Indiana Jones and the Emperors Tomb Review (PS2) By LeonardQuirm

Review

6 / 10
06 Nov 2004 at 17:47

Indiana Jones. The original tomb raider.

Lara Croft, heroine of the Tomb Raider games and movies, took the idea of the Indy movies, changed the American doctor into a female British aristoract and set the entire thing in the modern day. This game now takes back from Tomb Raider what was originally theirs, and returns the whip-weilding hero.

After returning from a quest to get an ancient artifact (the first chapter of the game), Indy, in a good likeness to Harrison Ford, is approached with the request that he retrieves a treasure called "The Heart of the Dragon". Of course, this requires travelling over the world, evading and defeating Nazis and negotiating ridiculous traps. Fighting ghosts and entering the Underworld are given prerequisites.

So what's the game like? Well, the tombs and locations are designed solidly, with some ingenious traps, and a good variety of surroundings. Ingame graphics are pretty good, although cutscenes are rather disappointing. The gameplay is thought out well, with nice touches, such as the possibility that Indy will get his hat knocked off in a fight - and the ability to pick it up again.

However, it's all a bit limited. While fisticufting the bad guys, chucking them into tables (which breaks them) and picking up a leg from the table to hit them with, using your whip to pull them in and then laying them out with a solid punch, or pushing an enemy over a cliff edge can be very entertaining, you soon discover pretty much all that you can do. The surroundings will never give you real logic trouble - you may sometimes be stuck looking for a post to swing your whip on, but the actual puzzles are easy enough. And the game can become very annoying in the more difficult places - especially a ridiculous level later on where you have to run ahead of a tank (driven by a mad Nazi commander) down a narrow passageway, seeing it from the viewpoint of the maniac. A slight misjudgement and it's down a pit or under the tank.

The boss battles are varied, but mostly pretty easy - with one exception which goes to the other end of the spectrum, and this isn't the last one. Otherwise, the game provides a reasonable learning curve, although the latter stages can feel quite simple.

There are three difficulty modes, providing a little replay value, with Hard made considerably more challenging by the removal of symbols that appeared in the easier modes (which tell you of various possible interactions, such as whip swing positions). Also, there is a secondary objective of trying to get all the bonus treasures in the game - three in each of the ten chapters - but all this unlocks is a picture gallery.

All in all, "Indiana Jones and the Emperor's Tomb" is an entertaining game, but can become repetitive; especially if you can never quite manage a jump off a whip swing and continually plummet to your doom. It's great to have the whip, rather than just Lara's guns, and the game does manage to capture a little of the class that made the movies so great. But, in truth, there are better ways to spend your money - such as on the actual trilogy.

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