Straight to the Point: A brilliant re-boot, bringing the series bang up-to-date. Although the gameplay is not highly original, it provides an immersive action experience with solid mix of great platforming, puzzles and combat. This is the best action/adventure game I’ve seen for a long time and is a must have title.
Review
You may know Lara Croft as an agile, confident, danger-seeking adventurer, dual wielding guns to plough through hundreds of bad guys and endangered wildlife and using high-tech gadgets to traverse ancient ruins. Well, forget all that; this is Lara’s first adventure and so we see a younger, inexperienced version of her; more of an academic than adventurer, who is thrown into danger rather than seeking it.
The story starts on a ship in the pacific, where Lara and a crew are on an expedition to seek a relic of a sun goddess, when disaster strikes and she ends up shipwrecked on a strange and hazardous island. This is no tropical paradise; more of a dark island with heavy rain, severe winds and to top it all off; a crazed sun goddess worshipping cult. Lara starts of fighting for survival, while searching for the rest of her team and killing animals and other people to do so does not come easy to her. Although, Lara is often terrified of all of the dangers the island has to offer, she shows great courage and compassion and we see her character develop into the Tomb Raider we all know and love.
I’ve never got on that well with the previous Tomb Raider games, mainly due to the awkward controls and bad camera angles, which made the experience far too frustrating to for me to endure. I’m very happy to tell you that these things are now a thing of the past; The controls are much more intuitive and the cameras never cause you any bother. It has a much more cinematic feel to it and the level maps are so much more atmospheric than in the previous games. It actually feels much more like an Uncharted game than a Tomb Raider one, with platforms crumbling beneath you, your character tumbling into rooms more than just walking or climbing into them and the combat mixing shooting with melee and stealth kills; it can be forgiven or stealing these things however, as after all, Uncharted stole the whole concept of the Tomb Raider Games in the first place.
There are a couple of new elements to the series and they are upgrades; this time, the more enemies or animals you kill and plants or meat you collect, reward you with experience and when you have enough points, you can use a skill point to add new abilities to your character; which can improve your survival, hunting or brawling skills. Skill points are getting very common in action/adventure games and in this case, they help add to the feel that Lara is developing more as an adventurer. Also, collecting salvage along the way means you can upgrade your weapons and choose how you want them to be improved; some upgrades also need you to search for the parts first.
Puzzles still need to be solved in order to progress through the levels but unlike some of the previous games, there are not lots of small puzzles, which need to completed in order to complete one big ones; this is a good thing in my book as it means less backtracking through levels. It does have a linear path in order to progress the story but there are lots of hidden objects scattered around the levels and secret tombs, which involve solving platform puzzles and give you a reason to explore the whole area. Collecting objects gives you experience points, weapon parts, salvage and gallery unlocks.
This time around, Lara doesn’t have the high-tech gadgets she uses in the previous games; instead she has makeshift tools and weapons to help her get around; instead of a grappling hook she uses a bow with rope attached to the arrows, which can be used to pull down objects to create a path for her or if she’s close to a wooden post; once she’s fired the arrow on to a surface, she can tie the other end of the rope to the post in order to create a zip-line. To open any chests she finds, she uses a pickaxe; which involves a lots of mashing the buttons and she also uses this tool to attach herself to rock surfaces: you just need to jump at a wall and press a button at the appropriate time in order to cling on to it.
The combat is particularly good; as I mentioned earlier, you can mix shooting, melee and stealth and which one you use depends on your situation. You can get more points for stealth but it’s not always possible, especially as the enemies can be standing very close to each other, but firing an arrow at a wall can distract them and cause them to separate while they investigate, giving you the opportunity to take them out without alerting the others. Some enemies carry shields and to take them out you may need to get close to them, dodge them as they strike out them, get behind them and either shoot or punch them. Also, everyone’s favourite cliché; the exploding barrel is a regular feature throughout the game.
Quick-time events are used quite often, in both the combat and the more cinematic sequences, which many people find annoying but it does mean that the game can be cinematic and interactive at the same time; as much as I hate constant button mashing, I hate watching long video sequences with action, which I have no control over, much more.
Once the single player campaign has been finished, then there’s always the multi-player; but again, it’s very much like Uncharted and doesn’t offer a lot to separate it from other multi-player shooters, except for traps, which you can set for other players. The maps and modes are very limited and it only has a competitive mode; a co-op survival or adventure mode would have been nice or something to separate it from other multi-player games, as it just has deathmatch and a couple of objective-based modes; a race mode through an obstacle course might have worked. Don’t get me wrong though, the multi-player is fun to play, it’s just a bit too generic and just feels tacked on.
To Conclude
Tomb Raider is a solid game, with very few bugs, and game-play that has more depth than most similar genres. If I really had to get picky, then I would say that the developers could have included medicine crafting to give it even more of a survival feel, as Lara just heals, in the now overused, heal-over-time way. There are many plants scattered around the island but picking these just gives you experience; same with collecting meat from the animals you’ve hunted. Also, the single player game could be a bit longer; collecting the many objects and finding all of the secret tombs fills it out a bit but I don’t think many players will get much more than 10 hours out of it; to be fair though, it’s just as big as most of the other games in this genre but as it’s quite hard to put down, it will just feel that it’s over far too soon and you’ll be left wanting more.
