On the other hand – small levels with ’studio’ feel to it. Some really terribly looking models and textures – especially in cut-scenes IIRC. Heavy console feel to it.

Parkour-ish, linear, boring levels without exploration. Antagonists look like they dropped from US silicon porn film. And ‘hilarious’ motorcycle chase parts (or rather utterly awful).

And last but not least – one dog is more dangerous enemy than group of blokes armed with assault rifles and submachine guns? Really funny (really :).

Oh, and it is also quite short too (which can be plus for somebody, though).

And, sadly, mediocre entertainment for me – not bad, but not something I would be looking forward to play either.

My wish for TR series – less human enemies (way less) and more areas to explore – I don’t want to play Tomb Raider – Hitman Chronicles. NO parkour, which I sincerely hate.

All in all, my end mark would be something around 3/5. Nice and shiny, without deeper substance = shallow entertainment.

What? The controls are fully changeable in the options, and you can quit the game on the pause menu. Also, the cutscenes in the tutorial can be skipped with the look key, although the same can’t be said of the later ones (and it’s an irritating step backwards from the earlier games). Though I’ve never been too fond of Last Revelation anyway (it has the most attempts at innovation, but theres a bunch of strange steps backward in general interface and it falls apart towards the end).

Otherwise it is up to THEM to mark it for preview as an early pre-release version and if they do that I’m sure it will be mentioned. The fact it wasn’t in stores yet means shit as it could be for many reasons other than the game not being gold yet.

And once again, unless the actual developers state there’s even a chance this won’t be the final product, the journalist can do nothing about it because in each and every case there’s no interest for anyone in sending out something that’s not representative of the store version and mark it for review while it’s the same developers or publishers that should be damn aware a game can be marked down for such reasons.

Similarly, you cannot expect reviewers to go out and buy the games they review, that only happens on websites like this, not when it’s just a day job you go through, whoever spends his own money for his day job (unless it’s his own small or big business)?

This pretty much nails some of my main worries for the game at the moment; both Legend and Anniversary were quite inconsistent in their design quality, and, while they were rarely bad, they had many parts where great areas contrasted with more average ones. Hopefully CD have worked on sorting that out for Underworld.

It wasn’t my intention to start a big discussion so I’ll just leave it there. I really appreciate what you guys at RPS do and didn’t mean any offense.

Yes Pace, it does make sense.

Al3xand3r, you’re partially missing the point (my fault for trying out brevity). Yes, one of the problems with magazines and journalists getting games before release is that they might be getting “non-gold” code. But this is something every reviewer should be aware of if he accepts pre-release code.

And you’re completely correct that magazines (online or offline) that don’t shell out for released games for their reviewers to play through are “damn jobs”. That is where I was going with my comment and where the love and hate bit was coming from. I realize that Mr Walker was an employee of Gamer and thus bound by their practices, but calling a dev idiots is kind of harsh when they’re doing what the mags want them to.

The problems with accepting and reviewing unreleased code are many, I’ll try to pull some out of my … erm … hat:
- It establishes a relationship between publisher and mag that where the publisher gets power over the content of the mag. They might not give review code pre-release to some “uncomfortable” mags f.ex.
- It fails to guarantee that the game is finished. Granted, that mostly harms the publisher. I remember reading a “review” in one mag (probably PC Gamer, swedish ed.) for a game that wasn’t released and later got pushed back more than 6 months. Bad for the mag, the reader and the publisher.
- It makes the magazines part of the publishers marketing apparatus. See the Introversion cover story debacle to see what i mean.

The biggest issues are those that create closer ties between the games industry and the publications. OK, games aren’t the most serious issue facing our planet, but I still expect the people doing the reviewing to not have ties to the industry they’re reviewing. It’s the same thing as all the “exclusives” you see all the time. Ponder the word “exclusive” and think about how many true exclusives you see. And if you see a real one, what did the mag have to do to get it?

Sorry for the rant. Steve Bauman once did one a lot better.

Oh, and Mr Walker seems to have done the right thing here though, rating the game down instead of listening to the “oh, that, we fixed that in gold”