![]() ![]() ![]() There are a few notable gaming improvements. The “story” starts in an ancient ruin on the floor of the Mediterranean Sea and then jumps to a series of cobweb-filled crypts and tombs in exotic locales around the globe. ![]() True to her well-established MO, the intrepid British explorer must piece together stony puzzles, scale seemingly impossible heights, somersault over and squirm under deadly obstacles, and blast the occasional bad guy, Bengal tiger or undead creature. In other words, our ridiculously proportioned hero is still following up on previous archeological expeditions that her father had embarked on, while scratching up new clues about her mother’s disappearance. In it she picks up where gamemaker Crystal Dynamics’ Tomb Raider: Legend left off. Tomb Raider: Underworld is Lara’s eighth video game excursion. Except that Lara never gets older than twentysomething and, well, Indiana never thought short shorts and a tank top was the best attire for spelunking. They’re really very similar iconic figures when you think about it. Grenades make for a more interesting battle, sending enemies ragdolling everywhere, and flying melee kicks and roundhouses are the perfect finisher as you race along the deck after taking chunks out of a bad-guy's segmented circular health bar.What Indiana Jones did for map-in-one-hand-gun-in-the-other cinema, Lara Croft has done for video games. We've got to get down into the bowels for reasons we'll leave out to preserve the surprise.Īs with all ships in videogames ever, none of the doors open, so Lara has to climb the containers, but not before a shootout with some, it has to be said, thoroughly stupid and predictable identikit henchmen, one of whom stutters back and forth on the spot as we pop him repeatedly with one of Lara's iconic twin pistols. Lara pulls alongside in a cracking little boat with a widescreen TV in the cabin (Tipping the Velvet no doubt in the DVD player) and then we take over and climb up the anchor, emerging onto a deck full of shipping containers. We've seen Thailand before, so instead we head out to sea for another of the game's levels, this time set aboard a ship. After the relative solitude of Anniversary, Underworld is back to the Scooby Doo antics of Legend's headset cast.īut onto more serious business. Given the option to upload stuff to the internet, and the inclusion of blood for the first time in a Tomb Raider game, we can't wait for all the pictures of Lara swan-diving onto spikes or toeing the kraken. And using Lara's multi-use camera (photographs can be transformed into hints about how to solve the puzzle), it's also possible to insert our heroine into the pictures by setting up a timer and then jumping into frame. For example, you can fight dolphins, and throw sticky bombs at tigers. He also wrote some beautiful things about the puzzles and referenced Keeley Hawes a few times, which should keep him in work.įortunately, despite having to suffer the indignity of sitting in my flat for the demo because I left the PS3 debug at home, the latest Eidos Man to show us round Lara's Underworld had a new level to explore, and a whistle-stop tour of the levels we've already seen offers us a chance to present new facts. Less award-winning but just as cuddly, Christian then took a couple of virtual trips to Thailand, first to contemplate the auto-lock weapons, shooting two people at once, stupid insect enemies, wall-jumping, and shooting while climbing, and then returning a few weeks later to consider the story (Croft Manor in flames! Thor's hammer! The Legend story revisited!) and, well, flying kicks. That must have been a heck of a call to answer after half a dozen Tomb Raiders, and we only bring it up because we're trying to think of a good touchstone for our present situation, trying to come up with something good for Eurogamer's fourth preview of Tomb Raider: Underworld, due out this time next month.Īfter all, our first preview by award-winning Ellie has already covered Lara's new sonar (for sniffing out usable ledges), camera (for sniffing out solutions) and bum (not for sniffing), along with her smaller bag (so she has to drag bigger stuff around like a normal person), and the controversial adrenaline events, which are QTE-style scenarios, like fast-moving trap blades, navigated in slow-motion with regular controls. It's just come out - plunged from the development womb into the amniotic fluid of fiscal desperation - and someone's called up Crystal Dynamics and asked them to step in. Eidos won't thank us for bringing it up, but let's go back to 2003, and Angel of Darkness. ![]()
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