Tomb Raider: Underworld

I finished this one up earlier today after a long session of co-op last night at a friend's. There's no co-op item in the menu, but that's basically what we did. I played and he was my navigator and second pair of eyes. He'd watch the walkthrough on YouTube if we got stuck and point me in the right direction. He said he didn't mind doing this since he'd played all the original games on PS1. It was good for me to get some historical perspective on the series, actually. I started with Legend, so I'm relatively new to the series. I was complaining about glitches and bad controls and he said with a smile, "that's all a part of the fun!"

I can't help but compare this game to the new Prince of Persia. Underworld gives you so many more moves and freedom of movement, but with that comes lots of problems. There were several times that I fell to my death because I was angled just a little bit wrong on a jump. PoP simplified and streamlined things so much that a failure of that sort almost never happened. You had a good two second window where you only needed to push a single button to pull off some crazy looking manuever. Assasin's Creed was forgiving in this sense too. You just pointed your character in the right direction and he figured it out. I'm not sure I prefer this "easy mode" but maybe a hybrid of the complex controls of Tomb Raider and the forgiving ones of those games could be just what I'm looking for.

There were a few times where I was so frustrated with this game that I almost quit. While each level is very visually unique, within a level it's easy to get lost. Every corridor looks the same. And when you're in an open area of ocean, it's very easy to get turned around in a 3D space. I read somewhere that the designers were trying to make this game with less hand holding and more of a "figure it out" sort of vibe. I think they succeeded. So much so that it was frustrating at times. My old standby, GameFaqs.com wasn't much help since it was all text-based, so I had to actually see it on YouTube.

So this one was interesting to see, it looked great, and for the most part pretty good. It can just get frustrating in the controls department. Another thing that surprised me was the title. I assumed it meant that the whole game took place underwater, which wasn't exactly the case. It was more of a reference to the Norse underworld. But whatever, that just means more jumping and less swimming.