SPOILERS
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SPOILERS
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Everywhere I look I see reviews for how great Tomb Raider: Underworld is. I have played this game, I was so excited to get it, and yet I felt so disappointed that I'm considering selling it. My absolute favorite x-box game was the prior installment in the Tomb Raider saga - Tomb Raider: Legend. This game had pacing, character, very cool environments, fun moves, awesome level design, engaging music that I WISH I could get on itunes, just enough hostiles to make the game feel like it wasn't holding out on the main draw of the action/adventure genre - ACTION! Underworld, on the other hand, relies almost completely on its new and admittedly cool environment generation that it pretty much sacrifices everything else. The two redeeming factors of this game are that the puzzles are harder and allow the player to go about solving them via a various number of routes. Unfortunately this is most visible only in the first level of the game in which the platforming options allow you to take one of several routes to reach your goal. After that it's pretty much copy and paste for the rest of the game - do you jump around to pull first the left lever all the way up on that remote ledge and then the right, or do vice-versa?

In terms of the fighting the enemies are so spread out that the encounters feel forced and contrived. "Laura's been jumping around for a while so.... lets throw in some random mercenaries!" or "They have spiders in Thailand right? Well, whose going to notice if those same exact spiders show up in snow covered mountains or in Laura's basement ?" I kid you not, you fight a total of about 8 different AI as follows: big "yeti", little "yeti", enormous tiger, enormous tiger painted black to be a panther, mercenaries, green giant iguana/"naga", red giant iguana/"naga", and sharks.
While in Legend the dialogue flows smoothly through a barrage of bullets, acrobatics and creative takes on old action/adventure environment classics (i.e. swinging and jumping through the heights of a sprawling city (usually in Japan or China), and the old, abandoned Buddhist/ martial arts monastery high in the snow covered mountains), in Underworld Laura's dialogue in presented as her "documenting" her findings while she uses a video camera to record her surroundings. Throughout all levels there is little to no in-game communication between Laura and her posse. This is odd since in Legend we are entertained and sometimes helped in all levels by Zip and Alister who communicate via Laura's headset. Having this back and forth helped provide dialogue, move the story along and strengthen inter-character relationships, not to mention the secondary characters' personalities which, without this dialogue, appear as ancillary and largely uninvolved. In Underworld we have to take Laura’s word that Zip and Alister are helping her and are worried about her obsession. It would be like having Batman present Lucius Fox with the machine that uses all cell phones in Gotham to project a sonar grid, telling Lucius that he can communicate to him out in the field and help him find the Joker, and then never hearing or seeing Lucius again until the scene in which he self-destructs the display. SERIOUS INCONSISTENCY HERE!

Speaking of inconsistencies, at the end of Legend Laura is in possession of Excalibur, in all it's kick-ass glory, which she has just used to defeat Amanda. The game ends showing her telling Skip and Alister that it's not over. She and Amanda are officially enemies since her ex-colleague was the cause for the disappearance of Laura's mother (which is shown in the intro). Laura is now determined to find Avalon and prove to herself that her father was right about her mother not being dead. Then Underworld picks up. The first warning light is that there is no mention of Excalibur at all. Who has a weapon like that and trades it in for a pistol that needs a million shots to take down a mercenary? "Okay", I tell myself, "maybe they are going to do some gameplay taking place in the past like in Legend and explain what happened to it." Nope. There is never any explanation. It’s just dropped. The second warning light is that Laura is, within the first level, introduced as being on a completely different mission of discovery involving Thor's hammer this time. The leap of logic here is really hard to grasp. If there are many portals to Avalon all over the world, each of them using the same type of sword (as explained in Legend), why is Laura all hopped up on jumping through hoops to find and assemble the pieces to a new super weapon which requires a completely different kind of gate in order to get to Avalon? Again, I tell myself that it's only the first level, and there is sure to me some explanation right? Again, nothing of the sort is offered save for the fact that her father though Valhalla and Avalon were the same thing and that’s good enough for Laura to go globetrotting. The final warning alarm appears near the end of the first level in which Natla makes a sudden and completely out of nowhere appearance. Apparently she's been in cahoots with Amanda all this time and is using her to get closer to Avalon for some reason. Laura, amazingly, seems to not be very surprised at all and basically says, "That explains everything. It all makes sense now!" Um, no it doesn't. When a game begins recycling characters from its previous attempts at resuscitating the franchise then it's time to just call it quits and go back to the fanfiction.

At this point I saved, exited the game and took to the internet. Apparently Tomb Raider: Anniversary set what was supposed to be a trilogy in motion with Natla and Laura fighting over the initiation of the seventh age or whatever. The idea to make all three games interconnected must have occurred well into the final stages of Legend at which point rewriting the story would not have been an option. On the release of Anniversary it was presented as a rehash of the previous games so that the new developer could rekindle the interest of the public in a series which had, over the years, followed Sonic and Final Fantasy into the dank dungeon of piss poor story and crappy character development. It had its flaws, but did fairly well. However, most gamers who had been around during the first round of Tomb Raider (including me, who used to watch my dad play) didn’t necessarily think that a rework of previous games was something worth buying for about the same reason that some people don’t like what Lucas did to Star Wars 4-6 and what Spielberg did to E.T. Now, it is important to note that not only was Legend touted as the beginning of a new adventure for Laura, but there was nothing save for Natla's company logo on some of the boxes in Legend that would indicate any continuing connection between Anniversary and Legend. And yet these games are supposed to lead into one another? I mean, it's like the teams were at separate poles of the earth while one worked on the moon and none of them even bothered with a phone call of an e-mail. Anniversary, Legend and Underworld are on completely different plot lines here. Without playing Anniversary all the information you need to know in order to jump into the story of Legend is presented in a succinct intro video in which Laura is traumatized for life and begins her long suppressed desire to know what really happened to her mother. From there the story builds on itself in pleasant bite size pieces like candied chestnuts – savory and chewy but ultimately leaving you with a desire for another one guaranteed to be just as satisfying. With the release of Underworld someone coming off of their Legend high expects to be sucked into a story that smoothly picks up where the previous cliff-hanger left off. Instead it’s like reaching for a chestnut and getting a chocolate covered cherry that’s green and fuzzy. While it still has it’s Tomb Raider chocolate covering the substance of the item is cultivating a colony of things that are unpalatable and will most likely put off your appetite.

I know I'm nit picking on this next point but what the hell. Maybe I'm just old fashioned but only offering two types of weapons that are pre-equipped at the beginning of each level and not interchangeable during game play? Come on! Once the secondary weapon is out of ammo that's it. You still have unlimited ammo for the pistols, but the option of finding or picking up other guns or even more ammo for your shotgun, harpoon gun or whatever your pick is not offered. That, among other things, was a major hindrance in the flow of the game. The developers touted the game as offering more interaction with the environment, but when Laura takes down an enemy who was using the same gun as her she doesn't bother turning him over for equipment?

Frankly it makes far more sense to think of Legend as a sadly incomplete Elsewhere story and simply play Anniversary and Underworld back to back. Tomb Raider: Underworld, which seemed so shinny and cool, tragically fell prey to poor level design, character presentation, and a plot that was written as though it had too many writers all doing their own thing. Keep Legend close to your heart as an example of what a good game is (albeit one in need of a sequel). Keep the environment rendering of Underworld as a resource for future games, but throw the rest in the bin next to Greg Hastings' Tournament Paintball MAX'D and Turok: Evolution.

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