Project Eden

Reliant for so long on Lara Croft who, quite frankly, has started to get on our nerves recently, developer Core Design has decided to branch out a bit with Project Eden, an action adventure that actually has a promising story, and gameplay to match.

Set in a future where the Earth's enormous population reside in massive cities that stretch into the sky, Project Eden puts you at the head of an elite four-man squad, charged with cleaning up the upwardly sprawling metropolis. The rich live atop huge tower blocks and the poor in the crumbling ghettos below, where the sun never shines and criminal activity is rife. Throughout the many derelict areas, engineering teams are operating, constantly repairing the foundations of the huge buildings above. One such team, sent into repair automated processing equipment down at the Real Meat Factory, has gone missing. And guess who's being sent in to investigate?

Playable both in the first and third-person, Project Eden will allow you to control each character directly, much like Hidden & Dangerous, along with any remote equipment that the group gets to use. It features hideous deformed mutants and gang members and players will also be able to look down and see their feet. Out in the autumn, our only reservation will be how the AI works, but, after seeing the game at E3, it already looks impressive and we could be seeing a whole new series develop aside from Core's Tomb Raider franchise. Let's hope so anyway.

In the rock music world, it is common to speak of the "difficult second album", in reference to the pressure put on a band to match the achievements of their first hit record. The assumption is that before achieving fame, they have nothing to lose, nothing to live up to and no one telling them what to do, thus erecting no barriers to their creativity and ambition. Plus they don't have enough money to while away every night on champagne and daiquiri binges, snorting cocaine from the navels of nubile nymphets and shooting pharmaceutical grade smack into their eyeballs, so they're usually relatively coherent. Now, we're not trying to suggest that the talented people at Core Design are a bunch of whacked-out coke-heads with more money than they know what to do with and a penchant for corrupting the innocent - heaven forbid - we're simply grasping for a tenuous parallel between the game that made their fortunes and a great rock album. The difference is, of course, in the hard-bitten world of rock, not even the most insipid soft-rock studio band has the luxury of putting out four remix albums, each shamelessly reworking the ideas in the original, licensing out the film rights, signing a cross-promotional deal with a major sports drink and bundling copies of the original record with inkjet refill cartridges before attempting something new. Even in the games industry it's something of an indulgence. Despite all this, and even four years after their first big hit, team Tomb Raider are under considerable pressure to match their former achievement, and their historically troubled second album is an ambitious affair called Project Eden.

Sophomore Blues

Luckily, Tomb Raider evangelists and Lara knockers alike can rest easy, as Project Eden is not only looking rather stunning, but very different from the game that bankrolled it. We visited Core in their flash Derby HQ to have a chat with the Eden team and examine the latest build, and we were suitably impressed with what we saw. We also took home the first fully playable beta, cut that very day, the code practically still wet on the page. It was the first build in which all twelve levels of the game were playable, the cutscenes in place, the puzzles working smoothly and the enemies lurking in all the right shadows. All that remains now for the Eden