Tomb Raider: The Angel of Darkness - the black sheep of the iconic series starring butt-kicking beauty Lara Croft - is by far the most controversial and overwhelmingly hated-on game of the bunch. It's the entry in the series that most long-time fans of the franchise look back on with at least some degree of disappointment. Indeed, it's the 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Tomb Raider game that so many people love to hate.
But that's old news, the fact is that the game is a total hot mess. We all know by now that the thing has godawful controls, enough bugs to fill th🐻e cast of another Bug's Life sequel, and enough plot holes to induce trypophobia in anyone.
So how about we focus on some of the other mꦦore in𝐆teresting aspects of this fascinating game? The things that made it great and unique, as well as some mysterious cut content. Let's swan-dive in.
A Unique Beauty
Starting witꦜh the obvious, can we just take a second to appreciate how stunning Lara is in this game? Well, she's stunning in all of her games (including low-poly 1996 Lara), and it's always great seeing what form her beauty will take in each new title. But there's just something about AoD Lara in particular that sets her apart.
Besides the fact that her character design itself is just beautiful, there's also her uniqueness that certainly contributes to it. Sure, she shares a voice actress with Chronicles' Lara - Jonell Elliott - but her character design༺ is the only one of its type to appear in the series.
Tomb Raider 1, 2, and 3 share a very similar Lara, and the fourth and fifth games have their own one. Tomb Raider Legend, Anniversary, and Underworld have slightly different Laras amongst them, but the🅺re are still enough similarities to group them together. Then of course, we have our most recent Lara who has stuck with us since 2013. Lara in AoD, on the other hand, stands apart. That separateness is fitting, considering the whole "fugitive on the run" premise of the game. It also certainly adds to her appeal.
The Visuals
Incredibly, when you look at the game now, it actually still looks really good, considering the game came out 17 years ago and all. Obviously, they're not perfect, and some of the NPCs' clayish-looking faces look like they've seen better days, but overall the game reallღy does have some attractive environ▨mental visuals.
The different levels are also really memorable in their diversity and uniqueness. Even after not picking the game up for at least a decade, I still held close those distinct memories of creeping through the Louvre, walking through the snowy streets of Prague, and fighting my way through that greenhouse and terrifying-at-the-time sanitari🐬um. And how intimidating was it being confronted by that massive, echoing chamber in the T🐓omb of the Ancients level?
At the very least, the game certainly left a lasting impression in its palpable ambition to be bigger and more unique than any Tomb Raider that came before. However, it's precisely this ambition which ended up condemnin🤡g the game to its tragic, unfinished fate. And that's a damn shame.
Secrets In The Shadows
AoD was the final game that the series' original developers - Core Design - would ever work on. Thanks to a complicated mixture of too much ambition, not enough time, and , AoD was pushed through the system way too quickly and published long before it w♐as originally intended to.
As a result, the final version of the game can hardly be called a "final" version at all. that what was released on June 20, 2003 was only half of what Coreꦛ Design had actually wanted to give us.
Thanks to the internet, we now know just how serious things got behind the scenes, as suggested by the sheer amount of cut content which has emerged since then. Such content includes inventory items that probably would have made a couple of significant gameplay differences like a cellphone and GPS, not to mention Lara's signature dual pistols. The latter appeared in , but for some reason✨ never landed a spot in the released game.
Missing Pieces
Perhaps the most interꦑesting pieces of the puzzle that went missing somew🍎here along the line are the deleted cutscenes. It turns out we were supposed to end up knowing far more about what the heck was going on than we did.
were apparently cut from the game. Two of which would have explained what happened to the brutish mercenary Gunderson, and would have revealed that Lara actually knew Karel the Ultim🀅ate Baddy from her past. Then there's a scene that would have told us how the hell Lara actually survived the Egypt incident, namely that she was "taken in" and healed by Putai - a North African shaman. Check it out below:
As part of his , Steve of Warr☂ mentions that the Eckhardt boss fight was apparently supposed 🎀to be completely different (and far cooler). Specifically, he was going to use some whacko powers to summon up "realities from Lara's past to try and kill her." Those would have included the Himalayan plane crash from her youth, a flashback to her rendezvous with those Peruvian dinosaurs from Tomb Raider 1, and her attempt to escape from the Great Pyramid at the end of The Last Revelation. How cool would that have been?
Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness is a game that, despite all the flakౠ, still deserves a moment of appreciation not only for what it could have been, but for what it is: immensely flawed and falli✅ng short of its immense original potential, but beautiful in many ways and still one of the most memorable Tomb Raiders to date.