Posted on: August 14, 2012
KainKlarden
Possesseur vérifiéJeux: 785 Avis: 59
Unfinished requiem
Angel of Darkness could be a new direction Tomb Raider needed. It could be the perfect change from an trusty, but very old engine to a new one, from a great gameplay, to an even more nuanced and interesting one, merging Action Adventure with RPG. It wasn't. And part of the problem lies within the fact, that this game is an unfinished product. It was being made as a first Tomb Raider for PS2, alongside with the last Tomb Raider for the previous generation of hardware - Chronicles. When the work on Chronicles was finished and all the effort became focused on AoD it became apparent, that the game wouldn't work the way it was. So it was scrapped and started over again. Long story short, it never got finished, as Eidos decided to ship an unfinished, cut down version of the game to coincide with the second movie based on Tomb Raider. And later blamed Core Design for all the faults, took away the franchise from them and gave it to Crystal Dynamics. because AoD was a complete and utter failure as it was. Joke is, it is rumored, that a beta build of the game was more full and better working than the released version. So, if the game was unfinished, what do we have here? We have an attempt to make a story-driven, dark and moddy Tomb Raider, which adds some NPC talking, questing, skill progression, a secondary character and many new features to the series. Which would've been good, if it was finished. As is, most new things seem rushed and stupid. For example, the concept that Lara has to re-learn some of her abilities in an RPG style, because of the psychological and physical damage she suffered at the end of The Last Revelation is great. It could've made more open levels more "Metroidvania" and interesting to explore. As it is, it sometimes requires you to do meaningless tasks to "level up", so you can progress in a fairly linear fashion. All th NPC dialogueQuesting thing sounds interesting, but it works rather bad and exists only for the first quater of the game. Secondary character is kinda cool (and reminds a bit the later released Dark Sector and Infernal), but he's not fleshed out and, with the death of this storyline, is completely forgettable. And the story - oh, it could be great. In fact, it was meant to be a trilogy of games, with AoD being first. Thing is, with cut content even AoD story is convoluted and a mess, with character just appearing or dissappearing like everyone should know them already (and we should, but their introoductions were cut with the areas they were in). And the technical issues... Oh yeah, there were those. In the original version of the PC game, thee was a quicksave. Fun part was - it worked at random. And could load you a very early quicksave upon load when used. SO you had to make 3-5 quicksaves, just in case, every time. And when the quicksaves are broken, you can guess that things are bad. Some of the glitches and annoyances were later patched (and GOG version is, as always, probably patched too), but the core - the feel of a rushed, unfinished and cut down game - couldn't be patched. Angel of Darkness is "that game" of the series people tend to block out in their memories. It's a shame, as it does have some really solid potential and great ideas. And i wish there would be a remake someday. But as it is, i would recommend this only to: a) diehard TR fans with good patience or b) wannaby developers, so they can see what happens, when the game is forced to get released in an unfinished state.
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