Which is not to excuse Eidos forcing an incomplete product to market but merely noticing how forgiving a wide access to always on broadband has made us as customers and critics. It’s interesting to imagine the kinds of messes a large chunk of modern Triple A releases would be like were they produced and shipped in the same era as Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness. In terms of buggy-ness, the released game was probably somewhere in between Assassin’s Creed Unity and Arkham Knight perfectly playable and for the most part functional but with a noticeable lack of polish and some irksome and bizarre bugs that have no place being in the final product of something so expensive. If this game was released now there would be nowhere near the critical eviscerating which this received on release because it’d have been patched to within an inch of its life post launch. The second trend Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness just missed out on was the modern patch culture. It’s a pity we’ll never see it fully realised as the direction the two subsequent reboots have taken are of a significantly sunnier Lara and an overall safer direction for the character. Lazy as the trend now seems of Batman Begins-ifying a character, it was an interesting and natural direction to take Lara. Sadly between the vast amount of cut content and the two sequels which never emerged, the characterisation feels wholly incomplete, dissatisfying and akin to poorly written fan-fic. While it all looks a tad emo from today’s perspective, it’s hard to deny that it was actually a fairly logical progression of the character. The deadpan charming psychopath Lara of old is largely missing, replaced by a more driven, impatient and dangerous mercenary version of the character. The game starts with Lara in a stormy Paris, hands bloody, memory missing and her mentor’s murdered body in front of her. In a way this game managed to arrive just in time to be too early for a couple trends. Fancy new graphics and gameplay, a jump to a new console and a serious attempt to give fans a new experience in a popular (but very formulaic) series? What could go wrong? Hype, an unworkable time frame and an out of control budget that’s what. Marking the sizable shift between PS1 and PS2, the game sought to not only update the series’ visual and mechanical design, but also the storytelling. Back in an era when “next gen” actually meant something, Tomb Raider: The Angel of Darkness was a hubristically ambitious attempt to update and reinvent the Tomb Raider formula.
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