A highly overrated classic

For some reason TR2 is revered as the best classic Tomb Raider game. Though it has some great moments around the end (The Ice Palace in Tibet or the Temple of Xian in China) generally it lacks the tombs you should be raiding. You go on a killing spree through a deserted Venice, an industrial diving area, and after 8 levels reach the first level where there might be a treasure hidden: a sunken ship. But it takes 11 levels to get your first artefact, until that it is just pulling levers and running around in places that are incompatible with the series and are simply senselessly engineered. Why would there be a hidden room in a ship with which you can flood the ball room? Why are gunmen behind doors that take you hours to open? Why are there deathtraps in a monastery? In the first game, the levels were fortresses, designed to protect invaluable treasures. Here they take on the same pattern but the urban environment makes it hard to understand why this game works the way it does.
Even though, it has some great ideas (breaking through a wall of ice, heating lead to melt a frozen lake, turning a ship upside down), revolutionary graphics (the programming of the flares and Laras hair is incredible, considering it was made in 1997), but of all the old episodes, this one aged in the worst way. Even the unpopular 3rd episode is more Tomb Raider-ish than this.
A hint: despite complaints that there are no graphic options you can turn Filtering on/off by pressing F8. Too bad you cannot change screen ratio.

vargatomi about Tomb Raider II