Tomb Raider VI: The Angel of Darkness

I went in knowing the reputation, and Angel of Darkness still managed to surprise me in both directions. The ambition on display here is real. Core Design set out to drag Lara Croft into a gritty, European noir, trading ancient temples and jungle ruins for the rain-slicked back streets of Paris and a labyrinthine plot involving a murderous Alchemist, a secret occult alliance, and Lara herself as a fugitive murder suspect. On paper, that is a genuinely compelling setup, and the story mostly earns its darker tone. Cinematic cutscenes, NPC dialogue choices that affect how you navigate early sections (bribery, threats, or polite questions all route you through locations differently), and a second playable character in Kurtis Trent give the game a scope that none of its predecessors attempted. Then you actually start playing. The controls are the central, load-bearing problem that nearly everything else collapses against. Lara responds with a half-second delay to almost every input, she clips on invisible geometry near walls, she misses ledge grabs on jumps you've timed correctly, and the camera spins erratically the moment combat starts and enemies surround you. The grip meter, a new mechanic governing how long Lara can hang from ledges, adds a layer of urgency that the controls cannot support reliably. A stealth mode lets Lara hug walls and peek around corners, which sounds interesting until you realise enemy AI is so poor you can practically walk into guards without triggering a response, making the whole system pointless. Combat defaults to auto-lock shooting, which works until it doesn't, and the hand-to-hand attacks tend to eat your health faster than the enemy you're punching. The bugs compound all of this. The Steam version is the original 2003 PC port, unpatched beyond what shipped at launch. Lara can fall through floors into unrendered geometry, sound effects loop on death, and certain scripted sequences have collision issues that can strand your progress entirely. This is not the sort of rough-edges-with-charm situation that endears older games to patient players. It is genuinely, frequently broken. The Metacritic PC score of 49 was not revisionism; critics called it at launch and the Steam community's 61 percent mixed verdict reflects two decades of players arriving hopeful and leaving frustrated. What keeps Angel of Darkness from being a complete write-off is atmosphere. The gothic Paris and Prague environments are cohesive and moody, Peter Connelly's orchestral score is legitimately excellent, and the RPG-lite NPC conversation system hints at what the game could have been if Eidos had not rushed it out to market. The story of a Lara who is cornered, uncertain, and genuinely dangerous is the most interesting character writing in the classic series. Hardcore series completionists and anyone drawn to deeply flawed games with obvious unrealised potential will find enough to hold their attention. Everyone else should know exactly what they are signing up for before they invest time in a port this unforgiving. Alex, Scout Team