Soul Reaver 2

Soul Reaver 2 honestly lacks the charm of its predecessor, for me. But that doesn't mean it's not worth playing at all.
We start with an FMV version of the last game's end battle. Kain, celery-plant-resembling villain, jumps through a time portal, and we follow. We wind up in the former Sarafan stronghold with a very creepy man called Moebius. I noticed that the characters' mouths move when they talk and that the audio quality is pretty bad in places, the game could have done with subtitles.

There are a few control differences; the look button is now just R2 and the camera angle doesn't seem quite as pliable with the right stick. The combat also feels a bit stilted.
The natural world of Nosgoth's past looks quite nice. You can't see through the surface of the water and this can make it difficult to swim to the correct point. The souls don't look quite as ethereal as they did in the previous game, and in the spectral realm they are just floating skulls.

Some heads.

There is so much talking and the cutscenes are ridiculously long. Especially when we run into the Elder God again, and Raziel gets very bitchy. He also starts decapitating people a lot. If you use the Soul Reaver to fight, it consumes the souls instead of you, which is a bit of a bother.
The (somewhat ridiculous looking) save plinths and checkpoints have very arty-farty descriptions for what they actually are. But, at least the game actually has save points, and you don't start at the bottom of the Lake of the Dead every time you load.

A save point.

In this game, Raziel collects different elemental powers for the Reaver, which seem to have replaced the search for Glyphs. This seems to be purely an exercise in filling time, not least because you have one of them for all of five minutes before the game abruptly ends.
You activate gained Reaver powers by dipping the blade in an appropriate basin. This sounds simple enough, but you lose the power whenever you go into the spectral realm and another correct basin is not always within a pleasing distance. There are some puzzles requiring you to have one Reaver power, use it, then immediately cross somewhere and use another, all without screwing something up and winding back up in the spectral realm. I had a lot of frustration at this part and it was frankly serious bullshit.
The transition between realms has been quite significantly hindered by the placing of the Soul Reaver and map in the same menu. The latter, by the way, is far too zoomed-out to be of much use.

Glitch of underneath area visible through floor.

There's a lot of enemy bombardment and it starts to get seriously annoying. The humans are all dumb as rocks and can't manage to leave you alone, even while you are fighting the same monsters which are terrorising them. Speaking of the monsters, they are just thoroughly unpleasant. It can be tempting to run ahead through the waves of them but this is not always possible, either due to someone firing projectiles and knocking Raziel as he is climbing, or the electrical barriers.
The spacing of portals also gets ridiculous at times when lots of enemies will be knocking you back into the spectral realm.

Despite the annoyances, this game has a very rich story, which is told in a compelling way. There are some interesting game mechanics, such as having to scoop up blood into a bowl and transport it to another. There are walkways which form in the air out of blood, which are absolutely fascinating but also quite time-consuming to achieve.

At the end of the day, it's a Soul Reaver game, so I wouldn't recommend giving it a miss.

Tomb Raider: Unfinished Business

The original Tomb Raider had some PC-exclusive extras, known as the "Unfinished Business" levels. I always knew of them, but as I prefer to play games on a console, they had long eluded me. That is, until last week when I decided to finally get hold of Unfinished Business via the Steam instructions.

My little ultrabook isn't really designed for gaming and so I moved over to my partner's PC to play the levels, using a PS3 controller because I was simply no good at getting around with the keyboard.
There are four levels in total, but they are each quite lengthy in comparison to the main game levels. The first two are set in Egypt, following Lara's return to the City of Khamoon. She finds it flooded and discovers an entrance into a tomb dedicated to Bastet.

You may remember the fairly detailed cat statues in the main game, which I was always surprised that the game creators didn't do something more interesting with. Well, they did. Quite a few of those statues now transform into live panthers when you get too close!

Recognise that Sphinx?

Panthers everywhere.

Not looking forward to that.

Oh dear.

Inconspicuous boulders.

The cats on the walls move. This is hard to see in a screenshot.

Hello.

Hmm.

Not sure if this area was meant to look like this, or if it's missing some texturing.

Nice use of spikes as teeth.

The Egyptian levels are more breathtaking than the original ones in the main game. You even get to run around outside for a bit, and there are visible, twinkling stars in the night sky. I haven't found all the secrets yet, so I'll have to go back to these levels, but I'll be glad to do so.
I was always quite overconfident about the original Tomb Raider because I know the levels like the back of my hand. Having no clue where I was going in Unfinished Business, revealed that I am actually quite a scaredy-pants. Having said that, the mummies were always my least favourite enemy so I suppose it's fair that I wasn't keen to run straight into them.



The next levels take place at the Great Pyramid of Atlantis, seeming to begin where the ending of the original game left off, as Lara is sliding down that slope after killing Natla. This is somewhat erroneous in its execution, though. It would have made more sense for these levels to take place before the Egyptian ones in Unfinished Business, given that they are set beforehand. The creators seem to have forgotten that the pyramid was in the midst of blowing up, and the environment is not shaking and thumping here. Although the sun is setting when Lara escapes out to the boat, and indeed when she first enters through Natla's mines, the starry night sky is visible here. The Atlantean eggs on the wall are also a vivid lime green now.

Foreboding.

These guys are seriously tall.

No thanks.

Diving in holes again.

Yes, that is a lot of boulders on a ceiling.

Lara Croft: The only woman who can get so close to lava without her skin burning off. Maybe she is part Atlantean.

Hmm.

The only thing I really disliked about Unfinished Business is the almost constant enemy bombardment. There's not a lot of time for running around and exploring before something is leaping on you, sometimes in large numbers, and it gets a bit ridiculous.
The environments are beautiful though, and they're something that Tomb Raider fans need to experience at least once.

Tomb Raider 2013

I ended up with this game as an entirely unexpected Galentine's Day present this year. I've been wary of this one for the past few years because it is, of course, yet another reboot of Lara Croft. I didn't have high expectations of it.

The first thing I have to say is that Camilla Luddington has a very distinctive voice, and so I was picturing her in her Californication role every time Lara spoke. Things start off immediately grim as Lara is strung up inside a cave and left to die. When you figure out how to get her down, she's impaled by something sharp on the floor. You have to figure out how to escape a cramped cave full of skulls and bodies while contending with a serious injury and vision akin to how things look before I've put my contact lenses in.

Lara briefly ends up with pink hair in some lighting.

This is all part of Lara learning to be a survivor, hence the game's tagline, A survivor is born. Lara and her archaeological crew are now stranded on Yamatai, a once-real island within the Dragon's Triangle. Anyone taking to the seas or skies finds themselves victim to sudden and mysterious storms.
You very quickly become in desperate need of shelter and food. You soon set up your first camp. These allow you to upgrade your skills and weapons (perhaps if you sit and think about something for long enough around a fire, you become really good at it), and eventually to "fast travel" to other campfires.

Not a good day for Lara. Or any of those skinned people.

I keep ending up with games that put me in crawl spaces with skeletons.

I think the game could have given more practical hunting advice than just "Focus," and it would have been more interesting for Lara to have to craft her own bow rather than just find one. You do, however, get to upgrade the found bow with numerous salvaged bits of junk from around the island. The hunting method doesn't always seem quite proportional to the animal in question. For example, I shot a crab with an arrow and that seemed a bit bonkers. Having said that, past versions of Lara have used guns on scorpions.

It's not going well.

A floating torch in its natural forest habitat.

The gameplay is very unlike that of previous Tomb Raider incarnations. The only thing that struck me as being similar, was shuffling sideways along ledges and having to leap over to the next one. It can be quite unclear what you actually have to do in a given area, although thankfully if you get it wrong, you're likely to restart exactly where you were as the checkpoints are so frequent. The ledge edges aren't all quite as obvious as they have been in the past, but if you get stuck you can hold L2 for "Survival Instincts;" everything turns greyscale and relevant areas are highlighted in yellow or red.

Is that deer meat? Who bloody knows, frankly.

Well you can't eat it like that, can you. These people do a lot of strange things with dead bodies.

You unravel the mystery of the island by finding what appear to be entire journals that people have just left lying around. Listening to enemy conversations as you approach is very important, and if your hearing is anything like mine, you'll want to have the subtitles switched on. The font, though, is almost illegible on a CRT television.
The game doesn't really own the "Tomb Raider" title. At one point Lara even exclaims "I hate Tombs!"
There are various "optional tombs" to be found, and the screen will say "Tomb Raided!" when you complete them, but they are far from being the main point of the gameplay, and they are often discovered during times of urgency when you just have to run by and leave them.
There are numerous little challenges too, but these again tend to present themselves at unsuitable times and situations. You can't really be farting about in the woods looking for mushrooms when a bunch of angry men with torches are searching for you.

Here's a pig with an arrow in it.

Tomb Raider-inspired shenanigans on the family blackboard.

There are a fair few glitches, and other things that don't work quite so well. At one point I landed in some water after a fall, suddenly zipped over to be on land again, and then jerked all the way back into the water. Looting the bodies of some of the Stormguard seemed to cause Lara pain. Torches sometimes remain floating in the air after you've shot their owner. There's a point where you need to use a grenade launcher, but there is simply not the room to handle the kickback and you land in some flames.
Even though the enemies change, the main point of the game is pretty much fighting long streams of men, and this can get a bit boring. You also come across some repeated enemies with riot shields which are a pain the ass to kill.


As much as I hate to admit it, I really liked this game. I just think they should have invented a new heroine instead of rewriting Lara for the billionth time. If they wanted the assured audience of a franchise, they could have made her Lara's daughter or something. But maybe I'm just being an old fuddy-duddy.

The scenery is absolutely amazing, especially the background of the palace standing tall above the shanty town. I found the aesthetic of repurposed aeroplane wrecks and grass growing through the floors of crumbling concrete buildings, really appealing
The sheer number of dead bodies all over this island is macabre but also kind of fascinating. As a chandler I also can't help but wonder how they made all those candles. Imagining somebody having to actually melt, pour and set each one of them was almost enough to give me a headache.

After the end credits, you can press "Continue" and resume exploring the island to deal with unfinished challenges and tombs, pretty much to your heart's content. The weather is lovely, after you dealt with that whole thing. Areas are also seemingly free of enemies, with the exception of places that you missed the first time around. I do feel, though, that the opening scene of the game was never really resolved. The person responsible for hanging Lara up in a cave did not strike me as belonging to any of the enemy groups.


This is the gaming equivalent of a book I can't put down. It's hard to stop playing and there isn't really a good quitting point. There is a constant sense of peril, whether from the fragile structures, disgruntled animals, other people, your own hunger or the creepy ruins. This game made me say "Holy fuck!" out loud a lot. Things get so intense in places that you don't even know where you're leaping, but you just keep doing it.
I loved it, really.