I thought there was no coop? 

oh crap! www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=12674 (deus ex h r)
spoiler warning for the comments. 

Sorry Lara, but i'm going to rip you a new asshole. Through a review of course, rather than literally. Perhaps i'm just the wrong sort of gamer to be playing jumping puzzle games. Perhaps I should stick to shooters only. But I played it, so I'm going to review it.

Anniversary is the eighth game in the franchise, hot off the heels of Tomb Raider: Legend, both developed by Crystal Dynamics who have taken over the franchise. They went on to release another Tomb Raider game in 2008, then Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light which is more action-oriented than puzzle and our now working on a complete reboot of the franchise with 2012's Tomb Raider, yet to be released.

All previous games up until 2006 were developed by Core Design. I played one of the early ones, I'm pretty sure the original Tomb Raider 1 from 1996 or it's sequel. I don't think I ever finished it, so it can't have been a great game, but I do remember some awesome looking scenes.

Anniversary is a remake of Tomb Raider 1. Same story, same levels but obviously beefed up, same puzzles. You can definitely tell too, because the cliched 90's style of gameplay is present, such as find the key to open the door. Numerous levels in Anniversary have you trekking around hunting for, in essence, keys to continue your merry way. It's not ground-breaking material here, and i'm surprised the franchise doesn't get a harder time on it's simple old school puzzles.

What makes Anniversary and probably the entire Tomb Raider series fun, is the scaling and jumping your way through the levels. Getting to great heights and backflipping over to an almost hidden crevice behind you, all way above the ground. It's all very cool. Cool, but not exactly realistic. For instance in the third episode you spend three huge levels getting through this obstacle course to get the artifact, then Lara simply strolls out of the room through it's back exit, which doesn't even have a door, to her motorbike waiting 20 metres away. Why didn't she go that way in the first place? Who made all these strange obstacle courses and how exactly are the bad guys getting through them? It's all a little unrealistic.

The levels all look pretty good. Critics suggested Legend looked much better, which is a shame. Sequels should get better as technology progresses, but it is still the same engine. Sometimes it does feel like corridor-room-corridor, but the settings help to make the environments look great; Peru, Greece, Egypt and the Lost Island. All typical Tomb Raider themes. However it doesn't have much grand outdoor beauty or detail. In comparison to Crysis and it's outdoor scenery, Anniversary looks years older. In fact King Kong wow'ed me more than this game. The Crystal Dynamics engine definitely isn't the best looking from 2007, but it does cut the mustard at least.

Now to what really irked me off with Anniversary, if the above wasn't enough already; four things. 

Firstly the combat system. It's rubbish. Fighting animals is not fun at all. They constantly knock you over and you're swearing at Lara to get the hell up so you can attempt to resume the fight. You can shoot blindly, hold a key to auto-aim, which is unreliable at best, or go into shooting mode where it zooms in on Lara and you get a target, but you can't move. It's terrible! Just give me a normal target, none of this auto-aim bull. Lara also moves extremely slowly. I was forced to use a high speed cheat to speed her movements up. Especially when you're having to repeat puzzles over and over again. I also put god-mode on too, because after the first episode I was WAY over the awful combat and just wanted to focus on the jumping.

Which brings me to number two; frustration factor with some of the jumping puzzles. 90% of the game is fine, but there's just a few jumping parts where it doesn't seem to work well, especially using the grapple hook. One such jump with a grapple I probably repeated 30-40 times before I finally managed it. Another I tried a good 20 times before I managed to fluke it. It's not fun getting through 15 jumps only to miss the last one and repeat all over again.

Number three; checkpoints. This game features the most idiotic checkpoint system I've ever encountered. If you run over a checkpoint spot you've previously been to, it'll save overtop of your existing checkpoint. To explain how this is a bad thing take the T-Rex level as an example. I'm at the pit unsure how to proceed so I backtrack incase I missed something, suddenly falling down a slope and back into the T-Rex arena, which I'd already completed previously. And a new checkpoint saves, overwriting my last one. Now I have to spend ten minutes climbing out of the arena all over again just to get back to the top of the slope where I previously was. However, you can do manual saves at checkpoints. It doesn't save your currently location, just the previous checkpoint again. I was doing this regularly so I decided to go back to my previous manual save, which just happened to be right at the beginning of the T-Rex fight. Checkpoint. What?! Another checkpoint just got saved overtop of my previous one? Now I have to fight the T-Rex all over again and climb out of the arena because of this terrible checkpoint system. Which brings me to the last point...

The boss fights. There's four of them and in order to complete them you need to do bullet time. Bullet time is supposedly easy, you get the enemy infuriated and when they charge at you simply press a movement key and roll at the same time. I probably tried this over 100 times, not once EVER did it work. I have no idea why not, others seem to do it with ease, but it just wouldn't work when I tried it. It meant the first two boss fights weren't possible without cheats. The last two, in the final level of the game, weren't possible at all, even with cheats. Ridiculous.

So overall what did I think of Tomb Raider Anniversary? Well the levels all looked pretty good. Not groundbreaking and won't be on any best-of lists in 2007 for it's design, but good enough. And while the puzzles and jumping dynamics were good for most of the game, there were some really frustrating points, not helped by terrible boss battles and no quick-save. Not to be forgotten rubbish fight scenes. I wouldn't play any other Tomb Raider games unless I knew it was going to look utterly amazing, so Legend and Underworld off my list. I don't like to be frustrated, hence a low score for Lara, and some vaseline.

Rating: 5.0/10 

I better get back to the shooting games, it's what I enjoy. Call of Juarez next I think :) 

Oh save yourself the frustration. I played some Call of Juarez demo recently and it was a horrible experience. 

Count me in on PC coop. 

Not available in my region. GG Steam. 

Oh bugger. Well it can't be worse than fucking tomb raider jumping shit so i'll give it a go and review it even if I give up. I'm not once to quit easily though. 

steam://install/55410

gogo 

 

After nuff dicking around including having to disable NVidia AA just so it would run, I gave it a brief whirl.

Well. You can fully rebind controls and it doesn't control like complete dick. That is quite a welcome surprise. There is some partial dickness from clunky running and consolisedly out-of-control melee. The over-the-shoulder 3rd person is as pointless as ever, in fact 3rd person at all in this spoils both the control and immersion, but whatever it's tolerable.

It definitely does what it says and no more. In some ways I could take it or leave it.....BUT then again, it's got bomb squigs (so cute!), the jump pack stomp attack is awesome, and the prospect of coop, well yeah count me in for that ;) 

Still not sure there is any coop, no word of it on the steam page (normally it has a small COOP button the side when there is). 

Well which twat said coop then?? Huh?? 

i heard that they would release a coop version for pc after the release or someting like that 

http://www.shacknews.com/article/69656/space-marine-co-op-to-be-added-after-launch 

NEW HATS! 

Looks like Portal. Like, a ripoff, not necessarily thematically.

http://www.gamespot.com/news/6330911/quantum-conundrum-puzzling-pc-ps3-360?tag=updates%3Beditor%3Ball%3Btitle%3B3 

the designer of portal ripped off her own ideas for her latest game? 

Took Portal, applied a fresh coat of paint, sold as different game. You can see the game play looks pretty much untouched - the portal mechanic replaced with dimension-shifting, but the same puzzle solving things of place crate on button, open door, planes that objects can't go through, lasers that power other objects, etc.

In other words, it's Portal, sans portals. 

i guess, but that's what most games are anyway?
all of id's games are basically the exact same shooter, with even the same types of guns.

but at least with the puzzle solving genre, it's pretty much unexplored, so it'll feel a lot more fresh. 

I don't know, the game play doesn't seem to expand outside of Portal territory. Slowing down time is nothing new or particularly innovative, fluffy world just means you can pick up heavy things.

Portals though were pretty mind bending and very adaptable.

This doesn't seem like a bad game, just like a watered down version of Portal.

i guess, but that's what most games are anyway?

Sure, but Doom 2 wasn't called "Hell Quest" and sold as a different game. This is just too similar to Portal in core game design. It seems like one of those Chinese games that blatantly copies a successful game and sells it off as their own. 

remember, you haven't played it yet... 

Well, duh. 

A few years ago, I was part of the Dare to be Digital competition, in which students are locked in a room for 8 weeks and told to make a game.

We based our game on one mechanic - a gun that could give objects magnetic charge. Shoot one robot with positive charge, and another with negative charge and they'd swoop towards each other and explode in the middle. some posters from the game that explain the gameplay and a screenshot

We decided it was to be a first-person action-puzzle game, and began the design process. Now, after early testing, it turned out solving puzzles in three dimensions is difficult and confusing. It needs to be extremely clear what you can interact with and how. In game terms this means that the non-interactable game environment has to be fairly nondescript, and the interesting stuff has to stand out. In Portal, this meant pristine lab environments, color coding the portals, drawing lines from buttons to doors, and so on. It's a real abstraction of an environment to suit the gameplay, and it's extremely functional.

When we came to develop our visual style, we realised that the 1950s aesthetic we were planned needed to be scaled back. There's no room for potted plants, secretaries desks and typewriters in the areas where the physical gameplay is occurring (although, like portal 2, you can put them in areas without puzzles), and when gameplay gets serious, you can't have distracting colours and patterns covering the walls. We decided that if a static object was to be magnetizable, it'd be bright yellow and chrome. These objects needed to be everywhere, so they became the fans and vents of the ventilation system. Part of the gameplay involved combining objects of the same size to make a bigger object, so these sizes were also colour coded (small = purple, medium = green, large = orange).

We also found that our expansive multi-stage puzzles fell apart in practise unless they were rigidly compartmentalized. Thus, we started putting in doors that blocked progress until each puzzle section was completed. The environment needed to become arbitrary, homogenous, it was the only way that these odd environment elements made sense. Where portal had decided on a famously-meta interpretation of a lab environment, we went for a factory on security lockdown, and hoped the player would suspend their disbelief.

The moral of the story is - by the end of the day we had something that on a surface level shared many similarities to Portal, despite arriving at each design decision from first principles. It's a testament to the design of their game. To share a familiar quote "Perfection in design is not achieved when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing more to remove." and that's why Portal 1 is held in such high esteem.

When we were nearing the end of our development, we realised the similarities of our game, and had to make a strange decision. Would we take steps to distance ourselves from Portal, knowing that it meant taking the 'wrong' decision in gameplay terms? We seriously considered moving the game to 3rd-person even though it would make it harder to solve some of the puzzles. The magnetic charge was shown by objects glowing red or blue, as that's what we and players expected - but portal had blue and orange portals. Should we change it to glowing white and black? We decided not to, and I'm glad we didn't, and although we went on to win the audience vote, we perhaps deservedly had our share of criticism for the similarities.

In conclusion, I'd defend the developer of this game, because a lot of the re-trodden ground is likely done so because it is the 'right' choice in response to a gameplay problem. There may be creative solutions out there to avoid similarities, and perhaps it's worth looking for them, of course. It's certainly the case that producing a first-person action puzzler funnels you down a certain path, where the similarities are much more peculiar than the similarities when making a Gears/CoD clone.

I also bristle at your suggestion, Zwiffle, that gameplay is "untouched" when the Portal developer swapped out the core mechanic. You have to design completely new gameplay, and a completely new set of puzzles! It's not easy to create a satisfying puzzle dynamic with a nice difficulty curve in the FPS environment, and if she succeeds in making a compelling game with her new mechanic, then it wasn't easy, it's a great achievement.