Mostly Treasure Hunting
Tomb Raider Underworld is a game I had played before on the Xbox 360 but never on the PlayStation 3 and I was pleasantly surprised when I checked that it had a relatively straightforward Platinum Trophy run, it's not often I get to start a PS3 Platinum run from scratch any more.
The trophy list ticks a lot of my boxes for a good Platinum list. Firstly, the Platinum can be done in one playthrough so long as you play on hard difficulty. Hard isn’t too difficult, and you can even turn on invincibility cheats, which apparently do not block the trophies, but the game was easy enough that I didn’t feel the need to try that.
As a general rule, keep a new save file for each location; you can keep as many manual saves as you want, and you should, as the game is quite buggy and glitchy.
There are a number of missable trophies you need to be aware of that I will go through in more detail:
- Swan Diver, Swan Diver 2 & Master Swan Diver
- Roadkiller & Master Roadkiller
- Grenadier & Master Grenadier
- Weapons Expert & Weapons Master
- Swan Diver, Swan Diver 2 & Master Swan Diver
These trophies require you to do Lara’s iconic swan dive, but it is only available in certain locations. The first one being in the room with the Kraken in the very first level, the next on Amanda’s Ship, which is available in the mission after, and the last is in the mission after that - Thailand. These are easy to get out of the way as you progress through the first parts of the game. The controls to perform this are, like the rest of the game, not that reliable and can be tricky to execute, meaning a lot of jumping off and either dying or climbing back to the top. But after a few goes, you’ll get it.
Weapons Expert & Weapons Master
These are the next two that I worked on. For this, you need to kill enemies using the slow-mo function, which requires you to do some combat to build up the bar. If you start out using this as soon as you encounter enemies on the first ship level, you’ll soon get it after a few more levels, as there are plenty of enemies to try it out on, and I think the non-human enemies also count towards it. But you must get it before the end of the game, as you can’t replay levels, and there are only a finite number of enemies.
Grenadier & Master Grenadier
These two have you kill two and three enemies, respectively, with a single grenade. I was starting to panic about this one, but if you wait until the Thailand level, there are plenty of times that a group of spiders attack you, and they count towards the trophy. It is much easier to throw a single grenade into a cluster of small spiders and get both trophies in one go. Again, use your manual saves as a back-up.
Roadkiller & Master Roadkiller
After the first few levels are over, you start a level with a motorbike. Here, you have to run down multiple enemies with the bike; most enemies, especially on hard, require going over a couple of times before they die. I think there are some panthers in the area where you first get the bike, and I managed to get both of these trophies quite quickly by creating panther roadkill.
Clearing up
After those trophies were done, I just continued my playthrough and completed the game to get the remaining story-based trophies and the difficulty trophy. The only ones I had left were to collect all the relics and treasures.
After you finish the main game, you unlock Treasure Hunter mode, which is like a free roam around all the levels with the puzzles completed and all enemies gone. It’s quite a neat idea to let you have free roam through all the platforming in a level; it must have been quite a design challenge to make platforming sections traversable in either direction.
As far as I could tell, there is no in-game way of finding treasures other than simply walking around and searching, so I had to fall back to a video guide for this phase of the trophy hunt. In hindsight, I think I should have just done this whilst playing the game. It was quite tedious having to watch the video, pause the video, play the game, and then rinse and repeat. Inside the game manual, they advertise the official guide book, so I wonder if this whole treasure hunt was a way of selling a need for the book.
It was very easy to collect most of the relics; the only one I had difficulty with was the very last level, where the platforming controls were so controller-throwing infuriating, but with enough persistence, I got it and with that, another Platinum trophy on the digital shelf.