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Review
Caves is the opening level of the Qualopec section, the first level of the game, the first of the series in fact, and also no doubt, the first of a long running gaming obsession that will end up with Lara Croft Junior the 3rd on a celebrity golf game on the PS24 in the year 2087.
In a similar way to Konami's Silent hill 2 (2001), TR caves makes you run half a mile before making you have to do anything. The reason? To draw you into a claustrophobic feeling of being 'in deep' I'd presume. Hardly going to bother Lara though, probably not you either.
The darts coming out of the wall are a little bit pathetic. They move impossibly slow and never run out. Only on a video game. The skill to dodging them isn't that hot either. Only a meat head could lose up to half a health bar here, and whether or not you lose anything at all mostly relies on pot luck.
A lot better is the attention paid to spreading various kinds of artifacts around the otherwise festure-less environments. This would not continue after Vilcabamba, but it's more needed here than anywhere else. Shame most of the darn things look stupid when you get up close because they're not actually 3D, but oh well. From another point of view, artifacts can annoy players at times. You might think you've seen a large health pack from a distance only to realise up close it's an interesting but pointless 2D monstrosity sitting in the middle of the level for no apparant reason.
The enemies on this "first of the first of the first" section of life long TR frolics are rather good. There might have been a temptation to just give the novice Lara some bats to bully and let that be that. However, we not only get wolves but a big brown bear. The placing of the boar in particular is quite clever. You don't have to fight it, but it's there if you want the practice or the fun, with a reward being given for volunteers.
Obviously it's a level with a lot of firsts. First block of something unstable that crumbles beneath your feet. First lever that opens a door. First timed lever, and blah blah blah. The timed lever though is actually quite good. Beating the large double doors before they shut is by no means a veterans walkover, and is probably a newbie's annoyance. Tough needles though. Beat the timer and learn the damn jumps already.
Caves has no great structure to it, but then that would be confusing to many. It's A to B stuff in a manner that might as well have made it the official training level had we not wanted to see Lara's mansion.
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