Tomb Raider: The Angel of Darkness

I love Tomb Raider and I can easily recommend every Tomb Raider game. Except this one, of course. In this game, all the things that made the Tomb Raider franchise a legend, are gone. The controls are modified with respect to previous Tomb Raider games. Unresponsive, imprecise and clunky controls is what you will find here. Forget about raiding tombs, here you will play on poorly designed city levels, laboratories, sewers… Weird upgrades of Lara abilities, pointless boss fights, lots of bugs and crashes conclude the distressing scenario. My personal experience starts with a bug that prevent me to run the game (it has been solved searching on internet) and ended with a bug that prevent me to pass through a cutscene in “the Strahov Fortress” level. The game crashed EVERY single time. I found on internet a savegame to skip this part, but I’m not sure I will play again this game. I’m not so masochist.

Is this the best Tomb Raider game? No. Is this the worst Tomb Raider game? ...Maybe. I personally didn't like Chronicles, and many others would place that or Underworld below AoD. But is it a bad game? No, not really, at least to me. To address the major causes of criticism: - Glitches were nonexistent for me (on Windows 10, no less) and I never had to figure out any bug workarounds. - The "levelling system" is... stupid. It's pointless and half-implemented, to the point where in some places you have to find a barrel or block to push around for no other reason than to increase your "strength" in order to complete the next section. I'm not going to defend that. The only mitigating factor is that there are only a few sections like this. - The controls are functional enough. I never tried the new mouselook, but keypad controls are fine once you get used to them. Movement and turning speeds are down from what I can tell, but not enough to really affect gameplay. - I found the plot to be actually pretty neat and immersive. The mood especially is gripping, and well driven by the levels. - The character interactions in the first set of maps are decent and help to get the story underway, then disappear as the game returns to more classic TR-style play. That goes under something that could have been improved, but certainly doesn't spoil the game. For the other boilerplate stuff - graphics are good enough for the period, difficulty varies between sections but is certainly manageable, and combat is fine. So overall this game certainly has its flaws. But if you're willing to look past the could-have-been-betters, there are several hours of fun to be had with Angel of Darkness.

It's an aged game and we live in an era, where people anticipate too much in every aspect of their lives. Was I expecting it to boot up under Win11 ? Not really. A bit of googling and there we go! It even worked with a fanmade translation patch from 2003 :) Back in the day, my PC was a budget homework PC so yeah...no DirektX orgies for me. Fast forward 20 years and here I go with my favorite Lara jump-turn-grab-pick adventure :) In my opinion, there are way too many tweaks in the Settings launcher to be fiddled with and you are not given any explanation what they mean or do or break if set up incorrectly. However, the game runs fine, supports FULLHD, GOG goodies are very nice, love the DRM-free Lara collection :)

This is, without a doubt, one of the worst games ever created by a major game studio. The story about how the devs had very little time to do what they wanted to with it is infamous by now, and it's all lies. The truth of the matter is that they couldn't even get the controls to work decently, which should have been step one (of ALL possible things). The biggest complaint about the first five games was how clunky the directional pad movements were, and yet with this first attempt at a series update, they were made even clunkier. It's pretty much unplayable if you don't have a huge amount of patience and a willingness to re-load saves over and over. In my first hour, I came across a ridiculous amount of bugs in the opening levels. At one point, while riding an elevator, Lara glitches through the top of it and was held floating endlessly in mid-air, forcing me to re-load. I can't even comprehend how this made it to store shelves. The Angel of Darkness will forever be remembered as the game that almost killed the Tomb Raider franchise, and for very good reason. Only play this out of curiosity and if doing a binge play through the series, as most will probably deem it worthy of being skipped over completely.

I'll be honest, I liked this entry in the series. This game was the most interesting and different game in the tomb raider series and was scrapped because of it. As the review below states, it's an unfinished game that was supposed to be a trilogy and it's such a shame they were too scared to at least delay this one until it was finished properly. Since this game I have been more and more disappointed in Lara's adventures, which is such a shame because I grew up with her, i'm still hoping the latest one will be a little better. I would recommend buying this, but maybe from eBay for about a £1 for ps2.