Highs: You get to be Indiana Jones, the greatest adventurer of all time, you get to swing on the bull whip pick up your hat after getting it knocked of in a brawl and kick but by punching Nazis and kicking undead butt. Lows: Almost everything else. Best Played by: People with high tolerance for repetition, high thresholds of pain, and who hate themselves. Indiana Jones has a long history of good things. He is who we all wish we could really be. James Bond is too pretentious, I don’t think anyone who plays as Laura Croft wants to be her, and Indy is just perfect. A mix of adventurer and educated class, the professor with the daring to take a gun and whip on an archeological dig with him. It’s ironic that Indiana Jones and the Emperor’s Tomb mimics so accurately the frustration a paleontologist must feel at doing the same thing day in and day out, tediously repeating identical tasks over and over again throughout the duration of their career. It’s so easy to talk about the bad when it’s as frustrating as the bad in Emperor’s Tomb, but there is a great deal that was done right in this game. Almost everything Indy does makes for fun gameplay. There is a moderate variety in the enemies, though within a level they felt rather too similar for comfort. You really get to fight everything that Indiana Jones is against, starting with poachers and looters, Nazis, funny Asians in elaborate warrior getups, and finally some seriously troubled undead. Everyone can and should identify with wanting to fight all of those things, especially undead, I personally am with Indy in my anti-undead stance on the issue. Particularly when fighting with the style flair and broken jaw dealing fun of the dual fisted love that is Indiana Jones. Fighting is wonderful, even though there are some odd inconsistencies. One of the most striking was how the revolver and whip or a machete were less effective than if you could easily get right up close and knock someone down with raw fists. There were some other things that seemed odd, but nothing glaring, only minor clipping problems, etc. None of the glitches will bother anywhere near enough to break you from the illusion that you are the behind kicking explorer. The combat system shames everything else about Emperor’s Tomb and deserves a good game to shine in. Punches are thrown with weight, enemies rebound and the brawling ends up being really fun. Beating people down while holding them in headlocks and slamming their heads into walls or breaking bottles over their heads make for great entertainment and fun gameplay. You can never get enough of breaking heads. Well, different heads. It really bites breaking the same ones over and over. That’s ultimately the meat of Indiana Jones and the Emperor’s Tomb’s problem, is the countless repetition. There is a very limited save system that auto saves at the end of every level chunk, each chunk being a minimum of about ten minutes and as many as about 20 for a skilled player. Well, ten to twenty minutes of getting everything right after all the fudges you are guaranteed to make, being human and all. Even on easy the save system is no more forgiving than any other level of difficulty. All of Emperor’s Tomb’s other problems are relatively small but they only seem to compound on top of the pain of the save system. There are artistic decisions and there are bad decisions, and creating a feature of the game that punishes the people who buy it as harshly as that does is a bad decision. The reload feature proves harsh and unforgiving and unavailable in a tight spot where you know you’re going to die without either quitting the game or getting yourself killed and watching the camera rotate around your corpse a few times till it shows the option to start the level that just killed you all over again. These painful features aren’t even taken into consideration of the level design. There are levels of horrible frustration with a cut-scene and a little mood setting running another cut-scene and then an extraordinarily long sequence that is unlike anything you’ve done the rest of the game. You will, with a capitol w, die many, many times on this level. You will mess up and know that there will be no avoiding death. The certainty of death is absolute. You will be forced to wait till you die to restart the level, because it’s either that, or exiting to the menu, and going through the painfully long, tedious, un-skipable menu system with all of its very pretty and tomb like Indiana Jones flavored animations that were very cool the first time but will drive you insane if you ever try to reload the game that way ever. Then you must skip the two cut-scenes again, and not accidentally die in the thirty-second waste of time before the actual challenge begins. The other problems with the game proved equally irritating. It’s still hard to condemn this game completely though because a really fun game really does hide there under all of the pain and torment. The style and flair of the Indiana Jones movie shines constantly during the segments of the game where everything is fluid and well designed. That is the saddest thing about this game. It’s just not right for such a quality experience to be bogged down beyond the point of having irritating flaws and into the level of being useless as a game. Rent it, play it for five minutes and then return it and you will always believe you have played a fun game that captures what makes Indiana Jones cool. You will miss everything that makes this game painful and unpleasant. Under no circumstances should you buy this game, there just is no way you will find enough good to outweigh the bad.
Other Helpful Reviews for Indiana Jones and the Emperor's Tomb
This game is awesome!! You have to buy it after you really get into the game, but it's worth it! This is the first game I have played that has a REALLY good storyline and that doesn't screw up on the gameplay. The figh... Read Full Review
This is a great game to play, especially for Indiana Jones fans. It's really fun and there are a lot of twists and turns in the game. The levels are not hard, but like any Indiana Jones game, you also have to use your br... Read Full Review
