Game info

• Title Tomb Raider: The Angel of Darkness
• Developer [Core Design]
• Publisher [Eidos Interactive]
• Year 2003
• Platform Playstation 5
• Genre Action

In Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Angel of Darkness, a series of grisly murders brings Lara into conflict with a sinister Alchemist from the past and a secret alliance of powerful individuals shrouded in mystery. At the centre of these mysteries are the Obscura Paintings--five 14th century pieces of art that the Alchemist is desperate to repossess. Accused of the murder of her one-time mentor, Werner von Croy, Lara becomes a fugitive on the run. Pursued by the police, she follows the Alchemist into a dark world of blood, betrayal and vengeance where it is up to her to defeat this unholy alliance, and stop them from unleashing their incredible powers on the world.

Player Select

If you’ve been following the Tomb Raider journey so far, you’ll know that I have previously loved Angel of Darkness. My TR experience previously had been Tomb Raider II (love) and then Angel of Darkness (love). And that was it until the new Crystal Dynamics games were released. Well, now I have been replaying through all the early games thanks to the Remastered versions, and it’s been eye opening.

It’s in the Game

This is not fun, is it? The controls are awful and the settings quite irritating. Running around the streets of Paris sounds like it should be fun but it’s just quite stressful and repetitive and yea, not fun.

The graphics are much better, there’s far less difference between the old and the remastered version, so that was a step forward. And it doesn’t use the grid system, which obviously newer games don’t either, but for some reason is more annoying on this game. Somehow it feels like it should be using the grids for jumping and measuring where you are, but it doesn’t. It’s a weird halfway house.

There’s also a whole new gameplay mechanic where Lara can’t do some things until she’s done other things, for example she doesn’t have the strength to do a task until she’s lifted or moved something else, which upgrades her strength and then you can continue. I don’t object to that in principle, but it’s not really obvious what is going to work or what isn’t, so that can be quite frustrated.

In this playthrough, I didn’t get far enough to the bit where you swap to play Kurtis, but I remember that being quite annoying too - it’s Tomb Raider, not the Kurtis Show! I’m making it sound terrible, and it’s certainly entirely playable and has glimpses of what’s great about Tomb Raider, it just doesn’t deliver the whole package.

Thoughts

I read that this was supposed to be the first game in a new trilogy but as it was rushed to market and not received very well, that was cancelled. I can absolute see why, now, even though I had previously enjoyed the game. If you come at it fresh, yea, it probably is quite fun. But if you’re a hardened Tomb Raider fun with experience of all the previous games, it’s not going to live up to expectations. Quickly brush this under the carpet, and move on, I think.

Rating: 2 / 5