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Review
“I guess some birds just aren’t meant to be caged” – Morgan Freeman, The Shawshank Redemption.
“The new arrival is… a woman!” – Brian Glover, Alien 3
She is indeed a woman, but as all the other prisoners are clones of the same guy, it probably wouldn’t have mattered to her uniqueness on the block had she been male. Anyway, it’s level 2 of Nevada and Lara’s been caught and put in the slammer. Rather than wait to be extradited, she’s decided to escape and continue with the mission. This is something we should be thankful for. “Lara fights the Nevada judiciary system” probably wouldn’t have made for riveting raiding.
The place is called The High Security Compound, but frankly I’ve seen better security at Woolworths. There are only 5 or 6 guards for the whole prison, and not one of them seem capable of knocking out an unarmed guy with a baton. The seasoned escape artist would also be encouraged to learn the entire complex is full of secret passageways and movable bits of wall. Alcatraz it isn’t. In fact it’s more like The Famous Five break into the Bandits’ hideout “Oooh, look at this, Julian. Timmy’s sniffed out a secret passage leading to the mess hall!” Well come on, even the barren Kirren Island was harder to get onto that Area 51.
The beginning of the level is something of a farce, as Lara escapes from her prison cell in just as dubious a manner as James Bond briefly escaped his cell in Goldfinger. What’s the point in having a lone guard rush into a prisoner’s room the moment he/she sets foot on the window sill? It’s not like the window itself is breakable or anything. Anyhow, no doubt buoyed on by this bizarre moment of fortuitousness on her behalf, Lara proceeds to wreck havoc from hereon in, releasing all the prisoners and making a break for freedom. So much for prison time reforming violent characters!
One of her first stops is in the prison toilets, which she proceeds to fill with water in order to reach the room above. If video game heroines had rights, this is the shot their trade union groups would almost certainly use, that of Lara swimming in a restroom filled with water – “Take heed, designers. This is what happens when you don’t give your characters the chance to pee for two and half games”.
Manipulating the guards and the prisoners into fighting plays a big part in the strategy of this level, though the two don’t so much fight as play Ring-a-ring-a-roses with each other until one (usually the guard) keels over in a heap, his pass-card conveniently falling out of his pocket as he does so (A-tissue, A-tissue – the guard falls down). In total there are probably about 10 single-bed prison cells in the whole compound, which seems perfectly reasonable until you see the canteen area, which strangely has a capacity of about 100.
As well as guards the prison also boasts a number of none-human defence mechanisms, the most effective being the video cameras with guns attached to them. Not so effective, I imagine, is the barb wire on the rooftops, which seems to have been strategically placed so that even a fleeing Danny DeVito could leap over it. Going back to the camera guns for a moment, I notice they seem to be rigged so not to fire at the guards. This begs me to ask the question – “Why doesn’t Lara steal the clothes from one of the dead guards?” It would surely beat faffing around looking for an OFF switch.
If you haven’t already gathered, I was a little disappointed by the High Security Compound, and not necessarily because of anything I’ve talked about so far. The concept of putting Lara inside a prison is an intriguing one. However, am I the only raider out there who would have preferred a more realistic prison setting? What we get seems less a tough American penitentiary than it does some sort of military space camp. Barely any of the rooms we wander through resemble those seen in a proper jail. Hell, they might as well have just called this place “Area 50”.
On the plus side, the constant running back to your start point whenever a guard begins to sniff your blood is quite clever, and one or two of the puzzles/death traps are fun and interesting to get past. I particularly like the kitchen room and the fans leading off it. I also felt myself raising a smile when Lara drinks from the bottle during the end of level FMV. Not only does she get to take a whiz for the first time during this level, she also gets to drink for the first time. It didn’t quite look like Lucozade to me, but the marketing people who make the commercial probably won’t care. Like they even play the games anyway.
Before I finish off, I’ll just throw up a quick theory as to why the guards and prisoners fight the way they do. Well, put it this way, how efficient do you think you’d be at fighting if some idiot had wrecked the building’s only restroom and certain things were having to be ‘held in’. Think about it. 6/10
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