Atlas's Thoughts

The Croft Curse

All in all, I have to say that this is an enjoyable levelset. The puzzles aren't to hard and they aren't to easy. This set of levels is, more or less, like the old Tomb Raider game levels. The storyline was simple and easy to follow, as long as you made sure to watch the intro in the downloaded file for the level. With that said, there were a few points that kind of killed the levels for me. I'll list them by levels. Before I do that, however, I'll give small review of each level.

Aegean Sea, 1994
This level is like any other prologue level. It's short, sweet, and to the point. This is the level where you get the artifact of the game. You are accompanied by Anaya. She gets ahead of Lara and ends up injuring herself in her rush. After you complete the puzzle Anaya finds, you have to go down into the water again and collect the artifact from its cage.

The Pool House and Greenhouse
This level is really short, and I felt it could've been included as part of the Croft Estate level. All you do here is get a key to the Gym, and then the level ends.

The Croft Estate
This level is a fairly simple one. It's a lot of puzzle solving, not to much to freak out about. There is one item that's easy to over look in this level, and that's the Security Fuse. It's looks like it's a small light fixture with how it looks, which makes it easy to miss. Overall, this level is just a simple, and fun, puzzle level.

Jade's House
This level here gave me some trouble on my first runthrough of the game. There's two enemies that have flamethrowers, and it's very hard to kill them. I actually never managed to kill them. This level also shows the antagonist's, Jade, obsession with becoming Lara.

Tibet
Ah Tibet, I hadn't really played a level based in Tibet in thirteen years, so it was a nice experience to see a level like this again. This level offers an interesting vehicle, a Hover Plate. This level also brings back the original Yeti enemy from Tomb Raider II, I've always had an great fear of them...anyway, back on topic. This level is fairly straight forward, get from point A to point B with some stops along the way.

Venice
Venice, another location I haven't played in a Tomb Raider game in thirteen years. The music really brings out the feel for Venice, and I enjoyed this level very much. This level is about the same length as Tibet, which means you'll do some slight backtracking.

The Church
This is a short level here. You have to get under the church to bathe in the Holy Water. There are some occasional random screams heard in this level, and they seem rather misplaced since there's no one else at the Church.

Showdown in Egypt
The music that plays in this level should be easily recognizable if you've played Resident Evil 5. This level is also fairly straight forward. You have a time limit, and you have to catch up to Jade before she gets away. Once you catch Jade, you have to kill her. Once she's dead, take the keys to her Jeep and drive off into the Sunset.

Now for the bad side of these levels. There weren't glitches in all the levels, just a few of them.

Aegean Sea, 1994 Glitches
There were two glitches I kept coming across. The first one is with the sharks in the water at the beginning. If they followed you down into the cramped corridor you have to swim through, you often couldn't get around them. Which means you'd either have to start over, or hope that they moved before you drowned. The second glitch was actually a rather irritating one. If I stood on the of a block and tried to line up a jump, Lara would often get stuck and I would have to her until she started to move normally again.

Tibet Glitches
When you're in the second fire room with the spinning blades, near the end of the level, if you don't let Lara put her feet on the ladder and you try to shimmy, you can often get stuck in the column and have to reload.

Venice
The only NOTICEABLE glitch I saw was the two mafia guys you come across near the beginning of the level. If you jump back across the water to get some distance from them, they will jump after you, but they'll usually fall in the water. This wouldn't be a problem, but sometimes Lara wouldn't aim at them in the water when this happened to me.

Showdown in Egypt
This one isn't really a glitch, just a kind of annoyance. The final fight with Jade, to me, felt like it took to long. Also, if you kill her with your pistols, she still some how explodes, and that just seemed silly to me.

Now for the last things, the soundtrack, sound effects, and the voice acting.

The Soundtrack
I loved the soundtrack the creator of this level put together. There's a great variety of music in here. There's music from Assassin's Creed II, Resident Evil 5, and there's even a Lady Gaga song that plays during the credits. Overall, the soundtrack was great.

The Voice Acting
I feel that the voice acting in this game could've been a lot better. The actors that the creator got just didn't seem like they wanted to do the voices for the characters at all, and they volume of the characters voices often times wasn't loud enough to hear. Since the voices of characters is considered music tracks, and there's no subtitles option, you had to deal with trying to hear what the were saying.

The Sound Effects
The sound effects for this game were wonderful. They felt right, except for the vehicle sounds. They were, most of the time, messed up and way to loud.

Overall, this is a good level set. Good, but not great. I felt that it could've been longer. At most, you'll probably spend about two hours on this game on your first playthrough of it, and then about an hour and fifteen minutes once you know how to do everything.