Gaming Target - PlayStation 2: Indiana Jones and the Emperor's Tomb

Written by John Scalzo on September 05, 2003

Full Review: "No time for love Dr. Jones!"

No developer has ever really gotten an Indiana Jones game just right. Something always seems a little off, or sometimes the games are just downright bad. You have to go all the way back to zipping around in mine cars in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom for the NES to find one that gets the closest. Now, with Indiana Jones and the Emperor's Tomb, I think we have a new contender for top dog.

The Collective took on the near impossible task of translating Buffy the Vampire Slayer into the video game world and shocked everybody. The game was amazing and featured one of the best fighting engines in recent memory. When LucasArts tapped them to create the next Indiana Jones game they brought the Buffy engine with them and really why wouldn't they? Indy's fights are legendary, and that punching sound effect that accompanies every blow in the trilogy shows you he means business.

And to take part in those fights Indy must once again travel the globe in search of a rare and powerful relic. This time Dr. Jones must search for the Heart of the Dragon, a black pearl that allows it's owner to control the minds of men. Indy is contacted by Marshall K'ai and his assistant, Mei Ying, to make sure the Heart does not fall into "the wrong hands." After a little convincing Indiana hops on his red line and the adventure begins.

Due to the presence of the Buffy fighting engine, Emperor's Tomb doesn't hesitate in pouring on the action. The hand-to-hand fighting works extremely well with Indy constantly being surrounded by guards and having to fight his way out. The two button scheme allows for a lot of complex moves, but is simple enough that throwing straight haymakers is a breeze. The fighting is also given a little extra nudge with all of the various melee weapons Indy will get to wield. Chairs, table legs, swords, and wine bottles are just a few of the items you can pick up in the heat of battle to stomp those Nazis. The system is great and adding a third wrinkle is the ability to use Indy's whip to disarm guards that are coming at you guns blazin'.

What doesn't come off so well is when it's time to pull out Indy's revolver or any of the game's other selection of guns. The game's auto-aim feature is incredibly sloppy, so who you think you're shooting at might not get hit at all. And even when a guard is hit, the poor hit detection sometimes will not register it. Of course this works for Indy as well as the guards have Stormtrooper like accuracy and sometimes miss at point blank range. That doesn't really excuse the poor gunplay, but when hand-to-hand fighting is so good (and so much easier) it's almost a non-issue.

Besides the fighting, Emperor's Tomb also throws a lot of adventure sections at you. Like a good archeologist you have to find artifacts and keys to move forward and of course, dodge booby traps. The booby trap sections are usually very short, but they add quite a bit to the game. For example, in Ceylon Indy will have to throw skulls across the ground to set off the automated gun trap and then run past it to the next safe area before it has time to reload. Very cool.

Actually, the whole level of Ceylon is used as a training ground for Indy and it works very well. All of the (many) moves are shown to you and the only way to continue in the game is to complete them. This was a very good idea on The Collective's part as Indy's move list is extensive to say the least. Each button has at least two or three commands mapped to it that are supposed to work in the context of the situation they're needed and never again. It doesn't always do that. Occasionally what you were trying to do won't be what actually happens. It's not a huge deal, but it is annoying.

The bigger problem with the controls is the way you access the inventory. Emperor's Tomb uses the pretty standard way of using the control pad to cycle through your available stuff, and while lots of games have done it doesn't work very well here. When you're in the heat of battle trying to run from the guards and pull out your revolver at the same time it just doesn't work. My thumbs do not have that kind of dexterity when the control pad and the stick are that close together. Maybe I just suck, but it shouldn't be that hard either.

Graphically the game looks fantastic. Indiana Jones himself shows up exactly as he should be. Rumpled white shirt, beat down leather jacket, Harrison Ford's face, and the fedora. It's a perfect character model and you can't really say anything else beyond perfect. The enemies are a little less perfect, they still look great, but there is only character model for every guard per city. That's only four different enemies, a little variety would have been nice.

But while there are only four different cities, there are tons of levels to go through and they run the gamut from lush jungles, to stuffy libraries, to drafty castles, to other places that my thesaurus helps me describe. The game looks great, my thesaurus rantings aside, there's a lot of variety in Emperor's Tomb and each level comes off looking detailed and sharp. The levels are huge and never let you forget that you're in a giant tomb, or a giant castle, or a jungle that goes for miles in every direction. There is even a good bit of that latest graphical benchmark, real-time shadows, for the true graphics hound. While the PS2 may be slightly less powerful than the Xbox, it can still pump out the amazing graphics when the developers want it to.

The sound somehow manages to be even better as David Esch sounds as close to Harrison Ford as we can get without actually getting Harrison Ford. The voice acting of the random guards is also very good and naturally every punch lands with a loud pop. But the real star of the soundstage is the sixty-five piece orchestra that LucasArts commissioned to create the score to Indiana Jones and the Emperor's Tomb. John Williams would be proud as the score rises and swells in all the right places to make this really feel like Indiana Jones. As much as I love the beeps and bops of MIDI music that I grew up, this is the way you make a video game soundtrack. It almost makes me wish LucasArts would put out the soundtrack like they would for any movie.

Naturally with a game this big there are a few odds and ends that don't really fit anywhere else. From really cool stuff like regaining health by filling Indy's canteen with water and using the whip to swing acorss a gap and right through a window. To less cool stuff like the game's occasional tendency to suffer from slowdown and the wacky antics of the camera during a few gun battles. But as I said, these are really just odds and ends.