A few first impressions after playing Tomb Raider: Underworld for an
hour or two. The graphics are pretty nice, they capture the feeling of
scale pretty well, frame rates however aren't so great. Animations feel
pretty broken in this one, some things such as diving into the water
just look plain wrong and looked much better in previous parts. In
addition collision detection is pretty wonky, you clip through other
objects quite frequently and it just feels pretty buggy overall and not
as smooth as in previous entries into the series. Level design is a
little different again, the levels are much bigger this time around,
which looks nice and gives the game an old-school kind of feel, but
makes hunting for objects also quite a bit more complicated. The menu
structure got changed to a radial menu, instead of the classical
rectangular ones in the previous, not a deal breaker, but it seems like
an unnecessary change. The story starts this time with one of those
'start in the future where things are broken, then flash back to two
weeks earlier' things, which I don't really like. It doesn't add
anything, but starts the player straight into confusion territory
instead of letting the adventure start in an easily accessible straight
forward manner. The treasures are pretty badly placed so far, just
randomly standing around without interesting hiding spots.
Update:
I have now finished the game and while the feeling of playing a rather
buggy game never completly vanished I still enjoyed it quite a lot. The
thing that this Tomb Raider does notably better then the previous ones
is the size of the levels and the focus on exploration. Its pretty much
a "here is your level, go explore" with much less of a structure that
pushes you in a specific direction or combat to distract you. In case
you get lost the game provides a two level hint system, going to the
PDA gives you one hint and pressing a button gives you a second hint,
which helps quite a bit when you are lost without giving the solution
away completly. The new sonar map on the other side isn't all that
helpful, while it give you a full freely movable 3d map, its all in the
same texture without structural hints, so finding a wall you can climp
doesn't get any easier via that map. One thing missing in this game,
again, is the radio talk, Legend had a constant voice over while
playing the levels, in Underworld that is limited to cutscenes, which
is sad, since I consider that voice over one of the most interesting
things that Legend brought to the table.
The Croft Manner level
is missing as well in Underworld, while you do visit the Croft Manner,
you do it in a normal in-game level, not in the advenutre kind of way
you did in previous games. Other stuff that is missing is the ability
to rewatch cutscenes and to replay levels, which is pretty stupid. You
however can revisit levels for puzzle hunting in a special mode that
removes some puzzles and fighting from the level that you have already
done, which is pretty nice change.
The rope is much more
flexible in Underworld then in previous games, it will now bend around
objects and you can use it for proper roping, which gives the game
quite an additional vertical range. You also get a bike in a few
levels, one that you can use pretty much like the horse in a Zelda or
Shadow of the Collosus, so its much more flexible and fun, and not
annoying like the bike levels in Legend. Instead of Excalibur you get a
Hammer this time, which in terms of animation and gameplay behaves
pretty much exactly the same, weird case of recycling.
An
interesting addition is the way quick time events are handled, instead
of having a cutscenes with special button presses, the game goes into
slow motion and keeps the normal game mechanics up and running. So QTEs
aren't as disruptive.
The story in Underworld continues and
concludes the ones started in Legend and Anniversary and is for most
part good enough, it however lacks quite a bit of exposition and jumps
from start to finish a little to quickly without really much of a
middle ground.
Overall, Underworld has plenty of obvious, weird
and unnecessary flaws that feel like they could have been easily
avoided would the game have spend another few month in development, but
even with all its faults its still a pretty damn good game. And
seriously, in a time were almost every other game follows the same
boring over-the-shoulder shooting mechanics (Uncharted, I am looking at
you...), I am more then happy to play a game that does do something
different, even when what it doesn't isn't something fundamentally new
either and a little flawed in implemnetation.
