YMMV / Tomb Raider: The Angel of Darkness

• Awesome Music:
  • Le Serpent Rouge
  • The orchestrated theme, anyone?
  • Though not actually present in the game, the promotional song Angel of Darkness by DJ Alex C. and singer Yasmin K. gained a healthy amount of popularity on its own among fans of eurodance music.
• Base-Breaking Character: Kurtis Trent. Some see him as interesting due to being one of the few playable characters in the franchise apart from Lara, being a capable fighter and his backstory (a psychic raised by psychic monks). Other franchise fans don't like him, seeing him as one-dimensional and hard to relate to (his backstory isn't fleshed-out), as well as considering him shoe-horned in to act as a love interest for Lara (his role as a Love Interest for Lara being admitted by Word of God). The Unresolved Sexual Tension between him and Lara, and how it was implemented into the game, didn't help and also divided fans between those who thought Lara shouldn't have a love interest, those open to the idea but who objected to Kurtis and those who really liked Kurtis. He also attracted a particular fanbase around himself - as detailed in the Estrogen Brigade entry below.
• Complete Monster:
  • Pieter Van Eckhardt is the founder of "the Cabal" and a centuries-old alchemist, who desires to recreate the Nephilim to bring the world to ruin. Becoming enemies with the ancient order of monks, Lux Veritatis, Eckhardt swore to kill them all after they imprisoned him for many years. After getting free, Eckhardt goes on a killing spree, killing numerous people to get their body parts so he can use them for his experiments in resurrecting the Nephilim. Burning an unlucky reporter alive and slaughtering Bouchard's gang, leaving one survivor in a Body Horror situation, Eckhardt gets rid of most of his accomplices one by one, first by throwing one into a monstrous "pod" to be turned into a mindless monster, another by feeding him to said monster. Hell-bent on unleashing the Nephilim upon the world, Eckhardt believes that it is his destiny to "breed Hell on Earth."
  • Kristina Boaz is the Head of Corrective and Remedial Surgery at the Strahov Psychiatric Institute in Prague and one of the members of the Cabal. Using her position, Boaz performed numerous brutal experiments on several people, reducing them to barely-sapient broken "animals" who attack anything they see. After creating a Proto-Nephilim, when she was ordered to destroy it, Boaz decided to keep it to herself and feed innocent people to it.
• Enjoy the Story, Skip the Game: Even in spite of the amount of content that was cut, this game is considered among fans to have the strongest story in the original continuity.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Janice is surprisingly popular for a minor character.
• Estrogen Brigade: Though a divisive character, the introduction of Kurtis Trent most definitely led to a spike in the amount of female fans for the franchise. To the point there used to be an actual Kurtis Trent Estrogen Brigade fanclub with its page and forum, lasting for almost 14 years after the game premiered.
• Good Bad Bugs:
  • If one completes Parisian Back Streets, executes the level select cheat and repeats the level, it's possible that at the end of the level, rather than progressing to the next one, you can instead continue to play through more of the training level, which includes hints that would otherwise not be provided to you.
  • In the Galleries Under Siege level, if you crouch in front of the case with the masks and hit the action button, you can grab all three masks and use them in later levels, which especially comes in handy in the underwater sections.
  • The game features an anti-frustration feature where certain magazines will respawn when you don't have a matching gun and ammo in your inventory. One of these is in Von Croy's apartment, a level you enter without any guns but contains the Luger and several mags. If you try to collect the respawning mag here before the gun the fact the game can find no weapons on you triggers a bug that makes it respawn instantly and as fast as you can pick it up, effectively letting you keep going until you hit the max amount of Luger mags the engine allows you can stack.
• Funny Moments: Arguably, choosing the most Jerkass options possible during dialogue counts, if only to hear Lara Croft be a complete ass to random strangers. Even when the player isn't in control, Lara gets a few gems:
  Lara: [Approaching Janice, a very obvious hooker] Not a lot of passing trade at this hour?
• Memetic Mutation:
  • "If I had a coconut for every time some lunatic said something like that..."
    • "Broccoli, coconut, hot dog."
  • Popularized by The Angry Video Game Nerd:
    • "Leave me alone, I'm busy..."
    • "AAAH! AAAH! AAAH! AAAH! AAAH! AAAH!"
  • The promo song "Angel of Darkness" is popular among fanvid creators. Gothic or otherwise dark characters get set to it a lot.
  • Due to the absolute treasure trove of snarky dialogue for her and her generally more hardened personality in this game, whenever Angel of Darkness-era Lara is treated as her own individual, you can bet nine times out of ten, she'll be a Lovable Alpha Bitch with a tongue to match the likes of Daria Morgendorffer.
• Misblamed: Despite what some may say otherwise, Core Design are not to blame for the failure of Angel of Darkness.
• Narm:
  • If you pause the game just as Lara dies, her death scream will loop infinitely in the menu.
  • Lara is framed for murder, so she clears her name by murdering everyone she comes into contact with. Dogs, cops, security guards!
  • The end boss is worth it just for the sheer hilarity: it's an old man you stab with a few crystals, and each time you stab him, you get a cutscene where he floats above the ground and yells for a good twelve seconds. "OHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH," like someone holding a flat note at a bad karaoke night.
• Obvious Beta: Core planned to publish the game by November '03, keeping with the tradition of releasing all parts in November and — more importantly — buying themselves enough time to finish everything. Eidos published the game on June 20th, regardless of the state of the game itself.
• Player Punch: Von Croy's death at the beginning. There's also the ambiguous demise of Kurtis.
• Presumed Flop: While some have assumed it got extremely low sales due to bad reviews, it actually sold enough on Playstation 2 to get into the Greatest Hits lineup. On the other hand, the game did suffer from massive returns from dissatisfied players, but those were accounted for separately.
• Sequelitis:
  • Along with Chronicles, this is usually ranked as the worst game in the series. Fans are divided between those who consider Chronicles to be the worst for being boring and extremely formulaic, and those who consider this game to be the worst for its overall terrible execution.
  • The game was so bad that the producers of the second movie adaptation (see Trivia section) considered suing Eidos for being responsible for the movie's severe underperformance at the box office and tarnishing the Tomb Raider name. In reality, while the game was far from good, it was nothing more than looking for excuse for delivering a mediocre movie that underperformed solely on its own.
• Tearjerker: Von Croy’s death at the beginning of the game. What makes it even sadder is that they never made amends after what happened in Egypt.
• That One Boss:
  • Brother Obscura in The Hall of Seasons. Lara has to defeat him in order to grab the Obscura painting, but the only way to get it from him is if he is completely immobilized, which only lasts a few seconds. If he touches Lara, her health depletes.
  • The Cleaner in Von Croy’s Apartment. He is hired by Louis Bouchard to take out Lara, and he comes in guns blazing just to kill her. When Lara gets to the final part to kill the Cleaner, she is surrounded by lasers lined with explosives. If the cleaner’s ammo hits Lara, she stumbles onto the laser and ends up dying.
  • The One-Winged Angel form of Kristina Boaz. The controls are a bit messed up, and the game gives you no hint about what the hell you're supposed to do. Made worse by the fact that you have to fight the two hardest bosses in the game (Boaz and Proto) with Kurtis, who is only armed with a wimpy pistol and a few clips of ammo. Lara has all the nice weapons and tons of ammo, but doesn't really need it.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: A common consensus among fans is that while Angel of Darkness was a train wreck in terms of gameplay, the storyline and atmosphere were some of the best in the series.
• Vindicated by History: With all the backroom deals around the game's release date and malicious mistreatment of Core by Eidos being fully exposed, many of the franchise's fans have become much more forgiving toward the game. Sure, it's still a barely functional wreck, but the story is still widely regarded as being one of the best in the franchise, to the point where the Crystal Dynamics games tend to catch flak for their weaker handling of darker themes compared to Angel of Darkness.

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