Tomb Raider 2

Release Date: November 21, 1997

Tomb Raider 2? And about time too, eh? We don't know about the rest of you out there in magazine-reading land, but for those of us with full-time jobs and a social life it was about the end of last month that we finally finished Tomb Raider - a scant 11 months after its release.

Since then we've been sitting around twiddling our thumbs, sighing and wishing that Core Design would get their act together, Well, the wait is over. We've been playing Tomb Raider 2 for a couple of weeks, and you'll probably have run her around the Great Wall of China in the first level, thanks to our exclusive cover disc demo by now. Unless, of course, you're reading the mag in a shop, or you're one of the strange individuals who buys the magazine and doesn't actually own a PlayStation. (We kid you not. We've even had someone ring up and ask why the CD wouldn't work in his hi-fi. ‘it makes the most terrible racket,’ he

confessed.) Anyway, we digress. We can even hear the sound of you getting impatient. So... Tomb Raider 2 is brilliant. Thank God. As you'll have seen on the demo. But you'll be wanting to know if the rest of the game is as good as the demo level? OF course it is Ysee, Tomb Raider 2 is packed full of new things. Yes, it's essentially the same game as the original, but at the same time it's got so much more. Take Lara's new moves, for example. As well as all the old jumping, shimmying and running tricks that she used to be able to do, Lara has learnt some new stuff in her year off. Now she can climb. Not just up to the top of a block as she could in the original, but up ladders and climbable walls. A fairly insignificant improvement, you might think. Except that Lara’s ability to climb has revolutionised the level design of the game. Areas that were previously inaccessible have opened up to her, If the level designers were artists, it would be like they'd discovered a whole new colour to paint with, And as we know, the lads at Core were the Michelangelos of level design before, Now the levels are bigger, more complex and more fun. There are other small improvements to her movement as well. Lara can also wade through shallow water now, meaning that she can get her guns out while still in the water.

All of these new moves are available to practise in Lara's mansion — just as in the predecessor. But Lara's clearly had the interior decorators in since last time, who've very sensibly managed to convince her to move her gym out of the ballroom and into the open air, where it now resembles one of those assault courses beloved of The Krypton Factor. And that's also a significant new factor in TR2 — a lot of the levels are now out in the open air.

But perhaps the biggest single new thing is that Lara can now use vehicles. In the Venice levels, for example, she gets to ride around in a powerboat. Indeed, her ability to do this is vital to being able to complete the level on which it's introduced. The first time Lara climbs into a power boat, guns up the engine and you realise that ~ rather than some animated sequence - you're actually going to be able to drive the powerboat around, is one of the great moments of the new game. Other significant improvements to the first game include the addition of ‘dynamic lighting’. Now that might sound pretty dull, but what it means is that in Tomb Raider 2, sources of light can move around, whereas in Tomb Raider they were just stuck in one position. The major upshot of this is that Lara now has flares. Not the dodgy '70s trousers, that would be too much to bear. No, Lara has distress flares that give off an intense light for a short while that she can run around holding, or throw down dark areas. Again this simple innovation has led to much more intriguing level design, with certain areas of some levels being hidden in pitch black, In much the same way as you had to hunt for ammunition in the first game, you'll find yourself hunting for flares so that you can find out what's hidden down that long, dark tunnel,

The other new element that radically alters the shape of the levels is that there are now glass windows dotted around. Glass windows that you can satisfyingly shatter simply by firing your pistol at them. All of these new elements combine to make the new levels feel much more like real places. These small improvements to the interactivity of the levels have made many of the places that Lara visits feel much more realistic.

The other thing you'll notice about Tomb Raider 2 is that the graphics are a little bit sharper. The textures are a little more complicated, Lara is a little smoother, the 3D engine is a bit quicker, and some of those slightly annoying glitches, like when you'd suddenly be able to see between walls, have been eliminated. This all helps to give Tomb Raider 2 a richer, lusher feel, and adds to the all-important feeling of ‘being there’.

But it's not just the new ways that Lara moves, or the technical advances in the game engine that make Tomb Raider 2 different to the first game. TR2 has a different, more modern and urban feel to it. The plot doesn’t take you toa seemingly endless list of fanciful archeological sites - Lara is more Jane Bond in the sequel than Indiana Jane. There are levels set in modern-day Venice, on oil platforms, in underwater shipwrecks and rather than the occasional tiger or mummy leaping out to scare the wits out of you, these levels are heavily populated by people, Admittedly, they're all still enemies, but whereas the first Tomb Raider had an almost ghostly, barren feeling to it, TR2 seems at times almost indecently crowded. There are thugs with iron bars trying to bash your head in, there are mafioso with automatic weaponry trying to gun you down and — most sinisterly of all, the first time you encounter them — there are frogmen lurking in the water armed with harpoon guns.

To help her cope with this new array of enemies, Lara has had her weaponry upgraded. in addition to the familiar pistols, automatics and Uzis of the original, TR2 lets you get your hands on some pretty serious firepower, including an M16 combat rifle, a harpoon gun of your own to use underwater and - the ultimate in carnage-wreakers — a grenade launcher. This modern feel has also got to the background environment, too. There are now huge air-conditioning fans to avoid and giant swinging hooks to watch out for. Instead of the quiet ambience of long-deserted tombs, Lara now spends most of the game listening to the background hum of electrical generators, the throbbing of powerful engines and the piercing shriek of intruder alarms. That's not to say that TR2 is lacking in atmospheric ruins to explore; there are plenty. But at least half the levels are set firmly in the modern world, making for a whole new kind of excitement and adventure. Tomb Raider 2 is also quite a bit harder than the first game. Which is no bad thing for all us battle-scarred veterans. The first level introduces you to a mind-boggling sequence of trap-doors and crushing rooms that will take all your wits and speed of reaction to overcome. There's a series of rooms that require you to keep moving ~ and always in the right direction - to avoid certain death, And this is where our only criticism of TR2 comes in.

The first game was, as you will no doubt be aware, a huge success on the PC as well as on the PlayStation. The only significant difference between the two was that while the PlayStation game had a series of save points dotted throughout each level, the PC version allowed you to save the game at any point. Unfortunately, this made the PC version much easier to complete PlayStation original, and also removed quite a bit of the edge from the gameplay. This was because the PlayStation save points were an integral part of the level design. They were frustratingly well-placed, often stretching your gameplaying abilities to the absolute limit. They were also the source of a good deal of the game's excitement, as you wondered whether you could nurse a severely injured Lara through enough of the level to find the next save point. On the PC there was none of that excitement; if you wanted to save the game, you just went ahead and did it. Of course, at the same time the PlayStation save points were an artificial element of a game that was so realistic in many other ways; you're not often looking out for a transparent blue diamond in real life. And they were quite possibly viewed by the designers as a necessary evil, given the limited RAM available in the PlayStation’s memory and on memory cards.

In addition to the familiar pistols, automatics and Uzis of the original, TR2 lets you get your hands on some pretty serious weaponary

In TR2, though, you can save the game at any point. And — as we've pointed out above - the game is also quite a deal more difficult. While in the first game you often had plenty of time to prepare yourself to make a jump, the second game has many more instances where you're required to act instantly ~ either because of a moving obstacle that must be avoided, because you've had your weapons confiscated and you're being chased by armed baddies, or because of switches that only open doors for a limited amount of time. So what you do now, of course, is to save the game every time you're in a dangerous position. And if you fail your task, you just reload and try again. And again. And again. Until you succeed. The unfortunate consequence of this is that, rather than making the game feel more realistic by taking out the blue lozenges, TR2 actually loses some of its flow to the continual ghastly interruptions of the loading screen. Luckily this flaw is restricted to only a couple of occasions on each level, so you won't get really frustrated about it, But it's not as good as it used to be. And that's a shame. Of course, for PC players this won't be such an annoying problem, largely because it should take quite a lot less time to load a level from hard-drive than it does from the CD.

The rest of TR2 is so good and in so many places such a significant improvement on the original, though, that we shan't be letting this one error of judgement affect our scoring of the game; just don't write in and say that we didn’t warn you. Tomb Raider 2, then, is an even more fantastic game than its predecessor. Which, given the fairly short amount of time that they had, is a testament to the growing confidence and expertise of the great team at Core Design. It's guaranteed to sell extraordinarily well and, unlike most sequels, will deserve to do so on its own merits, rather than by trading on its name. Like the first game, TR2 offers you 16 superb levels of gripping gameplay that will amuse, bemuse, scare and exhilarate you in a way that precious few other games do. We have seen the future, and the future belongs to Lara.