Tomb Raider: Underworld review by Tyson
Overall
Buy
While I found Tomb Raider: Underworld to be a bit unpolished it still provided an excellent tomb raiding adventure for me. This Tomb Raider game has quickly become one of my favorite released during the 2000s
Gameplay
The story in Tomb Raider: Underworld continues where Legend left off. Lara is still out looking for answers on what happened to her mother when she was a child. While finding out about her missing mother is the games major plot point it also has the stop the bad guy from activating an evil power to destroy the wold plot as well. I found myself enjoying the story and it served its purpose of helping to move you from stage to stage. What I found myself really enjoying about the game was the various set pieces for the different levels. Escaping from a sinking boat was a very short but enjoyable section of a level. Other areas like an underwater temple or some Norse themed underworld temple were neat set piece areas as well.
I have always enjoyed the way that Lara explores and interacts with the games environments. I have so much fun climbing up the side of an ancient ruin, or swinging from poles, or making death-defying leaps across large gaps. I also really liked how vast these environments feel. While they aren't as big as the earlier Tomb Raider games they are bigger then what was offered in Tomb Raider Legend. The games puzzles do feel better then previous Tomb Raider games as well. You will need to collect items throughout a level to activate a switch or some other puzzle element. Many puzzles are simply finding a way through the environment as well. The only downside though is the game can be a bit buggy with the environment at times. I had Lara get stuck in the environment for a few seconds several times as I played through the game. I also had a few times where Lara would fail to grab onto an object which led to my death from time to time too.
Thankfully the game has a decent autosave system. This helps remove a lot of frustration from dying. The game will pretty much autosave after any major puzzle, combat encounter, or after a major exploration segment. I did find it a bit weird how you could save the game at anytime but loading up my save would just reset me back to my last autosave point instead of the exact spot I saved the game.
The combat in Underworld is fun but also doesn't do much to improve it from previous Tomb Raider games. You still get a good selection of weapons like Lara's classic dual pistols, an assault rifle, a shotgun, and even a spear gun for underwater segments. Fighting enemies still boils down to the classic jumping around while shooting like a crazy person. Occasionally I did find myself needing to use a grenade or a melee kick to knock down an enemy. There is also this adrenaline head shot move you can activate every once in while that is pretty much an instant kill shot but I never found myself using it that much. Even using health packs wasn't a big deal for me since if I died I would be given full health once the game reloaded from the last autosave point. Thankfully the games combat never bothered me and it is a very small portion of the game.
Control
Tomb Raider: Underworld has a great control setup. You can remap the keyboard and mouse controls to fit your play style or even play the game using a gamepad connected to your pc. I found myself having no major issues playing the game with a keyboard and mouse.
Graphics
Using a pretty decent video card you can make Tomb Raider: Underworld look way more amazing than the console versions. A good video card will let you turn all the settings up and the character models and world environments look fantastic. The only issue though is a weaker video card might have frame rate issues. I also noticed that playing this game on Windows 10 would cause frame rate problems unless I enable Triple Buffering and V-Sync. I never had this frame rate issue when playing the game on Windows XP.
Sound
I enjoyed the audio portion of Underworld. I enjoyed each of the character's voices. The voice actress who did Lara Croft did an excellent job. The background music was well done too. The only downside I found was a few sound effects like the motorcycle sound effects could have been better.