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Review
Ah, Madabu Gorge, a one way trip to death’s door via a giant plughole. Fun. It’s also the point in the South Pacific section where the quality of level designing disappears down the plughole, too. The foundations to Edge-of-the-seat Tomb Raiding were not built around uncontrollable gimmicks and level maps so condensed you wonder how Lara manages to breathe, and those are precisely the evils we have to put up with here. Temple of Puna, the staple we recognise as being the end of level boss playoff by this point in the game, is no better either. (Stop reading now if you love these levels).
Having safely bypassed the enjoyable Coastal Village, and the rather excellent Crash Site, I nearly had a hernia trying to control the 3rd level’s wretched kayak. There’s actually a screenshot of it on the back of the box. But after spending an hour trying to work out how to use it, and a further half hour posting on a canoeing forum asking professionals if the real thing actually is this difficult, you generate the idea in your head that the screenshot in question was probably put there to demonstrate TR3’s improved water effects rather than the actual kayak. It really is atrocious. I have more fun driving my grandad’s lawnmower than riding that thing, and with the lawnmower it’s even possible to avoid the sharp grass thanks to a concept called “Turning”.
Thankfully there is a alternate route you can hunt out should you give up on the kayak. Oh no, my mistake, there’s another kayak waiting for you down the second route, too. Funnily enough, it’s the same model. Same model, same feeling of helplessness. Same hernia. You could always try swimming down the damn gorge of course. Seems to make sense. But then Lara, despite being an inexhaustible Mark Spitz in the calmer water, suddenly does a dramatic death roll the moment things get a bit frothy. “He’ll be a lucky man who gets you” says the fine young cannibal in the pre-level FMV. Yes, but whoever the jammy sod turns out to be had better not treat our girl to a romantic evening in a hotel sauna, or it’ll be bye bye Crofty the moment he turns the bubble function on.
There aren’t actually any more killable cannibals around until you reach the boss-section. The main adversaries during the Madabu interim are probably what can best be described as a pack of poison-belching green critter things. In appearance they all strangely resemble Dobby the house elf from the Harry Potter series, except rather disturbingly old Dobby was probably about ten times as dangerous. How can we go from gigantic killer dinosaurs to this drivel? At least the crocodiles littered around the gorge are still as creepy as ever, I suppose.
(So impressed was Lara by the gorge, the following year she took the kids)
Of course, there are all the usual boulders, traps, zip-lines, and random pieces of military hardware left lying around on ledges. Abandoned rocket launchers lying next to waterfalls, for instance! I ask you! What exactly happened here? Was John Rambo out skinny dipping and forgot to take his arsenal home? I guess we can’t knock too many things like this, though, or we’d have to go back to questioning even fundamental absurdities like gravity defying breasts and circus fart-masters getting employed as bourgeois butlers. Furthermore, I must confess I did at least enjoy the monkey swing over the plughole bit. It’s not often I get to relive my days as a five year old evading the olds down at the Jungle Jims complex at Blackpool Pleasure Beach.
As I hinted in the intro, The Temple of Puna doesn’t exactly do much to bring back your faith in life after struggling your way through the dire mire of the Gorge level. The Temple that’s Puny might have been more apt. It’s not even what I’d class as a temple anyway. A few blank looking marble corridors and a vain stretch of lava (always worth chucking the old red stuff in when ideas are running thin). Yes, a marvellous super-dab-a-fabulous temple that is. What makes me laugh the most about this place is the chessboard floor in the room with the rolling blades. Yup, sketching that onto to the ground in nice red and yellow colours will cover up the overall blandness of the building. Totally.
The final fight in a room with a built-in abyss requires some good skill and thought, but is made considerably less effective in its beating by the fact the villain is an un-named sir laughalot we have no prior knowledge of. No-one knows why he laughs so much, and no-one cares either. I’m going to call him chuckles, I’ve decided, and maybe the reason why chuckles is giggling at us so much is because we actually decided to plod through this rubbish rather than use the level-skip. What a git he is.
Conclusion? Well I’m not going to pull any punches here. Both the Puna and Madabu levels are absolute crass, worthy contenders the both of them in any ‘what level made you want to kill yourself?’ poll the admin choose to put up in general chat any time during the foreseeable future. I love Tomb Raider 3 as an overall game, but it’s very much a game where one bad level follows two great ones with an almost freaky level of consistency, meaning that if you like ALL of this game, you will just have to grin and bear this particular review, I’m afraid. 4/10 and 3/10.
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