TOMB RAIDER

When Crystal Dynamics announced that they would be rebooting the Tomb Raider series, it came with mixed reception.  Some fans were disappointed, as there has been a glut of overhyped "reboots" in recent years.  Others were glad to see the slate wiped clean, as Lara Croft's adventures had gotten pretty terrible in recent years (Angel Of Darkness, anyone?).  So with the team rebuilding everything from the ground up, how does this new game stand up as an origin story for one of the most iconic video game characters in history?


Pretty damn well.  

Tomb Raider sets the stage with Lara Croft as a very young, naive grad student on her first expedition.  She and her small team of archaeologists and researchers are searching for the legendary island of Yamatai, home of a Japanese "Sun Goddess".  Right away, their ship gets caught in the Bermuda Dragon's Triangle, a region of the sea where boats are known to mysteriously disappear.  The boat is destroyed, and the crew find themselves stranded on a remote island that is home to a sinister cult of bandits, thugs, and ne'er-do-wells.  But could this be the legendary Yamatai?   Well duh, but the game has to keep some façade of mystery, right?

I liked the characters in Tomb Raider.  Lara herself was a bit uneven, never really finding that balance between simpering, scared little girl, and brutal, badass, murdering survival chick.  I definitely appreciate and respect that she's never played up for sex appeal, though.  The rest of the supporting cast were fairly shallow, but they were at least palatable enough to make me care a bit.  Whitman pretty much has "I'm going to betray you" written on his forehead, while some other characters may as well wear t-shirts saying "I'm going to die!" but at least they were likable enough that I cared when they met their untimely ends.  The villain was scary when he needed to be, but his methods seemed a bit ridiculous for his reason. 

The visuals on this game were absolutely stunning.  Yet another game where I was spamming the screenshot button like a Japanese tourist on holiday.  The sweeping vistas of the island manage to capture both the lush vegetation and the bleak isolation.  One of the things that I appreciated most was the near seamless integration of objects into the environment, yet I was still able to see that this is a ledge I can climb on, that isn't.  I never confused the two, yet the things I could interact with didn't usually stick out like a very sore thumb, either.

The gameplay is where Tomb Raider shines like a beacon. Studies have shown that as low as 10% of gamers actually finish games, and I'm guilty of this.  Something about the gameplay in Tomb Raider compelled me to finish it.  The smooth controls, the well-crafted tools and puzzles, the stealth mechanics, the combat...everything in this game just worked for me.  The world was heavily peppered with collectibles, some of which made sense, some of which did not.  I appreciated that each major area of the story had a full range of places to explore, in both the horizontal plane and the vertical, and each one had areas you couldn't access just quite yet, making you want to backtrack when you got your new toys.  The upgrade and skill systems left a little to be desired, but they weren't bad necessarily.

One of my favorite aspects of the game was the honing of Survival Instincts.  It's nothing original, just honed and improved.  The mechanic takes the "Detective Mode" from the recent Batman games, and tweaks it just a bit.  One of the heaviest criticisms of Detective Mode was that it simplified Arkham Asylum and City to a point where it almost made no sense to turn it off.  The result was that you played almost the entire game in a neon-lit wireframe mode.  In Tomb Raider, they at least limit Survival Instinct to when you are standing still; the moment you move, it fades away.  It's a very simple, yet very effective, nerf.  It gives the player a sense of stopping and assessing a situation, rather than walking around with X-ray vision through the entire game.

One of the bigger complaints that I've read throughout my perusal of reviews for Tomb Raider was the overuse of QTEs.  The old "hit X to not die" trope that is becoming more and more prevalent in gaming.  Honestly, it could be just because I was expecting it?  But it didn't bother me in this.  There were a lot, to be sure.  But the action sequences that featured them were often very exciting and nerve-wracking, and pressing X to not die didn't seem so annoying as it does in other games.  I'm actually a proponent of tastefully used QTEs, because I think they allow for more cinematic, dramatic moments in a game rather than just normal interaction. 

I will say, the title of the game becomes a bit misleading.  Sure, it's the name of a long standing franchise that's been a household name in gaming since 1996, but as far as this iterations go?  It should have just been called "Island Explorer" (or, alternatively, "Lara Gets The Shit Kicked Out Of Her Repeatedly").  There are very few actual tombs in the game, and most of them are optional caves with a single room puzzle in order to find a collectible relic that adds nothing to the game.  At one point early on, Lara even mutters in disgust, "I hate tombs..."  Admittedly this feels a bit more realistic than earlier games, but then again, if I wanted realism I wouldn't have been playing a game where I was fighting a giant T-rex with dual-wielded uzis back in 1996.  This new iteration also, sadly, features no dinosaurs.

In the end, I was very pleasantly surprised with Tomb Raider.  I haven't enjoyed the games since the Playstation 1 era, so despite the positive rumblings, I didn't exactly have high hopes.  Instead what I got was a fun, beautiful, compelling game that I genuinely wanted to complete.  Tomb Raider exceeded my expectations in every way, and I definitely recommend it to anyone.  It's by no means a perfect game; its flaws are often glaring, and they make you want to facepalm so hard that you give yourself a concussion, but they never actually managed to detract from my enjoyment of the game.  

Play time:  About 18 hours  
Finished:  Yes 
Recommended:   A resounding YES!
Available For:  PC, PS3, XBox 360