Game  Platform  Rating Tomb Raider 3 Playstation 7/10

    Tomb Raider 3 is the third installment (obviously) in the Tomb Raider series, staring the well-endowed Indiana Jones-type woman names "Lara Croft". In this adventure, Lara must face cannibals, infiltrate Area 51, explore hidden pirate caves, and do a whole host of other exotic things. She's searching for 4 ancient artifacts, but it's a little unclear as to what they do or where they come from; but that really doesn't matter, since she's just getting paid to find them.

    While a 7 out of 10 isn't bad, it isn't good when you look at the big picture; I gave the original Tomb Raider and 8, and the second a 9, so I didn't feel this new adventure was up to the call. While the game is fun, and they've added quite a few new features, they really missed out of the flow side; I felt very compelled to complete the first two adventures, but in this one, I'm not even sure if I will, and I certainly don't feel the same sort of spirit while doing it. Let me give you four of the biggest problems that this incarnation has... First off, there are quite a few 'death traps', ie, things that you can't realistically complete the first time you encounter it. While not a wholly bad thing to use in sparingly throughout the game, they instead use it quite often, and at unexpected areas, with very little time to actually realize just what's happening. Next, there are several areas the require you to do the same thing over and over and over, to backtrack, etc; this is a VERY bad crutch usually associated to poor level design. The strange thing is that the level design isn't that bad, they just put a couple of items in the wrong place, to drag out the time you spend on the level - lame. Third, while the lighting is very cool, the overall lighting in the game is way too dark. There are many instances where I didn't find something, or died simply because I couldn't see anything; and since flares are a relatively scarce commodity at the start of the game, you aren't exactly jumping for joy when you need to use one. Finally, and this is the biggest for me, they totally blew it with the save game option. Either set it up like it was in the original Tomb Raider, where you can only save where a crystal is, or set it up like the PC where you can save wherever. The hybrid approach is terrible! I'm sure there were alot of complaints about the original scheme in Tomb Raider, but the bottom line is it increased your stress level not only when you hadn't saved in a long time, but when you saw a save because you knew something bad was about to happen. In TR3, saves appear to be relatively random, sometimes appearing in a place you should save, sometimes in a secret, sometimes just out in the middle of nowhere. This is perhaps the biggest failing of TR3, although in conjunction with the backtracking problem, it's almost fatal for the game. It was really hard for me to be objective and give this game a 7, since I had soo many bad feelings about the save problem; it really makes the whole experience not worth having. So unless you're a hardcore Tomb Raider fan (which I am or was, depending on what the next installment is like), I would just say rent this game, and you'll probably get about all of it that you need. You certainly won't complete it, but you probably won't want to either.