Dobian

Odyssey is a terrific open world game with a ton of things to do and places to explore. It's also gorgeous to look at it. If you like eye candy, this is the game for you. Odyssey follows the trend these days to create a huge world and mash up many different gameplay elements into a single title. The Tomb Raider reboot did this, abandoning the mission-based format of the original series for a Far Cry-style open world combined with Uncharted-style gameplay. A lot of players don't like this, and I can understand this. Many still prefer a more classical approach to games that are more linear and focused. The Bioshock games do this, as well as Dishonored. And they do it for the most part extremely well. Likewise, a lot of players want a return of this series to the early Assassin's Creed games and not the direction that Origins and Odyssey have taken. It's a legitimate argument. I am rating this game like a standalone game, without any reference to early AC games. As a standalone game, I think it's great. It's not Witcher 3, to which it is often compared. I also played as Kassandra, and many have said that Kassandra makes for the better play-through than Alexios. I never felt like I was grinding in this game, which is a common complaint. To me, grinding is when all you do is run around killing things to make xp and get better gear. It's pretty much all you do in WoW, for example. I never did this in Odyssey. Yes, there are a lot of pointless fetch quests but you can skip them and still get levels doing other things. And there are a lot of hidden gems, quest chains with engaging stories in addition to the main story. Odyssey isn't a classic, but I give it a high score because of the fun factor, between the solid fight mechanics, the skill tree, ancient Greece history and lore, entertaining ship battles, the mercenary system, and a pretty interesting and well-voice acted lead character (again, I didn't play as Alexios but from what I saw of him in my game and on You Tube videos, he's not as good). There are a lot of reported bugs, but the game ran fine for me. For a game this size, you can always expect bugs until they get some major patches out. Overall I enjoyed this one a lot as both an action game and an rpg.

As a big fan of old school isometric party-based RPGs, I made it a point to play both Original Sin and Pillars of Eternity, each in their own way an homage to those games of old. Original Sin is a flawed gem that mixes many delightful moments with some extremely frustrating ones. The cliché story (based in part on the story of creation and Cain and Abel), works because of the spirited repartee between your two protagonists and the characters they encounter. The otherwise dark "world facing impending doom" tale is presented in an almost jaunty upbeat way thanks to the music and excellent dialogue, where humor abounds. That, combined with the interesting character building model, unique crafting system, and strategic turn-based combat makes Original Sin worthwhile despite some obvious shortcomings. Pros and cons to follow: Pros Character creation and development Music (great soundtrack, love the music in Cyseal especially) Spell classes and Skills Dialogue (for the most part - see Cons) Two player co-op Companion stories and quests Side quests (talking cats, talking wells, lovelorn ****'s all good) Crafting Main story (cheesy but serviceable) Tactical combat Impacts for your choices (character traits are great) Creative usage of environmental surfaces Bright colorful graphics befitting the high fantasy theme Cons Inventory management is tedious (no quest items tab, no way to sort items alphabetically) Way too many traps (tripping over mines and through poison fields everywhere you go gets tedious, and don't get me started on sentinels) Obtuse and sometimes overly long puzzles (Phantom Forest, cough) Rock Paper Scissors (a fun mini game at first, but gets old after the hundredth time, I chose to skip it) Small game world given the illusion of size via winding paths funneling you to the next set of enemies Balancing issues where you can breeze through one encounter then have to resort to cheese in the next (Braccus Rex, cough) That awful camera (not being able to look up made me feel like my character had a neck cramp) Too much exposition in dialogues at times (I don't need to hear for the tenth time the story of Braccus and his **** ZixZax, grrrr) Original Sin is far from perfect, but play it, it's a lot of fun and you won't be disappointed.

This game has been reviewed a zillion times so I’ll try not to repeat too much what has already been said, but Max Payne 3 has some big issues and one deal breaker that keeps me from recommending it. I’ll start with the good. Max Payne 3 looks great and has terrific physics and fight mechanics. The mission areas have a lot of variety and are extremely detailed, and there are some well-designed action sequences. Now for the not so good. The setting for the game, as many have said, does not fit with detective noir theme of the first two games. Gone is the graphic novel presentation, and the mean streets of New York have been replaced with sunny San Paolo. Max has gone from a creature of the night to a tanned, sunglass-wearing alcoholic. The very personal story that drove him in the first two games, the quest for revenge and answers for the murder of his wife and daughter, has been replaced by a far less compelling one where he is simply an outsider involved in someone else’s troubles. The plot surrounding the rich and politically powerful Brazilian family that hires him for bodyguard duty reminds me of a bad episode of CSI:Miami. In fact, I remember an old episode of CSI:Miami where they go to Brazil in a story surrounding Brazilian mobsters. Swap in David Caruso for Max Payne, and this is an episode of CSI:Miami. The characters in Max Payne 3 are all clichés, the dialogue is often bad, and there is no femme fatal like Mona in the first two games to press Max’s buttons. So what we are left with is Max moaning about his sad sack life while entangling himself in the affairs of people we don’t really care about. This is emphasized even more when Max shaves his head to go undercover and spends the second half of the game looking like Walter White from Breaking Bad. The only time Max Payne 3 harkened back to the classic first two games was in the two flashback chapters where Max is back in New Jersey. If only this whole game had taken place in New Jersey. I also missed the humor from the first two games, like when a couple of cops are sitting on a couch at the precinct watching an episode of ‘Lords and Ladies’, and complaining when Max blocks their view. When Max flips on a tv in Max Payne 3, all you get are CNN-like reports. The spirit of the original games just seems to be missing altogether in this one. One of the big complaints about Max Payne 3 is with the excessive cutscenes, and it’s a valid one. I enjoy watching a good cutscene, but Max Payne 3 goes overboard to where it’s more an interactive movie than a game at times. Cutscenes at the beginning and end of a mission are fine, but when they are spread all through the mission it becomes a distraction and ruins immersion. It is no exaggeration that every time you walk through a doorway the game goes to a cutscene. There was absolutely no need for this. There was one time early in the game where Max is hurt and staggering behind his companion. The game would alternate between you controlling Max and the game moving Max along for you. Again, immersion-breaking as you feel like you are fighting the game for control of the character you are playing. With all that said, Max Payne 3 was disappointing to me but still a very good third person action shooter, and I really enjoyed a lot of the fight scenes. The problem I had with the action was that toward the end of the game they kept ramping things up to where it just became unbelievable. There are times when Max is single-handedly fighting what seems like a whole army. I’m not complaining from a difficulty standpoint, I obviously got through it. But the first two games did a good job of scaling the action to the story, so it kept things reasonably believable. Max Payne 3 goes so over-the-top in the late going that it again wrecks immersion by turning it into an insane action flick. The finale feels like something out of Just Cause. The deal-breaker for me, though, is the game’s save system. Rockstar, in their infinite wisdom, allows a single auto save with no backup. The game doesn’t even sync up with Steam Cloud. So if that save becomes corrupted, you are just out of luck. I loaded where I left off at the beginning of chapter six one day and found myself in the helicopter scene early in chapter 3. And the chapters four and five that I had unlocked were now locked. I looked it up online and found that this problem has been pervasive since the game came out four years ago, and Rockstar never addressed it. So I considered myself lucky since some people had whole games wiped out when they were in chapter 10, replayed from where I was and continued on. But I started manually backing up my game profile every time I exited the game. That is something you should never have to do because you can’t trust a game’s save system. For all its other flaws, this one is unforgivable and the main reason I have to give Max Payne 3 a thumbs down.

Way back in 1998 I bought this game called Rainbow Six at CostCo. It looked pretty cool, but when I loaded it up the first time I was blown away. The ability to plan missions and manage a team, set waypoints and go codes and rules of engagement. I was in heaven, and spent hours drawing up the perfect plan to rescue a hostage or diffuse a bomb. I would go on to play Rogue Spear and Raven Shield and the series just got better. Then it started to go downhill, with future iterations like Lockdown lacking the depth and quality of their predecessors. So along comes Siege and on one level it not only meets but exceeds the game mechanics of previous Rainbow Six titles in a big way. But on another level it falls way short, simply because UbiSoft's emphasis is on drawing in the multiplayer crowd (i.e., young console gamers). So there is no single player campaign, you have no bots to manage, no planning phase. There is minimal support for co-op. You can't control mission parameters like the time limit, number of enemies, map, mission type, number of rounds. You simply get a random map with a random mission type for whatever your chosen difficulty is. There is also no map editor so you must make do with the official maps provided. So on the whole, the game has very little content for gamers who are interested in the core RS experience established in games like Raven Shield and Rogue Spear. Rainbow Six has always had multiplayer pvp, but the heart of the series has always been tactical cooperative mission planning and execution. The gameplay itself is great. There are many large and well-designed maps. The graphics and animations are terrific. The shooting mechanics are fine, and the characters you can unlock have a lot of neat tricks they can do, from breaching charges to emp grenades. Using the destructible environments to create new sight lines or entrances is great fun. The drone is cool and very useful. The downside of the situation missions and terrorist hunts is they sometimes take the "waves of enemies" approach that is more CoD than tactical shooter. And the inclusion of suicide bombers in every mission that are more Jason Vorhees than a human enemy is kind of ridiculous. Still, the action is a lot of fun. Another negative for me is the whole cash-grab aspect of this game, with a rewards system that encourages multiplayer players to spend even more money on top of this game's already steep price tag of sixty bucks to get important upgrades quicker. And charging money for things like weapon skins that should have been opened up to the modding community like other games (e.g., Skyrim) do. Siege is a good game for what it is, but for me it's not a fully Rainbow Six game, it's more a game for the CoD crowd, just like the new Tomb Raiders are not fully Tomb Raider games, but are more for the Uncharted crowd. Without any real support for single player or co-op, the game ultimately lacks staying power since playing options will diminish as the online community shrinks over time. I expect Siege will end up on a dusty shelf or uninstalled on Steam for most players by the end of the year.

I finally got this game cheap on Steam after all these years. I had played the first two in the series and always wanted to finish the story of the nameless hero, but I had heard what a buggy mess Gothic 3 was. I played this on version 1.75.14 of the community patch. Even with the patch and playing on a modern computer, the game still lags. The good news is that when I wasn't hitting those lag spikes, the frame rate was mostly very smooth at high settings. The game was also pretty stable, it only crashed maybe five times the whole time I played, and always when I created a bunch of mayhem in a town. And this was in 120 hours of playing. There were some other noticeable bugs, though. On a couple of occasions, npc's somehow got ten feet in the air, or disappeared under the ground. When sneaking sometimes the camera would switch from my character to a nearby npc and I couldn't get it back. When standing on a boulder to shoot at animals attacking me, they sometimes clipped inside the boulder and actually bit me through the rock from below. And I had to spawn King Rhobar with a console command because he did not appear in his throne room. None of this made the game unplayable, but it's very noticeable after playing much more polished games like Skyrim. Gothic 3 differs from the first two in that it follows the open world model of Elder Scrolls. Personally, I prefer the narrative structure of the first two games to the sandbox approach. There is a story that slowly reveals itself as you travel across Myrtana, and you meet several old friends from the earlier games like Diego, Milten, Lares, Vatras, and Lester. The short of it is, the orcs rule Myrtana, the remaining free human settlements are in the mountains of Nordmar, and the Hashishin rule the desert in Varant. You have the freedom to choose who you want to side with: orcs, humans, Hashishin, nomads. Or you can just ally yourself with your old friend Xardas, who is squirreled away in a tower in the mountains. One thing I've always liked about the Gothic series, similar to Witcher, is that character and plot development is driven by actions and consequences over the abstract concept of good versus evil. That said, the weak narrative structure of Gothic 3 makes it hard to get really invested in the story. I literally only had one meaningful interaction with Xardas in my whole game that lasted all of two minutes. And the ending of the main story was completely underwhelming. No epic final boss battle, just perform a certain task and report back. The End. When you play a game for over a hundred hours, you expect something a little grander. The world of Gothic 3 is great. It's huge, and varied, and visually it still looks good nine years after its release. It's also very much alive, with wildlife that behaves like wildlife. They sleep, they hunt, they even leave you alone if you keep your distance or move past them quickly without loitering. Humans and orcs live their daily lives, eating, drinking, reveling. The game has tons of dialogue, and while the voice acting has been criticized, I enjoyed that pretty much everyone you meet in the game actually talks. Characters are believable as well. No black-and-white good or evil like in other games. The orcs are occupiers, but have a complex working relationship with the enslaved humans. They are for the most part noble and honorable. I even came to like them, though ultimately I betrayed them. Playing with auto balancing turned on in the community patch version made character development choices much more meaningful. With a limited number of learning points to spend, I made my guy a hunter/fighter with absolutely no magic abilities. He also was skilled as a thief and an alchemist, with a little bit of smithing. This made the game much more enjoyable from a role play aspect, and made it challenging throughout versus having some uber god character at the end. The combat itself was horrible, and I didn't even bother swinging my sword until I finally saved up for some paladin armor. My character's movement and reaction time in melee combat was so slow and clunky that taking on more than one enemy at a time was serious trouble. Even in the later levels, my master duel wield swordsman still had to resort to whittling enemies down with arrows before moving in with his swords. All-in-all, I had a lot of fun with Gothic 3, but the bugs, weak narrative, and combat keep it from being great.

Jimmy's Vendetta is pretty much what I expected, a lot of arcade-style missions on the city map. There are the usual types of missions...driving, stealing, shoot-em-ups, etc. They can sometimes be frustrating because of a timer that is placed on every single mission regardless of type, a feature that is also used in Joe's Adventures. For some missions I can understand why there would be a time limit, but for others it just makes no sense. I've just stolen a car, why do I need to get it back to the garage before time runs out? Fortunately, in most cases the amount of time you get is sufficient so you aren't killing yourself trying to get to the checkpoint and swearing up and down when you crash into a light pole a half a block away as time runs out. There really isn't much context for Jimmy himself. I know that on the Playstation there was a DLC that sets up his story and the reason for Vendetta, but the opening mission very quickly recaps it anyway. Basically, he was framed, got sent to prison, is now out, and wants his revenge. That's it. Jimmy is a man who stands for nothing and simply exists for the next job he can do for a price. I have no problem with that, it lets you enjoy the sandbox potential of Mafia 2 sans all the story and cutscenes of the main game. The problem is, this sandbox mode should have been included in the main game in the first place, like Free Ride and Free Ride Extreme were a part of the original Mafia. For that reason, I can only give this DLC an average score.

This game was a lot of fun. It may have just started as DLC using basically the same game world as Saints Row III, but who cares? If it ain't broke, don't fix it. Saints Row IV is a bit too wacky with the whole sci fi space invasion story, but the zaniness still makes me laugh. Watching my character blow up the town in some hologram of what looks like an episode of Leave it to Beaver is just the first of many hilarious moments. The action is as smooth and adrenaline-fueled as ever, amplified by your new superpowers. The problem is that these powers make the game too easy and also causes you to bypass certain gameplay elements that made Saints Row III such a blast. For example, I didn't bother to collect and upgrade cars in SR IV because of my super speed and ability to fly long distances, so why bother? Still a great time to be had, though, with plenty of jokes and sight gags, hysterical interactions between your character and the SR crew (Shaundi, Kinzie - who's a riot, Johnny Gat, etc.), a fun if ridiculous story, and of course, getting to blast tons of enemies and blow things apart in every way imaginable. And if you think the main plot is absurd, play the DLC How The Saints Saved Christmas, it doesn't get any loonier than that!

I have seen the movie many times (I even fired it up again the other day after playing this) and can say that Alien: Isolation almost perfectly captures the mood of that classic. So many of the details from the Nostromo are present on Sevastopol station, like the dipping birds, the cassette-playing boom boxes, the style of the rooms and bulkheads, the 70s era low tech look and feel to everything. You even get to visit the iconic alien derelict ship in the game via a flashback. Cool! But the most important thing it captures is the feeling of dread, the anticipation of death around every corner. The alien is terrifying, but you are most afraid when you don't even see it, just hear it stalking the halls or scuttling around in the air ducts. Alien: Isolation features a simple but suspenseful story, fleshed out by logs, radio communications, and a few direct interactions with other survivors on the station. The length and pacing of the game is excellent, there is never a dull moment. The manual save system that I was worried about is actually implemented very well, and I like how they incorporated the save stations into the game world so organically. Visually, the environments are wonderfully detailed, believably authentic, and sometimes spectacular. I was disappointed in the character animations, however, which looked more like something from five years ago, and the dialogue was not always synced up well with the mouth movements. I hope CA focuses on this more if they do a sequel. My only real criticism of the gameplay is with the last thirty minutes or so. Without giving anything away, after a certain significant event happens to your character, the gameplay suddenly changes from a stealth/survival game to a consoley/XBox linear action game with cut scenes and a final scene that is a god-awful quick time event. For a game built on the dynamic of completing your objectives while using your wits and limited resources to avoid detection by the alien and other human and android enemies, to end with you mashing keys when prompted was a real letdown. This game would have earned a 10/10 if it had a worthy finish that had you utilize the skills that got you through the first 97 percent of it.

Alice:Madness Returns is a terrific if flawed sequel to the original. As a narrative, it picks up the story where it left off in the first game and intelligently brings it to a conclusion. When it's over, you fully understand why Alice was driven to her madness in the first place, a reason much more sinister than simply that her family died in a fire years ago. The story is told wonderfully through excellent voice acting in recovered memories and in sequences cleverly done in cartoon cutouts. Alice also communicates with Cheshire Cat throughout the game in the game's 3D world. Visually, Alice is beautiful and a treat for the eyes. The game uses a wide color palette based on the theme of the area she is in, and the level design and art direction are excellent and sometimes spectacular. London itself is appropriately dark and gritty, all done in greyscale, making the Wonderland segments pop more colorfully than they probably really are. Character models are also appropriately cartoony and slightly twisted. The musical score effectively evokes the mood of the game, though it lacks the disturbing discord that the original's soundtrack evoked. The gameplay itself was mostly very enjoyable. The platforming was clever and challenging, and the combat (which there is a lot of) was very smooth (the "focus" or auto-targetting system works wonderfully if used correctly). The game also breaks things up nicely with various themed puzzles and even some sidescrolling mini games that were very fun. While a bit long for a platformer, Alice was nonetheless engaging all the way to the end. There were some negatives that marred the overall experience, some significant. The autosave feature is probably the biggest problem with the game. Since you can't manually save (like in the original Alice), you can only restart from the last checkpoint. The problem is, it is very easy to unwittingly transition out of an area when you still had another path you wanted to explore that might have lead to collectibles or an optional arena fight (to gain HP), and you can't go back since the game only stores one auto save (it does allow you to revisit major checkpoints after you complete a chapter, but you would have to go back and replay several areas to get back to where you want to be). Some of the auto saves are well-placed, but not all, forcing you to redo a jumping sequence for example before you can get back to the mini boss who just beat you. The auto save feature really rears its ugly head in the final boss fight, as it saves at two points during the fight. This sounds convenient on the surface, not having to start the whole long fight over from the beginning if you die. The problem is, you could in theory be down to your last bit of health when it auto saves for the next part of the fight, so now if you die you will always restart from that point at near-death, you can't go back to the begnning. They needed to include two or three auto save slots in the game to avoid this game-breaking scenario. Another issue with the game is the repetitive combat. Too many times in the game must you fight the menacing ruin, for example, which appears in various combinations with other enemies. There are many times in the game where you will run into one and say, "didn't I just beat this guy?" A similar experience happens near the end of chapter 2, where you defeat a mini boss called the drowned sailor, only to meet another one on the other side ****, then have to go inside three separate buildings to beat three more of them. This kind of gratuitous combat served to needlessly drag out the game and produce too many moments of "Oh, not again." The bottle collecting in the game is rendered almost pointless because in order to unlock what I believe is additional concept art, you have to collect every bottle in each chapter. Unfortunately, I was always a couple of bottles short of the dozen or so I needed to find. It would have been nice if they unlocked "some" of the content based on what you found, instead of making it all or nothing. Lastly, I found the jumping mechanics to be a little off, making some of the jumping sequences needlessly frustrating. Mainly, Alice would many times drop like a rock on the third jump in a three-jump sequence no matter how dextrously I hit the jump key, and this also happened a lot when hitting the jump key as she was hitting the apex of an air plume or off a jumping mushroom. They needed to fine-tune this, the jumping mechanics should have been much smoother and more forgiving. Overall, though, Alice is a fine sequel and is a must-play if you wre a fan of the original. Even if you aren't, it is a solid platformer and a very unique and original experience.

I find it interesting that people either love or hate this game, and even the reviews of the reviews are mostly split down the middle. I loved this game, and I have have been playing Tomb Raider since the first one in 1996. I still remember when you would walk into EB Games or CompUSA and see Tomb Raider boxes lining the walls. Anyway, I know the argument that this is not like a traditional Tomb Raider game where you start a mission right at the tomb entrance and spend the next few hours trying to solve a bunch of puzzles and perform death-defying acrobatics to get through it. I think Crystal Dynamics proved they could make that kind of Tomb Raider game and did it exceptionally well with Legend/Anniversary/Underworld. They also showed they could make an excellent platformer with Lara Croft and the Guardian of the Light. So next they took on the challenge of rebooting the series for the next generation and I think they succeeded. They could have easily just made another Tomb Raider in the mold of the previous titles, but then I imagine they would have been accused of being unoriginal and just producing more of the same. So they took a chance to make a different kind of game, and when you do that you are going to get beat up a little too, but I think the reward is worth it. The Tomb Raider reboot screams quality, everything from the graphics to the cinematics, the action, game mechanics, story, map design, combat, interface, and the number of things you can do in the game. It kept me engaged the whole time, and I really was invested in Lara and her growth as a character. Yes, it does feel like you are in a movie at times, but in a good way, and I did not mind the QTEs for the most part, I thought they generally flowed very well. At its best, Tomb Raider is spectacular and exhilarating. Gameplay was mostly very enjoyable. I liked the addition of the axe climbing and attaching rope lines with your arrows. I didn't miss the wall running (there were times I hated it in Anniversary), but I was disappointed that they removed pole swinging, a staple of past Tomb Raiders (there are times when she swings on a pole to the next ledge, but its automatic). For the first time in a Tomb Raider, there is fun combat where you actually have to aim and shoot. My only issue is that they overdid it at times, and made it feel like you were playing Call of Duty more than Tomb Raider. The scene that immediately comes is in Shanty Town, where Lara is on a platform with waves of spawning enemies coming at her. It felt completely out of place for a Tomb Raider game. It would have been much better if they had placed enemies throughout the map to give you the option of engaging them or stealthing past them, which fits more with the kind of character that Lara is. As for the tombs, yes, they are simple one room affairs. Most are pretty clever, though, and no one is making you press the survival instinct key to get a hint. Now that Lara's back story has been told, I am hoping that in her next adventure the emphasis will again be on the actual tomb raiding, and we will see longer and more elaborate tombs for her to explore and solve. The maps in the game are full of clever touches, and while I have finished 90% of the game, there are still a few places that I am trying to figure out how to get to. I thoroughly enjoyed Tomb Raider, and look forward to the next one.

Anniversary is the middle chapter of Crystal Dynamics' trilogy that began with Legend and concluded with Underworld. It's a faithful re-imagining of the original Tomb Raider from 1996, while deftly tying it into the story of the other two games that take place in the present (it's still 1996 in this remake). Anniversary is visually beautifiul and the puzzles are incredibly elaborate and complex. Lara travels the globe to places like Peru, Greece, and Egypt, while you solve the mysteries of some of the most enormous and intricately designed tombs ever in a Tomb Raider game. The story is a rehash of the original, with Lara hired by the mysterious Natla Corporation to find an artifact. What's good about it is the way they tied this into the back story about Lara's mother. The only knock I can give is that on the pc there is a well-known bug in one of the Egypt levels that prevents you from making a simple jump to a ledge so you can exit the level. I had to download a cheat to let me move Lara past that point. Then there is the infamous "pyramid tower of terror" segment near the end which had me smashing my mouse and keyboard in frustration. Even watching You Tube videos and knowing exactly what to do, it still took dumb luck on one of the jump sequences to make it after about a hundred tries. The problem is that they made grapple wall running/jumping to the next handhold very unforgiving, and you are constantly fighting the camera angles and the controls to get Lara to do what you want her to do. It's hard enough to get enough momentum, jump from the right height and the exact right moment so you can barely reach the ledge, but then to have Lara jump back instead of to the side, or to the side instead of back, because according to the camera angle that's what the game thinks you want her to do...that can be maddening. Despite late game bugs/control issues, Anniversary is still a great game and very satisfying to finish.

Underworld is the last chapter of Crystal Dynamics' trilogy that began with Legend and continued through Anniversary. As a whole, I thought they did an excellent job of capturing the spirit of the original Tomb Raider while significantly improving the graphics, gameplay mechanics, interface, and player control of Lara. Underworld improves on Anniversary visually with more natural textures, reflections, and light/shadow effects. The Thailand segment of the game in particular is gorgeous. It also adds some terrific new gameplay mechanics like chimney climbing, walking on and vaulting from the top of poles, and rock climbing. It also made good use of the motorcycle in a couple of the later missions. Where Underworld falls short of Anniversary a little bit is that the puzzles on the whole aren't as intricate or elaborate. Anniversary really set the bar high with some of the most ambitiously designed puzzles I have ever seen in a game. But Underworld is still a fun challenge nevertheless. I also, as amazed as I am to say this, miss a real boss battle in Underworld. Boss fights in Tomb Raider have never been that impressive and success is always based on your figuring out the pattern to beat it. Still, having those occasional showdowns do provide a sense of closure to the bigger chapters of the game. The ending itself felt rushed, and I was surprised after completing the final puzzle (which was a fun and visually impressive scene), it went straight into cut scenes and then the game was over. Underworld would have benefited greatly from one final showdown between Lara and Natla to bring the trilogy to an epic conclusion. (she is there during the last puzzle, but merely as a distraction while you focus on completing it) The ending does wrap up the story about what happened to Lara's mother, but it doesn't feel satisfying the way it could have. Underworld is still a must-play for any Tomb Raider fan, it is entertaining throughout.