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Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Angel of Darkness | List Price: $19.99
Discount Price: $0.61
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Platform: Windows 98, Windows Me, Windows XP, Windows 95
Brand: Eidos
Binding: CD-ROM
Release Date: 2003-06-30
ESRB Age Rating: Teen
Features: - Character evolution - improve Laras abilities and witness her adapt to how you play the game. You are rewarded for puzzle solving and exploration in the form of improvements to Laras jumping ability, brainpower, upper body strength etc.
- Character interaction - for the very first time in a Tomb Raider game, Lara has the ability to talk to characters. The choices you make in conversation will affect Laras route through the game.
- Take more direct and fluid control over Lara with an entirely new control system and experience new levels of gameplay with hand-to-hand combat, stealth attacks, last chance grabs and more.
Bad Eidos, Bad! [Posted on 2006-03-28]
Oh. My. God. I remember when Tomb Raider first came out, and my husband and I got it on the original PlayStation. It was great, for 1995. We got Angel of Darkness for our computer, and WHOA! It looked like Eidos had REGRESSED! The animation is choppy, jumps (basically all moves, in general) are hard to control and judge, and I read on a review for the PS2 version that you'd better come to love the phrases "save successful" and "load successful" because that's what you'll do, over and over and over! It's completely ridiculous how bad the game looks and plays. Holy cow, and the Glitches! At one point in the church, if you move Lara to JUST the wrong spot then the game gets stuck on the two boxers in the ring fighting, and you have to reboot the computer to get out of it! This game wasn't even worth the discounted price I picked it up for. Don't buy it, it's a trick...
Play this game to practice PATIENCE >:( [Posted on 2006-05-02]
Okay, so I'm not a gamer but seriously there cannot be a more frustrating game out there. Well, maybe...Here's the thing: Tomb Raider is such a big stinking deal among gamers I figured since I have a pretty good PC I'd invest in some cool (used)games for my past time. I got very lucky or so I thought when the price was marked down to $4.99 with an additional 30% off. This is more of a challenge than I care for. Ditto to most reviews that I read.
The one thing that I would say is if you Google this game for tips, walkthroughs and cheats it may help immensely. I got a few walkthroughs from various sites. I really like not having to go to doors that are locked. Very annoying!!
If you decide to buy this make sure of a few things:
1. You are not tired or in a bad mood.
2. You don't mind a challenge-although not mind boggling fun as it is cumbersome-then you may enjoy it after all.
I'm going to tough it out for at least 3 levels. There are 29 levels to this game. It's almost risky to continue but I refuse give up this early.
GOOD LUCK!!
To many issues [Posted on 2006-08-06]
The story is very interesting and the action and enemies are awesome, but the game just has to many technical issues. I think they rushed to get it on the shelves ASAP. Tech problems are my only quirk with the game.
not as bad as you think [Posted on 2006-08-12]
some people would say this game sucks. though some others would completely disagree. personally i found the game quite interesting and fun. the actual game itself did have gliches, but not to the extreme of not being able to finish the game. now you are able to play a different character other than Lara, and she can talk to people, though it really doesn't matter how you answer but its still fun to threaten people =]. over all if you've enjoyed the past games, you'll like this one. sure the "tomb raiding" is not exactly in the game, but i think you'll enjoy it once you learn to tolerate some of the insignificant gliches. as for the controls... hah once you play Legends you'll never again think that Angle of Darkness had horrible controls. =] enjoy and lets all hope the next game will be alot better than Legend.
As bad as advertised [Posted on 2007-11-03]
Was this a serious attempt at a Tomb Raider game, or a desperate attempt by a developer to be fired? CORE Design went from a creative, ambitious group ten years ago to one of the most passive-aggressive developers ever.
In their seventh (and final) attempt to kill off Ms. Croft, CORE rebuilt the graphics rendering engine for new platforms, but managed to retain and intensify every infuriating staple of gameplay inherent in Angel of Darkness's predecessors. Control input, regardless of gamepad or keyboard, is delayed and sluggish. Lara's movement engine is as slow and graceless as ever. CORE always had trouble distinguishing between the importance of clever pre-rendered animations and actual controller response. Despite the bloodcurdling screams of gamers and reviewers, they refused to rethink their control schemes. And poor Lara dies a thousand deaths because of it.
The highly anticipated new game world engine drops the old grid-based environments that made old Tomb Raiders somewhat predictable. At first, this sounds like a great idea. Unfortunately, CORE retained their love of brutally difficult jumping exercises that now rely solely on guessing horizontal distances. Combine that with the complicated and clumsy 3 types of forward jumps, a slow-responding "grab" button which is now timing based, and a cruel placement of tiny ledges and instant-death laser beams, and AOD is an exercise in quicktrigger quicksaving.
I will assume that CORE spent most of their development time on world building. Because the puzzles and combat are so laughably bad that they can't be the result of a good effort. The ease with which all enemies can be killed, bosses included, has to be the result of some last-minute difficulty sliding before release. With the awful autolock and camera, enemies with any armor would be impossible and the whole game unbearable. A complete lack of AI makes Tomb Raider I's T-Rex look like Stephen Hawking. The puzzles sadly haven't evolved, athough pushing levers and pulling switches is still fun in the right environment. There are occasions where a complete lack of sense is evident: Did you know that on one level, steam from a broken pipe is a harmless animation? Did you know that on the next level, identical steam from an indentical pipe is an instant death trap? Play AOD, and you will!
Graphics would be the one area of criticism I can't agree with. AOD on the PC is a sharp looking game, inarguably. There are a few visual missteps like the broken distance blur rendered by the "post-processing" option (I was able to fix it by setting it to "on" instead of "high"). But mostly AOD's enviroments are well-detailed with nice color and lighting, and reasonable shadow effects. Tombs and derelict apartments are dark and spooky, and underwater scenes sparkle with a clarity not available on the old Playstation. The settings themselves are largely inappropriate for a Tomb Raider game, but that's more of a criticism of the story concept.
Sound design is exceptionally good. Weapons sound great, voiceovers are passable, and enviromental effects are really suberb. Moody scores pop in at the right moment, and overall the acoutics of the game set a beautiful atmosphere. I even hear Martina Hingis supplied Lara's grunting effects.
A build 52 patch is available which fixes the worst of early release problems like crashing. There is no fix for the bad design and crushing gameplay, though. Angel of Darkness is for diehard Tomb Raider fans only. And you will die hard, over, and over...
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