: Ready For Your Close-up?
My friends know I am a hard-core gamer- PC gamer that is. Whoever tells me PC gaming is dead can eat my dust when I frag their team in a game of Quake or Warcraft or Need for Speed: Shift.
Now I have been a fan of the game Tomb Raider and it’s series from day 1. I have loved how Eidos and Core Design (the game developer) has developed Lara and the game into something that you would want to know about and play. Don’t be mistaken, just because the game has a female lead character doesn’t mean it’s a girly game. It’s got enough share of mind bending puzzles, target shooting (in different puzzles) and other characters that you would like to wring the necks of. Every Tomb Raider game has a storyline that develops throughout the levels…it’s like one of those really good TV series that you can’t get enough of. When Eidos launched the 4th installment of the Tomb Raider series entitled The Last Revelation I was so happy that I wanted to break glass! This installment was by far the best that Core Design developed-fascinating storyline, great character building (Von Croy!), eyebrow raising puzzles (both easy and difficult) and a lot of other new features. And then some crap happened to Eidos- they decided to go with another game developer called Crystal Dynamics. That just created chaos with the game series. They ruined it one by one. I installed Tomb Raider: Underworld yesterday. Let me start off by saying the game has got shit camera angles. How the hell is one supposed to see what’s happening in front of Lara when she enters a room and the camera pans to her left side??? No seriously, it’s all about combat and staying sharp but when you have no visual about the contents of a room HOW will you play? You have to keep moving the mouse every now and then to get a better view. One of the key elements of the series is the player’s ability to scan the room or surrounding and make a judgment call. With Underworld, you have dodgy camera angles and you are left frustrated. 15 mins into the game, I was found uttering one too many expletives because the camera pans to a close-up of Lara’s shoe when she is going to make that critical jump. How will I know where the heck Lara is jumping when all I can see is her shoe!
HOW and WHY Crystal Dynamics would do this is beyond me. How is one supposed to play this game? Oh, I think I said that already- but hey! I don’t have an answer to that. Anyone else playing the same game? Any tips of setting the camera angles right? I’ve searched on Tomb Raider forums and everybody complains about the same thing! Very frustrating. Please, Crystal Dynamics do not kill the series!
