|
Review
Bungled cheating hack leads to computer generated still photo of a green comet rendezvous. Welcome to the matrix, Lara. You’ll like it here. Life is beautiful. Everywhere looks like a golf green without a flag, mainly because some up-to-no-gooders on jetpacks have borrowed them to do some torso skewering. We’ll come back to that in a bit, though. For now let me just point out that getting out of bed on the wrong side is potentially dangerous, just as playing a five iron and missing the green is likely to result in you needing a new ball. Yes, that dark bit you see is not a black canvas designed to make your destinations stand out. It is death, pure and simple. Get ready to hop, skip, jump, and pole vault your way from start to finish of…The Floating Islands.
The Italian Stallion, Rocky Bartoli, has always been two cans short of a six-pack, and never is this aptly more demonstrated than in the cross-over from The Temple of Xena (Is that right?) to the Floating Islands. Most millionaires in their late thirties might pass the days buying yachts in Monaco, or sunning it up on a beach in Ibiza. Not our Marco, though. He would much rather stab himself in the chest and turn himself into a dragon. And If that’s not bad enough, he then condemns himself to living in a boring looking fantasy world all by himself, his only remaining goal in life being to subsequently become the galaxy’s first ever fire-breathing pro tour player to get an albatross in space. You can help yourself to that tag, mate. Nobody else wants it.
Bar-kingmad-toli takes a backseat during this level, though. The enemies in the Floating Islands are made up of shruiken throwing ninja’s and big, burly looking security guards of the more biblical variety. Both are enjoyable enemies to try and best, and are completely unique to just this level and the next one. These of course were the good old days before the TRLR indestructibles came along and almost tried to phase out the use of Lara's weaponry. You can’t beat a good firing frenzy now and again, and if that means a baddie needing fifty shots to go down in order to properly represent his late-in-the-game toughness, so be it. I’m prepared to take him on.
The flying guardian things deserve standout recognition for any number of reasons, most notably the creepy way they slowly fly towards you accompanied by the eerie sound of a faint howling wind. This is best demonstrated near the beginning of the level, when or two or three of them have an extremely long way to fly in order to reach you. Later on, they begin to only have two feet of lava to fly over, and the effect isn’t as good. Hell, I don’t know why they bother switching on the jetpacks for two feet of lava. They might as well just take a standing jump or something.
The guardians don’t have guns or shruikens, but woe betide the casual golfer who lands his ball within striking distance of the weapons they do possess, a twin pair of long, sharp spears. That person is likely to be unceremoniously picked up chopstick style and swished around a like the contents of a plate of prawn curry. You didn’t think those Asian textures and fittings dotted around the level were just for show, did you? This usually happens, by the way, some time after a guardian gets defrosted out of an ice sculpture built to fit his body. Why they can’t just sleep like normal people, I don’t know. The defrosting process gives you a chance to either prepare for battle or run very quickly in the opposite direction. (although you won’t get very far before reaching the edge of something in the case of the latter).
Bartoli : “You idiots! Why are you taking so long to defrost? She’s getting away!!”
Guardian 1 : “It’s not our fault we take half an hour on gas mark 4. It’s the way we were made”.
Meanwhile…….
Pierre : How are we going to get off these horrible green floating islands?
Larsson : Don’t worry, boss. I’ve got a couple of parachutes in my backpack!
Pierre : Idiou!
A good segment of play comes the near the end, when Lara falls into a large room where a veritable onslaught awaits her from four guardians and about six ninja’s. The layout of the place both hinders and helps you, with a small lava gutter slowing up the movements of the enemies towards you, while an initially beneficial looking steel cage rises up and abandons you the moment you touch down and begin firing. Given the choice I would swap the lava gutter for the cage any day of the week, but there you go. This is almost the final level. The fringe benefits offered by the scenery traditionally aren’t that great at this stage of a Tomb Raider game.
Predictably enough, the ninja’s and guardians ignore each other and almost exclusively go only for Lara when all three parties are in the same room. This is the phenomenon I call ‘The law of Croft-death priority extra’, and can be seen applying itself in only too many levels during the earlier Tomb Raider games. You get the odd one out and now then of course (the Barkhang Monastery and the Crash Site, etc), but these are usually one-off instances. For the most part, Lara Croft has the incredible power to create temporary allies of even the most unlikely enemies. Think of Pierre and the random coliseum tiger that never attacks him, and the complete refusal on behalf of yeti’s to acknowledge the presence of eels. And when two enemies in the same level aren’t making pacts to help each other kill Lara, they’re making agreements at least never to attack her on the same patch of ground at the same time. It was incredible how the terrorists and the snow leopards in the Tibetan Foothills managed to completely avoid each other the whole level. I’ve also been getting suspicious lately that sharks and frogmen have got secret radar devices telling them when the other is about to enter the area they’re swimming in.
Anyway, let’s get back to how clever the creation of the flying guardian is. It quite rightly dominates a great percentage of my take on this level, not just because of its design but because of the situations it is used in. The bit where you have to slide down the slope instead of using the zip-line is top-notch puzzle creation, and speaking of zip-lines, the descent over the heads of two incensed guardians aimlessly waving their spears around on a bridge is both humorous and satisfying. The amount of them who defrost compared to those who most often won’t, is weighted almost perfectly.
A top-notch hour of entertainment then is this strange but alluring expedition through Bartoli’s deranged fantasy world in the sky. Some might think it out of keeping with the rest of the game, and it’s certainly the ugly duckling of the pack in the TR2 level line-up (40 Fathoms just about gets off the hook, then). However, you can’t argue with the level of thought and vision that went into creating something like this. At the end of the day, as long as the game-play right in front of you is absorbing to the brain, I don’t care if the backdrop is of wallpaper depicting pink and yellow elephants doing the tribal dance. Design teams should remember this when they contemplate abandoning smelly, dark caves for the so-called cities or culture like Paris and Prague. Now then, my feet are tired. Who here owns a golf buggy that jumps? 9/10
^Top |
