killing you. It also resets Lara to her default pistol set instead of the more powerful weapons you’ll probably want to use.
A Slow But Steady Decline in Fun
Still, for its first half, Underworld is a solid entry in the series. There are weaknesses – swimming is sluggish, riding the motorcycle is less fun than in previous games and a series of puzzle mini-games are an unchallenging waste of time – but I still had a fun. At times the game was quite clever, as when you had to climb out of a capsized ship. And I really liked the game’s score, particularly when it was expressing magical wonder, although at one point when monsters were nearby the dialogue in a cut scene was drowned out when the game failed to lower the battle music.
Unfortunately the game gets a little more raggedy as it progresses, shifting increasingly from challenging to irritating. Parts of the game are very repetitive; in a section in which giant hammers destroy a bridge you must perform the same series of actions in several lookalike rooms. The only real change was that in one room for no discernible reason I could not jump up and grab something I’d successfully grabbed onto in every other room until I performed a tricky maneuver in lieu of a straightforward jump.
Various odd bugs appear, as when I unknowingly couldn’t use a mechanism until a cut scene was triggered. I ran around trying to find something to do when the cut scene suddenly played for some unknown reason. Elsewhere I had to restart from my last saved checkpoint when Lara’s pathfinding failed and she continually tried to swim through two feet of stone instead of going around it. None of these kinks was a real game killer, but the cumulative effect chipped away at my enjoyment of the game.
Overall, Decent but Not Among the Best of the Series
In a discussion of the game’s shortcomings at gamefaqs.com, some described Underworld as inferior to the PS3/Xbox 360 version. This version of the game has the same story and locations but somewhat different gameplay. There is more combat, Lara has at least one melee move and the layout of challenges is different.
But I played about an
hour of the Xbox 360 version and found it inferior to the Wii
version. The giant squid section was less involved and more
frustrating, swimming was even more annoying and most of the flaws I
saw in the Wii version were duplicated in the 360 version. There
wasn’t even the sort of extreme graphical difference seen in
games like Star Wars: The Force Unleashed, because Underworld is
better looking than most Wii games and the 360 graphics, while more
polished, weren’t especially impressive. While it sometimes feels game developers give Wii owners the short end of the stick, this is not one of those times.
Underworld is a pleasant enough game, but disappointing as a follow up to Tomb Raider: Legend and Tomb Raider: Anniversary, which rank among the best of the series.
This isn’t the first time Lara Croft has gone downhill. Legend had been a successful attempt to reboot the series after years of decline. But Underworld has too much of the been-there-done-that quality that inspired that reboot. Burning down Lara’s home wasn’t enough; a fire should have been lit under the designers.
