After a two-year absence Lara Croft is back in an all-new adventure for the Plasytation2, promising a vastly re-designed gaming experience, a darker and more mature storyline and beautiful next-generation visuals to really get gamers into a steam. Having played Tomb Raider: The Angel of Darkness at ECTS we had to ask the question as to whether two years has been enough??? <br /> <br /> Picking up the pad, we were both disillusioned and surprised to find that the game plays from what we’ve seen nearly identical to her previous outings. Emphasis on the stage we played was on pixel-perfect jumps, leaps of faith and the occasional slice of puzzle solving. Unfortunately, somewhere things have gone very, very wrong. <br /> <br /> For starters the game uses an unnecessarily complex control system that requires the use of both the analogue and d-pad to move Lara. Using the analogue stick to control her in a similar manner as you’d find in any other 3D game to give proper 360 degree movement, the d-pad gives identical controls to her previous outings i.e. back makes her step back, left and right rotate, whilst pressing forward inches her to the edge of a platform without the danger of falling of. However you can’t just settle for one method, instead you’ll find yourself inching to the edge of a platform with the d-pad and then having to switch over to the analogue stick in order to make a long jump as they can’t be performed on the d-pad. Similarly you can’t run on the d-pad so you’ve got to switch back onto the loose analogue controls for the main part. The result is lots and lots of frustrating moments, as you find yourself plummeting to your doom constantly. Combine this with a strange choice of camera angles, which mixes the traditional behind Lara cam with fixed perspective ones and you’ve got a game that makes all the other Tomb Raider games seem anything but frustrating. <br /> <br /> These moments also showed another of the games misgivings, the absolutely atrocious visuals. Whilst falling, Lara has no frames of animation; rather she falls down in a vertical standing position until she hits the floor in a crumpled mess. We were expecting this title to knock us out when it came to the visuals; unfortunately it’s not just the sub-standard animation that sticks out. The game suffers some big problems with anti-aliasing issues, resulting in a very jagged look that we thought was gone after the first wave of Playstation2 releases. Lara herself is supposedly made up of ten times as many polygons as those from her previous outing, however it’s hard to notice exactly where these have gone. A neat touch is in the use of lighting and shadows, with the latter all realistically casting on objects and characters in the game. Unfortunately the textures are also the subject of criticism, sporting low clarity, detail and variety, in motion it looks nothing like the first images that were issued to us when the game was first announced. We were left with the question as to whether these actually came from the PS2 version or were simply mock-ups!!! <br /> <br /> To be fair we only got to sample one small level, the series appears to be moving into a new direction with this title and we didn’t get to see anything of the storyline or other new elements that Core are promising. Lara didn’t have any weapons on this stage, which was supposed to highlight the emphasis on stealth but to be fair we didn’t come across enough confrontations with the guards to get a good feeling as to how this works. It would be wrong of us to dismiss the game at this stage, as fans of the original game we really want this game to be good, a return to the former glory, however at this stage it looks unlikely.