This free-to-play mobile title has Lara automatically running forward, with the player controlling when she jumps, slides, wall-runs, and attacks enemies, all with basic touchscreen controls. In the first of the two original TR mobile games to be worthy of this list, Relic Run took the easy route and dropped Lara Croft into a forward-scrolling endless runner in the vein of Temple Run- they didn't even bother to change the name all that much. In the vast majority of cases, games from that era are best forgotten seldom remembered as worthwhile parts of a game franchise's legacy- there is a reason why almost nobody acknowledges the Java God of War or Castlevania games anymore. It's worth noting that the PC version of Chronicles included a level editor which brought a little bit of innovation to the otherwise stale package, but it required a pretty hefty time investment to learn, let alone actually make anything.įull disclosure: We left the trio of 2003 Java Tomb Raider mobile games off of this list. Chronicles only sold about 1.5 million copies, which for a Tomb Raider game during that time was akin to a Star Wars movie that doesn't gross nine figures at the box office. But by and large, the game just goes through the motions, recycling the same gameplay, environments, and puzzles that fans had done four times already. The premise of Chronicles is somewhat interesting, taking players through various events in Lara's past- she is presumed dead after the previous game- and offers an excuse to jump around to a variety of locales and setpieces that don't have to be connected in any logical way. By 2000, an engine created in 1996 was definitely beginning to show its age, to say the least. The last few TR games of the initial run weren't bad games, they just felt very "been there, done that." Core Design never had enough time to actually create a new engine for the series, and so they spent four years building new games from an existing engine. There's also something to be said for Lara's personality and attitude being much of what makes TR games enjoyable, and with both missing from Prophecy, there was just very little to keep people playing. Unfortunately, the bulk of the puzzles were of the "get to a closed door, find the switch for said door, then pull the switch and go through the door" variety, which gets old very quickly- especially when the action that takes place between switch-pulling is also equally unsatisfying. This simulated Lara moving around in 3D space about as well as the GBA was capable of, and gave Prophecy the opportunity to have more puzzles than a side-scroller would typically allow. Unlike the side-scrolling Curse of the Sword for Game Boy Color, Prophecy opted for a 3D-ish compromise by showing the action from an overhead, isometric viewpoint. While portable Tomb Raider games would soon be able to go full 3D like their TV- and PC monitor-based counterparts with the advent of Sony's PlayStation Portable, 2002 was still Game Boy Advance territory- and so Tomb Raider on-the-go had to be in two dimensions. Released the year before Angel of Darkness- during what remains the franchise's lowest point- Prophecy is an overall underwhelming game redeemed slightly by its hardware. But the worst offender was just an overall lack of polish, full of glitches and bugs common among games that are released before they are ready- and you couldn't patch console games in 2003 like you can now, so a buggy game stayed a buggy forever.Īngel of Darkness was such a failure that Core Design was taken off the franchise permanently, and the series was given a three year break to lick its wounds. Play control still felt stuck in the previous generation as compared to newer, better games like Prince of Persia: Sands of Time- especially evident in the dreadful stealth sections. The result was a disaster on almost all fronts, with only the story getting any real acclaim. Unfortunately, publisher Eidos wasn't willing to let a calendar year come and go without a Tomb Raider release, and rushed the team to get Angel of Darkness finished by Christmas 2003. Much of the problem was that the team had already done everything there was to do with the formula on the aging PlayStation hardware, and with the move to the PlayStation 2, it was the perfect opportunity to reinvigorate the franchise with a new, different type of Tomb Raider. After cranking out a whopping seven Tomb Raider games in just as many years, developer Core Design was just as burnt out on the franchise as the public was.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |