Look past the busted controls and the glitches and Angel of Darkness is a mess of unfulfilled ambition.

'I've talked to people who worked on the game, and when I think of what Angel of Darkness could have been it truly kills me because it could have not only been the best Tomb Raider game back then but also the best game on the PS2.' 'Games today get away with what Angel of Darkness couldn't back then,' AJ.R says. Kristan Reed's Eurogamer review called it 'a marked backward step' and a 'half-baked, unfinished travesty' that was DOA for all except the most dedicated Tomb Raider fans. 'If Core were given only six more months of development time,' AJ.R continues, 'it would be a completely different Lara Croft on the market today.'ĪJ.R is under no illusions about Angel of Darkness's problems, but he believes it was given short shrift by critics back in 2003. 'If you look at everything Angel of Darkness tried to achieve and was mocked for,' argues the HD remaster Facebook page owner AJ.R, 'most games today actually use what it tried to build from the ground up.' Angel of Darkness' dark tone, its RPG mechanics, stamina meter and generous blending of horror, action, adventure and platforming genre conventions have certainly become commonplace in recent years. Yet its devotees insist the game was hard done by in the rush to release, that The Angel of Darkness never got a fair shake because of its myriad launch bugs and glitches and because of the difficulty of developing for the PlayStation 2. It went through three years of development hell before it was rushed out unfinished in 2003, to the eternal mockery of an industry weary from grandiose promises after five prior games that all looked, sounded and played much the same.

It effectively condemned the long-running studio behind one of gaming's most lucrative series to an inelegant demise. The Angel of Darkness very nearly killed Tomb Raider.

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