Father's Day Belated Game Review: Tomb Raider:Underworld

I had a pretty decent Father's Day. I got to sleep in, got breakfast in bed, had the kids behave for most of the day, and I also got to play Playstation all freaking day. The game I was playing was Tomb Raider:Underworld. In this one Lara Croft and her sizable assets :) are traveling across the world to find a way into Avalon which is where her thought-to-be-dead mother may be. Through out her quest she comes across many afterlife locales or ancient cultures (primarily Norse) such as Helheim, Xibalba, and Bhogovati.

The story also seems to be a continuation from the last Tomb Raider game, so it's helpful if you have played it, but not required at all (I haven't played it myself)

Graphically speaking, the game is impressive. The ruins are dark and forboding as they should be, it's raining hard in the jungle which has a very realistic look to it. There's different fluid effects for when you're underwater and above water. And Lara's, uh, assets are nicely rounded instead of the pointy boobs of yore :-P

Her character animations are nice and smooth. You can jump to a grabbable ledge, jump to a column, stand on top, turn and jump to a pole which you can shimmy or balance walk over, drop down and swing and jump to another ledge. Navigating the puzzles is very intuitive as long as you can see all the things you can jump to. Combat is fairly nice too. She has her trademark 45's and then has a choice per level of a secondary gun. Targeting is automatic and there usually never too many people to deal with at any one time that it becomes too hard.

Camera control is still a problem as with many 3rd person platformers. Tomb Raider is still very much a 3rd person platformer which means you need precise camera control to make jumps and stuff. Unfortunately this doesn't always happen. Many times you can't get behind Lara when she's on a ledge which means you can't really see what's in front of her, you can move to a top down view, but I don't think it would have killed them to give a 1st person view. When you consider how small some of the platforms are it is really necessary to see what you are doing. Also your actions are determined by the camera. That is to say if there's a wall on your charater's left but you have the camera so that it's on your right, you have to hold right on the controller and then jump. You get the hang of it but it still force you to think about it.

Trophies: As far as trophies go, they're all pretty easy, provided you have a guide for all the treasures and relics. You have to play through on the hardest difficulty but it's so easy in combat and generous with the health pack that you won't die from getting shot at but more often from missing jumps which obviously doesn't change per difficulty level. The Platinum can be had in about 16 hours.

Rating: 7/10