Indiana Jones and the Emperor's Tomb review

Taking you through a variety of different locations around the world such as Hong Kong and Istanbul, you are made to feel at home straight away, and everything is excellently presented. Between locations you get the red line moving from dot to dot on a world map just like in the films and even the control manual is presented like Indianas personal journal, everything hand written and rough looking. An excellent touch and one that shows a lot of thought has gone into the game, on a superficial level at least. Graphically the game is good: every character looks solid and moves smoothly, and each environment looks sufficiently different from the last to make you keep trekking through in search of lost treasure. Surprisingly there is a lot of variety in location, not as expected with every level being set in a tomb. You get Amazon forests, Gothic castles, Chinese fortresses, Hong Kong night clubs and of course the odd tomb; all splendidly displayed as huge interactive environments to explore.Another great feature is the sound, or it is when it works properly: the sound does have a tendency to become very jumpy which disconcerting when youre trying to perform a pixel perfect leap. Also it means the Xbox goes crazy trying to sort it out, which you can't help feeling isn't doing the machine much good. However when the sound does decide to behave it adds so much to the game. Its just like watching one of the films with the score in the background. Brilliant.Luckily the game play lives up to the quality of the presentation. Because the game runs on the same fight engine used for Buffy The Vampire Slayer it allows Indy to attack people in all directions with a large variety of weapons and combat moves. Apart from the fighting aspect of the game there is a heavy dependence on simple lever puzzles and jumping from platform to platform, but most of this is easy to achieve as the games main focus tends to be towards fighting and action. The problem is the controls for moving Dr Jones around are not quite as successful as when fighting. Its easy enough to swing from one place to the next with the trusty whip, but try jumping and unless you hit the next surface dead on you may find instead of grabbing the ledge you fall down, most of the time to your death. This can be very frustrating when you know what you have to do but the controls wont let you do it. Saying that, however, this does not occur to often and as the levels are split into small auto-saving chunks you never have to go back too far after plummeting to an untimely death. With enemies and death defying leaps concurred the next unpleasant things are the ingenious traps left around, thankfully not plentiful early on. Later on you can guarantee around almost ever corner will be a pressure pad or something waiting to fire a dart at you. All the traps are nicely incorporated into the game and are what you would expect from the Indiana Jones franchise; unfortunately running away from rolling boulders dose not seem to make it into The Emperors Tomb.Most importantly in games of this genre is the camera. If it isnt spot on it will either leave you looking at the nearest wall or end up making you feel sick - most of the time the camera behaves itself but on the odd occasion it does leave you feeling like you have just done a lap with your local Scottish rally driver named Colin. It can also be frustrating to look directly below you - not a problem that arises often but every now and then you really need to know where the small ledge your falling on to is. Its the little touches that make the game so much fun to play. For instance: get knocked over in a fight a you may lose your hat. Want to see Nazis with accents that would make Colonel Clink jealous, they are here too. Big Crocodile? Spinning disk weapon from the Predator films?, nasty Amazon type women? Its all here, everything you could ask for from an Indiana Jones game. And it's all the better for it.To sum up: Indiana Jones and the Emperors Tomb is great to play. Its just a really good fun game that does not take itself at all seriously and for fans of Dr Jones it is absolutely fantastic and I cannot recommend it high enough. For the rest of us well, let me say this Ms Croft will have a hell of a lot of work to do to come close to this. Saying that though it also represents a missed opportunity: with a little more care it could have been a classic. The occasional slowdown and jumping music should not really be apparent in this generation, either. Great fun, but a little disappointing.