Tomb Raider: The Angel of Darkness

This game is famously bad, but there is some good to be found for those who have the patience to look beyond the horrible controls and haphazard level design. The locations are good and the story is interesting, but the general lack of polish brings the whole thing down.

I really wanted to play this game as I could not play it back in the day but this error shows up: (Hope this get fixed soon) "Build Sep 17 2003 15:53:15 The Following Error has occured Generic Game Error ASSERTION: 'SUCCEEDED(hr)' at C:\projects\tomb raider\Game\shell\system\PC\sys_d3d_vmr9.cpp(1569)"

This game is so bad, that killed Core Design, and almost the whole franchise. It's not that they were not ambitious, or didn't have any good ideas, but the game shipped simply unfinished. Well, the new engine looks quite good for the time - it's a huge improvement over the old one. The music is decent, but that's it. Everything else falls flat on their asses. The worst thing are the controls. They revamped the original, familiar controls with the most unresponsive, glitchy and awkward controls ever made in a video game. It's torturous, and makes every simple thing a chore. Top that with the new "progression" system, where I can't jump far enough unless I train my legs with some idiotic manner, or cannot pull a box, because "I'm not strong enough". The story is boring, full of plot holes and overall nonsensical. It had potential though... They wanted a more dark and sinister plot, but everything turned out ridiculous and uninteresting. In one point I have to control another character, Kurtis, who is... just some dude. It would be cool, if I could use his awesome spinning, floating thingy in fights, but no. The game is full of half-baked ideas and missed opportunities like this. For example the stealth. It's there, but it's utterly pointless. There is no punishment if anyone sees me, and it's much easier to just shoot everyone, who are a threat. Or let's talk about the RPG style speech "system", where I can react to NPC-s in a different manner. Overall, doesn't matter, only makes little to no difference in the gameplay, and none in the story whatsoever. Or the boss fights, which are either laughably easy, or frustrating. Oh, and don't get me started on the glitches. They everywhere, from minor to game breaking. You can easily skip this game, unless you are a completionist, or really want to know, how the Tomb Raider franchise have fallen from grace.

This game is a horrible, broken, unpolished mess that failed so horribly both critically and financially that it put the series into limbo for awhile until it got retooled into its first reboot. There is absolutely no reason to play this game. The story is awful, the game is pretty ugly, the gameplay is so broken that it'll aggravate you at best.

not a fan of the controls