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Review
The ‘touchdown in Tibet’ may provide for one of the most exciting FMV’s in the series, but it does steal it’s idea somewhat from the James Bond film The Living Daylights. I can forgive Lara for the plagiarism, though. That was a difficult situation to escape from, and it’s not as if she had just come from a place where there would have a lot of fuel lying around. IzN’t ThAt RiTe, LaRa? Let me guess, hun, you wanted to make a quick getaway? Getaway from whom, exactly? Every sod on the Oil Rig got killed four levels ago! Ok, Bartoli got away, but he probably legged it back to dry land long before you completed The Deck. He probably had one of those cool Aqua-sub gizmo’s that Blofeld had in Diamonds are forever. By the way, Lara, on your way to Tibet, how did you manage to change your clothes and fly the plane at the same time?
It’s always tempting to give The Tibetan Foothills one more point out of ten than it actually deserves, just for how beautiful the scenery looks after having been in that dark, dingy ocean. The opening few minutes of game time even play on this, constantly making you look up into the clear blue sky to pinpoint the location of an eagle shrill, or goading you into taking a swan dive down to a beautiful pool. It’s only when you reach the terrorist hut you remember you’re in the middle of a generally stressful game that already got difficult some levels ago. It’s also here that best demonstrates just how superfluous 95% of our Tomb Raiding actually is. Lara needs a key to get into the WOODEN hut, you know, the one with the GLASS window. So instead of just finding alternative means of getting inside, she decides to go on a whopping great big time-consuming pilgrimage around half the Tibetan Alps (If such a thing exists), just to find a damn key. She even mysteriously knows which direction to go in order to find it. It’s almost as if the following happens when Lara is examining the hut door and we never see it....
Lara : “Hmmm. I need a key for this hut. I wonder where one could be?”
(Cue the appearance of everybody’s favourite T.V dolphin, Flipper, who leaps up high from that big pool Lara just came from every time he wants to speak)
Flipper : “Eep eep eep eep eep eep”
Lara : “Hey, what is it Flip?”
Flipper : “Eep eep eep eep”
Lara : “Say what?! You know where the key for this door is?
Flipper : Eeep
Lara : Great! Where is it?”
Flipper : “Eeep.....eep eep.....Eeep. eep”
Lara : “1.21 miles south east of here buried under a sheet of ice?!? Cheers Flip!”
Flipper : “Eep eep eep eeep”
The snowmobile makes its one and only series appearance here, even if some of the later vehicles (Quad Bike, motorbike with sidecar) would seem strangely similar in feel and handling. Thankfully, the level’s surface area is much more spaced out in this section than it was in Venice. With the speedboat you were banging into walls and things every five seconds. You get more freedom with the snowmobile, and thus, more opportunity to just bang around for a while having fun. How ironic then, the most enjoyably moment in the company of such a fast toy comes when Lara is on foot. Yes, I’m talking about the moment when you finally get to pick up the Hut Key and then get ambushed by a guy using a different model of snowmobile only moments later. It comes as a genuine shock to the player when this happens. Genuine shocks in games are good. In fact, the entire set of tasks you have to undertake in order to the retrieve the Hut Key are generally sehr gut, despite what I said about the whole being superfluous. I like the idea of a ‘Bridge key’(anything to get us away from ‘steel’, ‘silver’, and ‘brass), the two avalanches are tricky (especially the first one), and the leaps across the various pits nearly always make your heart leap.
The only nagging point comes with that snowmobilie adventure playground, the one with all the ramps and ledges cris-crossing all over each other. Working out where to go next from here can be fun, but you’ve got to admit the design of the thing is somewhat contrived. Lara also does her death roll far too easily whenever her vehicle leaves the ground for like........
uhhr...a second.
I do like the introduction of the more professional looking terrorist types, though, even if they do inexplicably fail to jump out the way whenever you drive straight at them on your snowmobile. Despite their heavy arsenal, they only seem to cause a serious problem when attacking in three's. A good example is when Lara finally gets around to opening the hut door. Three terrorists had been previously been kicking their heels in total frustration at not being able to get to this area. We know this because a brief cut-away shows the little gang trapped on the wrong side of a small wooden gate. (The fact that my granny could probably clamber over such a thing doesn't seem to come into the equation). The fight which follows is truly intense, and can be tackled in a variety of strategies. Do you stay inside the hut, go outside, run for the runnel, or get up onto the roof?
The level's final section sees Lara bustling her way past more of those guys on snowmobiles with machine gun implants. The villains here are deadly accurate in shooting you and running you down, yet strangely prone to driving around in endless circles whenever you climb onto a vantage point which is out of their reach. It's a good job the commodities of unlimited ammo and petrol are a not so rare thing in TR-land.
The one truly annoying aspect to this entire snowmobile adventure, though, is not being able to use one of the specialist machine gun vehicles to blow away a guy on another machine gun specialist vehicle. I had an idea that maybe the designers could have used a River Ganges type structure to solve this problem, and thus given the player two alternate routes to get to the end. The first would have seen you using the specialist machine gun model I just mentioned, to barge your way through a more action packed route. The second would have had you using the default turbo-speed model of snowmobile to think your way through a section similar to the river-jumping path from the TR3 level I just name-checked. Just an idea. 8/10
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Scores
Secrets - 1/3. The one near the hut is the second easiest in the game, and I've come to detest goodies buried at the bottom of chasms. It's done far too often. The only one I like is the one where the three panthers comes after you.
Best Part - Killing the two men on snowmobiles near the end.
Worst part - Being forced to ditch your machine-gun vehicle.(Sick of typing "snowmobile". Oops) This happens not just once but twice, and before you can even kill just one bloody living thing, too.
The 100th link I came across when I typed "Tibetan Foothills" into the Google search engine
http://www.hpc.susx.ac.uk/~ewels/per...ckpacking1998/
Read about Chris' travels. Yeah baby.
This level is like....
Antartica is the obvious choice.
Pirate leaders with irritating no-smoking policies on their vessels - Time for them to walk the plank?
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