Celebrate the best (worst) Tomb Raider game turning 20 this year by grabbing it for under £1
20 years ago this month, on a better timeline, Tomb Raider: The Angel of Darkness was released for PC and PlayStation 2, with the latter marking Lara Croft’s next-gen debut.
Avid Tomb Raider fans — including my then 13-year-old self — rushed out, bought it, played it, and loved it. We praised its willingness to break away from the formula established by the first five games in the series by including daring new features like skill levelling, non-hostile areas where you could gather information and stock up from vendor NPCs, a second playable character, and a plot you could actually follow, all without sacrificing any of the shooty-shooty-puzzle-solvey goodness we’d come to expect from the series.
Unfortunately, we dwell on this timeline, where what actually happened is that Tomb Raider developers Core Design were instructed at short notice to pull forward the release date for Tomb Raider: The Angel of Darkness from its planned 2003 Christmas period launch slot to June of that year, cutting off the last four or five months of the anticipated development period. The result was a game that was, in many ways, deserving of the descriptor “unplayable”.