When I learned to hate Lara Croft
OPINION
I must say that I was pretty enthusiastically playing Lara Croft: Anniversary for a few days since it was released and I even wrote a pretty praising review about it. And, the game really does still deserve that praise, or at least most of it does. However, there are a couple of very frustrating sequences in the game that may really take all the enjoyment out of the game and make you put the disk back into the game box and never take it out again.
This blog contains some spoilers, so if you haven't played the game and intend to do so, you are advised to progress at your own risk.
As everyone who's played the game know, the game is mostly about adventuring through various platformer-like arenas where you encounter different kinds of puzzles and occasionally shoot a couple of wolves or other such animals. However, at the end of most levels, you will meet with a bigger than usual challenge that will, unfortunately, move the game away from the puzzle-solving and towards some clickety-click festy action game.
Early on, one such example is the killing of the T-Rex. This is the first time you really need to take advantage of the adrenaline dodge and if you haven't taken the time to learn it, this encounter may be have to be repeated several times before you ace it. However, it is pretty easy once you get the hang of it (or at least it was so for me). But the second most annoying action sequence comes a lot later into the game - at the end of the Greece level, to be exact. Here, you will encounter two centaurs that keep shooting at you and trying to turn you into stone and there's simply no way for you to hurt them with any of your weapons. Of course, there's a trick to take them out, but there are no hints at all about what the trick is supposed to be in the game. So, you end up fighting the bastards and trying to dodge their fire and dying now and then and trying the same thing again for an eternity. And even when you've figured out the trick, it will take a long time for you to actually pass the ordeal.
So, why did the puzzle-solving oriented game suddenly turn out to be an action title? I have no idea. Ok, some may consider it a welcome change to all the exploring etc. that's taken place thus far. But, when the entire progress in the game is simply stopped until you either figure out what you are supposed to be doing (which is pretty impossible without any hints), or until you go online and check the walk-throughs, I'd say that the designers just lost their way as they designed this sequence.
Then there's the level that actually made me stop playing the game. And I don't think I'm going to even try this one again. Simply put, even after reading the walk-throughs and with the knowledge of what is supposed to be done, the simple frustration of endless tries makes we want to forget the whole game.
Ok, what's this dark and looming level, then, you ask? Well, it is the level known as the Great Pyramids, and more specifically the sequence called “Third Ledge” in the walk-through that I read. Here, you first have to shoot at a target to release two flying mutants. As they are released, the small ledge that you are on starts to move into a wall (dropping you into burning lava if you delay for too long). You are best advised to run left and right on the ledge, thus dodging the mutants' fire as they try to kill you. Of course, it is not as simple, since every time that they hit you, you collapse, get thrown around and usually off the very ledge and into the lava. Ok, reload onto the same ledge and try again. This time, you fail to dodge the first mutant immediately and fall into the lava again. And again. And again.
Once you have been lucky enough to defeat the mutants without getting killed, you have to shoot at a target again to make the ledge that you are standing on to extract again, as well as several poles and hooks on the walls around the hall. And you have 18 seconds to jump onto those poles, use your grappling hook and slide down various slides and jump again and again before all the poles and hooks etc. retract back inside the wall.
Ok, that calls for a click-fest. You simply have to be fast, fast, FAST when you go through those steps. Even if you take the shortcut advised in the walk-through, you must be fast. Ok, no problem, with enough practice, you can do almost anything. Just kill the mutants again every time if you happen to fall into lava and get returned to the last checkpoint (and get killed in the process until you are lucky enough not to fall into the lava again) and try the survival course again, and again, and again until you have perfected your clicking ability to the fullest.
But that's not really the problem, is it? No, the problem is that 99 % of your attempts end up frustrating you because 1) the mutants killed you again, 2) you missed one click at a crucial point, or 3) you clicked on the darn key but nothing happened. Perhaps you had a chance to try clicking that button AGAIN before Lara fell all the way into the lava and STILL nothing happened. OR, you used the grapple and tried to run along the wall and jump to the next ledge, only to find that Lara decided to jump AWAY from the wall and into the lava instead. This, because the camera angle was just incorrect enough for the game to decide that you were pressing that 'left' button with the full intent of jumping away from the wall, rather than alongside it (you naturally press that 'left' button already to swing on the grapple line, so this eventuality is more than likely, at least when you are playing on a keyboard).
After having spent more than an hour of my life getting frustrated with the said spot, I'm officially giving up on this game. No helping it. When an otherwise entertaining platformer turns into a masochistic repetitive experience, there's something that the developers did wrong. After all, I was playing on the easiest setting here!
You can imagine my feelings when I read that in Assassin's Creed, all the jumping is automatic. The challenge will not be in the clickety-click fest in that one at least!