Still replaying Tomb Raider II. I think my ranking is I > III > II.
Beat Underworld ten years ago, rated it a 2/5, before I ever played anything older than Legend. Just installed it again. I have so many problems with the gameplay.
Why bring the camera over the shoulder when she shoots if it's an auto-aim shooter? For what possible reason? Why does L2 have to pull out the gun if you can already shoot by pressing R2 by itself? It means that you can't do backflips, cartwheels and the forward flip that Link sometimes does in Majora's Mask without the camera zoomed in and the guns drawn.
That's the generation of consoles in which magnetic ledges replaced real platforming, meaning running and jumping. Well, not ledges, but I'll say ledges because I can't think of the word right now. The linear, sticky "ledges" are all over the place. Climbing, climbing, climbing, everywhere.
She moves so spastically as her system interacts with all the ledges and narrow beams for the player, and it's all done without a grab button to make it easier. You can't even run off a ledge because she will automatically drop down and grab it. When you try to run off a ledge that is not interactive, she will simply stop.
When you do get to jump to another platform from a run rather than a climb, that too is auto-steered.
More context-sensitive maneuvers with the grapple hook.
Motorcycle has auto-steering too.
What a crappy, crappy generation.
"I don't know what L2 and R2 means," someone who gets it responded, "but I agree that the LAU trilogy is pure decline when it comes to controlling Lara and exploring the levels. Underworld is still better than Legend, the locations are great and it has some decent puzzles. But yes, the entire trilogy has severely downgraded platforming. Ledges are sticky, you can only grab whatever the devs assigned as grabbable, Lara gravitates towards the grabbable ledges when jumping, the platforming is a lot more guided by nudging her towards intended positions. There's also a lot more context sensitive maneuvers, like anything involving the grappling hook. Controls feel far less precise than in the original games because of that.
"That era of gaming cemented modern decline features. It never recovered, at least in the AAA space. Game design has followed those same lines since the mid-late 00s and never looked back."