I’m playing Tomb Raider Underworld. I’m really trying to enjoy it. I mean i unexpectedly loved the prequel – Tomb Raider Legend – so why does Underworld fail so utterly when it comes to my enjoyment?
First of all, i’ve mentioned here that Underworld is very unforgiving. If you die, you are put back to a usually very reasonable checkpoint. But if you fall and survive, you have to get back up all the way. And that sometimes means spending a significant amount of time repeating the steps just to get back to where you were. Plus in any of these steps you may fail, just like the first time you tried to get up there, and you’ll have to start over – again! This sucks. I don’t remember exactly if Legend had this or to what degree but i certainly can’t remember such frustrating experiences.
Second, the 3rd person camera just sucks. If you move even the slightest bit, it will auto-rotate so you keep looking at Lara’s back. So you’ll spend a lot of time re-adjusting the camera to where you WANT to look at. Also the game and especially the Level Design forces you to look around, which makes matters worse. Often you’re in a small enclosed space and you need to find the ledge you can jump up to, so you’ll have to look up. And as soon as you move, the camera moves back to level with the floor. But it gets worse … since you’re passing a lot of enclosed spaces, and even if it’s just two pillars in an otherwise open area, the camera will adjust so you can always see Lara. Often times that means the camera will just snap close to Lara so you’ll get an mind-boggling look at her enormous breasts but you’ll see nothing else. But who wants to, right? The whole point of the game is to find corners and ledges that’ll give you the best cleavage and butt views. At least that’s what i’ve come to believe after playing it for two levels and probably 3-4 hours. Unfortunately, the camera sucks so bad, i’m also getting sick as mentioned here after playing it for about 60 to 90 minutes.
Then there are those minor nuisances. Lara’s headlight keeps getting switched off each time i’ve died or after each cutscene. Combat against wildlife animals is also highly frustrating. You’ll walk around with LT pressed to keep a lock and just keep firing. The camera will just snap back and forth whenever your lock switches targets. There’s nothing really tactical about it and at least for the wild jungle cats it’s close to impossible to avoid their attacks. And when you’re swarmed or cornered by two or more of them you’ll end up getting hit, falling to the floor, getting back up, shooting once or twice, getting hit again, repeat, over and over. Argh!
There are also issues with the game’s design as well. In Legend it was clearly visible where Lara could drop, hang, jump or climb. In Underworld the whole game elements melt together with the visual elements of the world so it’s often very hard to tell wether a certain ledge is something Lara can get a hold of, or will stumble upon, fall and die. Or worse: survive. This is especially bad for ledges that Lara can’t walk over and grab it while falling, because while running up to such a ledge you’ll just walk over it and die. You only get prior notice if you approach the ledge slowly, and that means approaching ALL ledges slowy. Underworld is unforgiving.
And some game events are very disturbing as well. Spoiler alert!!! I will give out the solution to a very frustrating situation here, so don’t read on if you want to be frustrated. In the Thailand temple, there’s a situation where you have a platform suspended on ropes that is obviously intended as a lift. A lift that traverses diagonally downwards and seems to be perfect to get Lara to the ground level beneath here. So after you’ve figured out how to remove the mandatory blockage of the ropes, you’ll flip the switch and die. Seriously, you die! You will be dead. It all happens so fast, after a few tries you’ll be looking around for something you might have missed. Maybe the whole thing is just a decoy and you’re supposed to find a completely different route? Nope. It turns out that as soon as you hit the switch, you’ll have to press X to grapple-hook onto a ring and then safely climb down. The main problem here is that it is counter-intuitive on so many levels. First of all, you’ve solved the riddle of the blocked ropes and you expect to be rewarded by a safe ride down. Not so here, you’re being punished for solving the puzzle. There’s just no way anyone could survive this fall on the very first try, it’s just way too surprising – even though the chain is clearly about to break you still don’t expect it to break right away. Second, whenever you CAN grapple-hook you’ll get a blue (X) icon on the screen – not this time. Add to this the fact that the camera is suddenly zoomed very far out it seems as if it is simply a non-interactive sequence. So you’ll have to get over this misconception as well and realize that you can control Lara while she’s falling.
After all this i’m not sure if i can get myself back to playing Underworld again. Even though it’s visually brilliant the gameplay is about as entertaining as the city portrayed in Mirror’s Edge is colorful.
The Mako – Mass Effect’s land vehicle – is almost beyond absurd. It is a three-axis six-wheeled monster which basically drives like a medium-boiled peeled egg. What’s up with that?
I’ll tell you what it is for me … the worst driveable vehicle from any Xbox360 game to date! The Mako does not only react very sensitively to your input, turning much too easily, it also hops and jumps wildly over each little bump making it all the harder to keep it on track. Occassionally it will just turn or flip over from all the bouncing and turning it does. Once i even managed to do a double-barrel roll with it. Amazing, but totally uncalled for because i was in the middle of frigging combat!
Of course, I’m thankful that the Mako can never get stuck and it will always roll back on it’s wheels and that i can even drive up mountains with it. And no matter what you do with it, you can’t damage it just by driving and crashing. But driving it is no fun at all because it is much too stressful to keep it going in just a straight line and more often than not you will find yourself driving onto a wall, flipping over or having to back up.
Speaking of backing up … why the hell did Bioware decide that it’s a good idea to have the controls reverse when you turn the camera around? First of all, I died about 5 times driving off a ledge on Prothean Skyway and on Noveria because of the sudden shift of momentum. Secondly, why did they even allow driving off edges? Other locations have invisible barriers so that you can’t pass with your vehicle, why not just block all the deadly areas for the Mako, too? I mean, if you’re so concerned about the casual gamers that surely would have halved their death rate. And we all know that dying in a video game is what often makes people quit the game.
The first thing to note in Mass Effect is that the 3rd person exploration camera does not rotate automatically with the actor, meaning the actor can even look and walk towards you. Most 3rd person games do allow this during some kind of manual-camera-control mode but otherwise rely on automatic positioning and orientation of the camera. Those auto-follow 3rd person cameras have often been a nuisance in the pioneer 3rd person games because it is amazingly difficult to get this right. But that is no excuse for forcing that burden on the Players who are used to be supported by automatic cameras from most modern 3rd person games.
I am convinced that an auto-follow camera is much better than having to control the camera manually all the time, trying to follow with your character’s movement. This is an additional constant burden that the game forces me to do even though it could well over 90% deliver a satisfactory result without requiring me to adjust the camera angle manually. And as long as i’m still free to control the camera manually whenever i want to, i don’t see any reason why Mass Effect should not control the camera for me by default the rest of the time?
Even worse is that the orientation of the camera determines which interactive objects are highlighted in the game world, not the direction the actor is facing. This took me some time to figure out and i continue to intuitively align my actor with the interactive objects rather than turning the camera. I first found out about this not before about 5-6 hours into the game when i repeatedly was unable to activate elevators once i had stepped into the elevator. I still first turn my actor left or right towards the button before i remember that i’m supposed to turn the camera instead.
This is even more a problem with vehicle controls where the relative direction of the vehicle towards the camera determines wether pushing up on the analog stick means going forward or backward. This has caused me accidentally drive off ledges to my death about 3 or 4 times already after about 10 hours playing the game and would not have happened if the camera’s orientation would have followed my vehicle’s orientation. Why the controls of the vehicle actually have to reverse is a completely different matter altogether, rest assured that this will come up again.
Looking at the camera from a technical perspective, Bioware didn’t do their homework either. The 3rd person camera frequently jerks and jumps when moving through tight corridors or doors and especially when walking on stairs or slopes. This jerky camera motion is so bad it even induced mild feelings of sickness in me at certain locations of the game. Something that only happened to me in two of the most early first person shooters: Wolfenstein 3D and Marathon.
The only other Xbox360 game i know that has similar technical problems with the camera is the mediocre (at best) Sonic The Hedgehog (full-price version, not the Live Arcade games). Mass Effects jerky camera motion really needs fixing, it’s that bad, even terribly so compared to most modern games!
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