Indiana Jones and the Emperor's Tomb Review

I played this game for two reasons, the first reason that this was one of the games that inspired David Jaffe when creating the first God of War and GOW is one of my favorite franchises and I also saw it get listed as a "pretty good" Tomb Raider like. I do like a good style of action game with adventuring and I also enjoy the Indiana Jones movies after rewatching them two years ago so I decided to jump into this.

The first thing that is really noticeable right away is that despite Indiana Jones as the main character and his name being on the cover, the game is very much a Tomb Raider like. In fact, Emperor's Tomb came out in between Classic TR and before Prince of Persia Sands of Time and all though SoT did overshadow this game by a large margin, I do think Emperor's Tomb is a solid enough game in it's own right all though one caveat I want to mention is that I emulated the PS2 version of the game which means I had access to save states, and this game has it's fair amount of unpolished and awkward gameplay mechanics to it on top of having levels with no checkpoints where if you die, you got to restart from the begginning, so with these save states I was able to bypass some of the more frustrating parts of the game.

The first good thing about the game is the combat, no it's not going to win any awards for having deep mechanics but it does a geniunely good job at preserving the spirit of the movies. Indy in the movie fights tends to be a brawler who barely scrapes by in his fights, he's not a trained fighter or martial artist who can dispatch enemies with proficiency, and the game shows that in gameplay. The enemy count is generally up to 2 and sometimes and rarely 3 and many fist fights shows a cinematic camera where you do combos and guard to knock off enemies off their feet, and my favorite is knocking them down and then picking up the weapon and using it against them, especially with firearms, it feels so satisfying to knock a gun out of the enemy's hand then pick it up and finish them off with it. It just does such a great job at replicating the famous Raiders of the Lost Ark scene where Indy shoots the swordsman. You can even enemies fall off cliffs and hit each other too, so even if it isn't deep, it can be dynamic.

However the combat does get easy by the end of the game since enemies don't use guns by the late game so much of combat is picking up the spears enemies use spam the light attack and widdle away at them until they die. You also get a glaive later on which also makes combat pretty easy and trivial since enemies get killed by it pretty quickly.

With that said, this is one aspect where I do think it's an improvement over the Classic Tomb Raider games and it feels a lot more enjoyable and less tedious than Sand of Time's combat.

The platforming and moment to moment gameplay is mostly solid, it manages to a good job at feeling not as "the game is playing itself" as Uncharted's platforming does and gets the job done all though not as good as Classic TR to me since it can be automated and the automation can be pretty rigid. Sometimes Indy will grab ledges and at other times he won't where Classic Lara as long as precisely time jumps and press the interact button in time, Lara is able to consistenly grab ledges where Indy's ledge grabs kind of feels like a guessing game.

Speaking of guessing games, one aspect that could piss off many is his whip grappling hook, for the life of me I'm just not sure what the timing for this thing is, there were times, where I pressed x and Indy's whip grappled on and other times where I pressed it and the whip grapple hook could miss. This could anger many without emu save states since there isn't anything more frustrating than getting moderately far into a level, and then die and restart because Indy botched a whip grapple hook part. There is also two sections in the game that could piss off many, one being a Crash Bandiocot style first person boulder chase with a Nazi drill tank and late game level where you need to time across on timed pillars and you got to do this 4 times with the time for them going down fast. To top off all this, the final boss is almost too easy so the difficulty overall is uneven.

The story of the game is "fine" but it borrows heavily from classic TR in that there isn't much plot and it's just Indy exploring tombs. The music nails the atmosphere, but if you come into this game for an indepth Indy adventure you will be disappointed. The game is also pretty lengthy so I kind of wished for more story too.

Another issue is that if you aren't dying a lot, levels can be pretty short and you might have to watch a fair number of load screens and save game prompts inbetween levels. Classic TR had larger more seemless levels which is why the lack of story is more tolerable in Classic TR.

Overall, for a game that I never see get talked about that much outside of a few instances, I had a good time with it, the game is a solid licensed title.