Tomb Raider III

User Rating: 7 | Tomb Raider III PC

Lara Croft returns on an adventure to recover four pieces of a meteorite that are scattered across the world. Lara will be travelling to India, South Pacific, London, Nevada, and Antarctica (note: the middle three can be done in any order).

The graphics don't seem a noticeable improvement on the previous game, so you still see that the levels are constructed out of square panels and bland, flat textures. You can still light flares in dark areas which take advantage of the lighting model. The game is pretty dark overall though, so I turned up the in-game settings as well as my TV to make it easier to see. Paths are not always clear; I found it easy to miss climbable walls and 'monkey bars' on the roof. There seems to be more detail with the guns; which have smoke and shells dropping to the ground.

In some ways, Lara is very agile with fluent movement. Lara can run, jump, climb, flip and roll around the environment and is well animated. There's a few new moves too; now she can sprint, crawl and monkey-bar across certain surfaces. The controls can feel a bit awkward until you get used to them. You also have to be in fairly precise positions to interact with switches or to pick up items. This can be a bit fiddly to make Lara slowly step to the required position. Also, it's quite easy to die by falling off ledges due to the controls. The vehicles can feel very clunky and awkward to control too, especially the Kayak. You can save anytime, which means it's not too frustrating when you do die. I found it pretty straightforward to configure the Xbox 360 controller to control Lara. The controls weren't perfect like that, but it was close enough to play through the game.

The gameplay consists of a mix of combat, platforming and puzzling. There are switch puzzles, timed areas, and block puzzles, but the majority is just finding the button to press to unlock the next door. The frequency of block puzzles has been drastically decreased compared to previous games.

There's loads of levels within the game and I found them to be better than the previous game, although the sheer length of the game makes it drag. Some of the early levels have branching paths; allowing you to miss fairly large portions of the map.

The combat feels more simplified compared to the previous game, but that could be more to do with the dumb AI with mêlée weapons; that often walk into you instead of trying to hit you. Lara fights against a variety of creatures as well as humans. She will be slaughtering a variety of monkeys, dogs, tigers, eagles, alligators, raptors and horrific monsters. In the previous game, the various enemies seem to have specific strengths and weaknesses, but in this one; I didn't feel there was as much need to switch weapons.

The game seems very generous with medi-packs and ammunition. Also, there's some green crystals (which were the save crystals on the Playstation version) which give you an instant health restore. Lara has unlimited ammo in her standard dual pistols, but other ammo is limited. Aiming is automatic if Lara is facing the correct direction, which leaves you to concentrate on the acrobatics to stay out of harm's way. The weapons are similar to the previous game so you have Uzis, a Desert Eagle pistol, a shotgun, an MP5 sub-machine gun, a grenade launcher, a rocket launcher, and a harpoon gun for underwater use.

During the Nevada set of levels, your weapons and ammunition are confiscated. Strangely, you don't get your equipment back at the end. There's opportunities to find weapons in the other levels, but the ammunition you collected is gone for good. I thought this was an insane design decision and was infuriating to lose items that I had spent a long time collecting. I recommend players choose Nevada first to minimise the impact.

In terms of bugs: Lara can get stuck in walls and can only be dislodged by tapping the roll button. There were two occasions where I saw the textures get completely messed up; the first saw textures swapped out for random ones, and the second saw most textures be rendered solid black.

The game is an improvement over the previous game. Firstly I found the level designs to be more enjoyable and the combat was less frustrating (Tomb Raider II had many unfair combat sections where enemies got cheap shots off on you). I found the game to be overly long though, so playing it became a chore.