Tomb Raider : Angel of Darkness : Web Wombat : Games

Console port. The dirtiest of dirty curses in the mouth of a dedicated geek and, in general, a bane upon the mighty PC…Or something; In other words, most console ports are crap, okay? Let's leave it at that.

In certain cases, we see good transfers from lowly console systems, for instance GTA3 and its Miami-based-brother-in-arms Vice City.

Now those are what every port should aspire to be.

Unfortunately, Angel of Darkness for PC has failed almost totally to reach that goal, instead opting to be a cheap cop-out that deserves to be shunned without reservation.

For the first time in maybe three hundred and forty years, I have been stunned speechless by incompetence. There can be no other word for what I saw on my screen upon installing Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness for the PC. The worst part is it's a 21-inch screen.

Where to hide, where to hide, where to hide?!

OK, I'll stop with the meanness now, but really, there is something seriously flunked going on here. I won't bother with the general story and gameplay outline here, because you can check out my PS2 review of AoD if that's what you're after, yesirree.

Anyway, moving along…nothing works.

Speaking in both visual and practical terms, AoD for PC is not a happy unit. The menu doesn't display properly or even finish showing up, the screen goes black for no reason, not to mention that the frame-rate could be outrun by a twenty-cent piece dropped through a foot of wet concrete despite the fact that everything, no matter the resolution, is pixellated. [Sweet! - Ed]

Oh, and the subtitles are something akin to corrupted, with big blank squares showing up halfway through pieces of text, seemingly at random.

It's horrific, really, and looks like something from the bad old days of '96; before anybody says anything about either inadequate hardware or the porting process from PS2 to PC, let me assure you that neither excuse is valid.

Firstly, AoD was tried out on both a 1.3GHz Celeron with a GeForce 4 MX440 and an AMD Athlon +2200 with a Ti4200, all with the latest drivers etc. Both came up the same.

Looks good eh? That's coz it's a PS2 screenshot...

As for the whole idea of 'porting is difficult to do', well, if Konami can do it, and Rockstar can do it, why can't Core do it? What makes Core so special that it can't produce a properly coded port?

That provides a terribly unstable basis from which to work for any prospective gamer.

From the second you start the game up and navigate your way past the cluttered exterior setup screen, you have, to quote numerous Star Wars characters, 'a bad feeling about this'.

The first twenty minutes of gameplay are so utterly difficult to get to grips with that many people may just go out and buy a PS2 in an attempt to avoid the pain.

You'll get stuck trying to climb onto a dumpster, the game will crash at least twice before you hit the Paris rooftops, and trying to move to the menu will result in the screen fading to black and never returning. That's bad. Very bad.

Remember, this happened on two different computers. Two. If this was only one computer, then maybe all of this could be waved away as some kind of malicious software glitch, but no, this happened consecutively with totally different bits of hardware and still I get a game that is about as playable as billiards without a cue.

In the event you aren't fazed by these events (which means you must have access to about three tonnes of Prozac…gimmegimmegimme!), you'll quickly find that you are unable to change the control system, on account of the fact that the menu is totally screwed.

Usually, this wouldn't be such a problem on account of somebody without three point five hands sprouting from weird places setting up the default control scheme.

AoD, however, has a default setup that can cause the player the kind of grief generally reserved for when the repo men come to take away your shiny home theatre kit.

Interestingly, the sound hasn't suffered at all. Odd, that. Everything seems to sound pretty much hunky-dory, which I suppose is something of a relief if you've just spent five hundred dollars on a Sound Blaster Audigy Platinum or some such. So, at the end of this slightly under-worded review, what do we have?

Answer: A bad looking, almost unplayable, buggy mess of a port that personifies everything I hate about big business.

For that, I condemn the PC version of Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness to the deepest pit of Hell to hang in irons next to Space Channel 5 Part 2, where legions of Amiga fans past shall feast upon its condemned flesh for all eternity, their cries of 'Space Invaders forever' echoing infinitely through the fiery corridors of the Underworld.

Ain't life grand?

Game: Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness
System: PC
Players: 1
Online: No
Developer: Core Studios
Distributor: GameNation

Rating: 35%

(Ratings Key/Explantion)

Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness is on the shelves now.

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