|
Review
Theatre industry stained as lone gun-woman’s Venice venture ends with a hammer to the base of the neck. Dusk has begun to settle on TR’s excursion into the Italian corner of world mobster ties. Baddies hoping to double up as oil rig sentries shall have already made their on-line catalogue orders for home delivered hard hats. Cargo planes shall be fully fueled and ready to perform ‘through and outs’. And restless crates will just swing baby yeah! Now can the last person to leave the building please remember to lock up and turn everything off? We don’t want that futuristic elevator that never makes any noise being left on do we? Neither do we really need the fallout next fall from an electric bill run up by a small rabbit warren of killer fans. No sir.
By far the most appropriate of Lara’s post-TR1 ‘realistic’ settings, The Opera House is a much loved and much copied (at least internally) banquet of on-stage pistol popping and back-stage circuit board remedying. It’s not strictly due to a poverty of ideas we end up back in this place both in the Living Quarters and the Streets of Rome. There’s something about the theatre that suits Lara to the most perfectly molded tee in the world. Put it this way, you could hardly imagine her mixing it with Popcorn-munchers in a cinema could you? If there was one scene missing from the Tomb Raider movie I wouldn’t have minded seeing, it was Lara socializing at a dinner party or some other highly populated gathering and failing miserably (albeit 90% deliberately)
The decision to pit the level in the fading evening is a good one, even if much of the argy-bargy takes place indoors. It just contrasts well with the endless sunlight that embraced Bartoli’s Hideout. The settling dusk also enables the cynics among us to put those floating wooden boards on the Opera House roof down to figments of our imagination conjured up by the near darkness around us. In the daytime I’m sure we’d quite clearly be able to see the thin metal rods that hold the damn things up. Despite the potential for death by falling, and also from the presence of spike traps, the total volunteers for sentry duty on the roof area would be appear to be quite high in thugsville. Exactly why that is I hesitate to speculate. I will though on just one more occasion attempt to initiate a discussion on the phenomenon of boxes that never stop swinging. What is it Bartoli is exporting in those damn boxes? Grandfather clocks?
More traps come close to killing Lara once she’s inside the theatre. It’s as if each one is connected to a pressure pad programmed to activate itself upon the detection of female feet. Mind you, at least the falling bag of potatoes is something new (or whatever it is that weighs the bag down). I’ve already had it up to my ear-hole with rolling boulders. Someone should create an even bigger rolling boulder that would exist to go around rolling over all the rolling boulders. That would make me happy. The new twist to the wretched things in TR2 is the way that each boulder seemingly has two smaller boulders by its side whenever it decides to go ‘a’ rolling. You tend to notice this more come the Tibetan levels. What I’m saying still very much applies here though. It’s as if the main boulder in each set now has a mummy boulder on one side and a baby boulder on the other, making up a kind of ‘boulder family’, so to speak. They breed!!
Not nearly as irritating is the somewhat bizarre structure of the Opera House itself, which I only bothered to actually stop and consider for the purpose of this thread. And like I’ve indicated in some my previous threads, if you don’t spot it during your first run through the game, you can’t criticize it nearly as much. Even so, the question of where everybody used to sit when they watched the Opera in this building is quite a difficult one to answer. There just aren’t any seats! (Gordon Taylor and his PFA committee would have a fit)
The Bartoli theatre company proudly presents……PINOCCHIO!
Date – December the 3rd, 1997
Cast –
Pinocchio – White shirted thug
Blue fairy – Lara Croft
Bad guy – Bartoli
Price list –
Standing (Top floor) : 30 Euros
Standing (All other floors) : 20 Euros
Seating : N/A#
Paddling pool at the front : 5 Euros
# - Members of the Seraph recovery committee should contact Mr Bartoli’s secretary, and a chair will be brought out to you on the night of the performance.
You know what? Looking back at what I’ve written above, I think I might just have miscast the white shirted thug. Still, never mind. He isn’t miscast in the level. That’s the main thing. Neither is the Duke Nukem wannabe who pops up near the end. This guy is just so cool it’s hard to imagine him appearing out of place anywhere in the entire game. I wish the designers had taken a risk and given him one or two other appearances in TR2. He can’t be interpreted as being killed off after the Opera House because of his re-appearance in Home Sweet Home, unless the second incarnation is meant to be his evil twin brother. (Pete Nukem?)
Anyway, dodging in and out of a stack of boxes to take on a platoon of thugs and dogs is great fun. Come to think of it, a lot of the shoot-outs in the Opera house are memorable. The puzzles and logistical problems are none too shabby too. I wouldn’t call the air vent section a puzzle, but working out the best way to get past the fans is certainly a logistical problem, as is lining up the two boxes that enable you to leave the area. Is there enough suckiness in this paragraph yet? No? Good, because I haven’t yet given mention to the fabulous secret hidden above the elevator, the interesting change of emphasis from keys to circuit boards, and last but not least, the broody music that hits you just after dropping into the water tunnels under the stage. It’s alllllllll pukka. All of it. There’s even a rare FMV awaiting for those people fortunate enough not to die of stage fright beforehand. (ho-ho). And if you’re one of those people having trouble getting past the stage at all, remember… Have faith Fabian, not gutrot. 10/10
^Top |
