The link: http://www.gamespot.com/pc/adventure/tombraider10thanniversaryedition/review.html?sid=6172223
I put a lot of faith in GameSpot's reviews. If they give a game an 8+, it's worth playing. For some reason, we're out of sync with Tomb Raider: Anniversary. One of their pros for the game really sticks out for me: “Acrobatic action adventure gameplay is challenging without being frustrating.”
Really?
Early on, I'd have to agree with them. For a while the game is very playable, and nothing too insanely hard comes along. Later in the game, though, the above quote is as inapplicable as it can possibly be. Perhaps I stayed up too late and tried to make things happen on sluggish reflexes, but there is a sequence of checkpoints late in the game that set new standards for frustration and reloading. In “The Great Pyramid” there is a section in which you have to ascend up a vertical shaft. You're attacked by flying monsters and have to complete various timed acrobatic sequences, and I found it totally unplayable. I must have died and reloaded a hundred times getting through four checkpoints. Literally, no joke, a hundred times. If that's not “frustrating” I don't know what is.
The problem with that sequence is that it really accented two of the major weaknesses of the game. One is the way the camera is used as a club. The other is the rather lackluster combat system.
I've played a lot of Prince of Persia, and it's definitely not without its own frustrations. That said, I still really enjoyed the Prince of Persia series, much moreso than Tomb Raider. Both games have very interesting, imaginative settings and levels and excellent graphics. In many respects the graphics in Tomb Raider are superior to those of Prince of Persia, but at the end of the day games like these are about playability and control, and this is where Tomb Raider really suffers.
The camera system is incredibly frustrating. Like PoP, TR requires you to take a certain amount of control over your own third person camera. Unlike PoP, which always orients the controls to the Prince, TR seems to base the direction Lara moves on the position of the camera. The exact details are fuzzy, but I ran into countless problems with TR that never cropped up in PoP. Wall running in TR is the biggest example of this. When hanging by a grapple line, Lara can run along a wall, penduluming back and forth. When she releases the grapple she jump directly away from the wall, or can keep running along it. Which of these she does depends on the direction the controller is pointed as well as the location of the camera. Since Lara is swinging back and forth, the camera is swinging with her, changing it's position relative to her, and thus the effect of a given controller input. No matter how many times I suffered through this situation, I never was able to consistently assure that she'd jump out, or keep going as I'd want her to. When you just finally got through a tough set of obstacles, only to lose your progress to this ridiculous issue, it gets very, very tiresome.
I'm not certain that my understanding of the control dynamics of these two games is totally accurate, but I do feel that the system used in TR is flawed and clearly inferior to that of PoP. In PoP, when I jumped the wrong way it was because I was too slow, too fast, or too frazzled, and I knew I was off. In TR I routinely found myself giving exactly the input that seemed correct, exactly when seemed correct, and not getting a consistent or understandable result. Thats VERY frustrating.
The other big issue is combat. While the “adrenaline dodge” system is a nice touch and can be very fun to pull off, it's very derivative of PoP's quick kill system, not as refined, and it's the only wrinkle in the entire system. PoP fighting is full of combos, special moves, environmental tricks and other elements that add flair, fun and tactical elaboration to combat. By comparison, TR is just “lock on and mash the shoot button.” And, of course, the camera problems. Just as the camera frustrates the acrobatic section of the game, it also makes locking onto monsters a pain Get too close to a wall, and the camera will refuse to move to allow you to see a monster. Flying monsters overhead are virtually impossible to get a lock on at times, especially when they're dropping fireballs on you. The end result is looking at a monster that's trying to kill you, frantically mashing the lock on button, and wondering what the hell you have to do to get Lara to listen.
There's certainly a lot to admire about Tomb Raider: Anniversary, but unfortunately it's all the secondary stuff that doesn't really make the game. The level design is creative and pretty to look at, but at any given moment you're usually focused a very small area of it, struggling to get Lara to do what you want her to. The graphics are very nice with HDR lighting, motion blur, and some very nicely rendered cutscenes. The animators managed to squeeze some real emotion out of Lara's face, and made her pretty, likeable and alive. The interactive cutscenes are a nice touch. It's also very fun to look at the side by side shots of the original Tomb Raider next to the new game (which is based on the levels of the first game).
Tomb Raider invented the third person action genre ten years ago, but it's since lost the lead to other more competent games.