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RATING: 7.5/10
IF YOU CAN LOOK PAST THE FEW
ISSUES THIS GAME HAS, IT IS A FANTASTIC SINGLE-PLAYER EXPERIENCE.
Should there be a list of iconic
video game characters, Tomb Raider’s Lara Croft would undoubtedly rank pretty
high. And with good reason. She has been around for 17 years, through 9
previous games on multiple platforms. Can you think of a more popular female
lead character in the history of gaming? Exactly.
So, given the recent tendency to
reboot older franchises in both games and movies, it came as no big surprise
Lara Croft was reborn, her story told from the very beginning. After all, how
can one ignore one of the greatest characters in the industry’s history?
I must admit I never played any
of the older titles. I didn’t own a console, and my PC at the time, a
state-of-the-art-in-it’s-day Pentium 2, could barely get the games to run. And
I was more interested in FPS’s anyway. Assassin’s Creed was the game that
really got me interested in a sort of free-roam open adventure world. So when the new Tomb Raider was released, displaying a darker, grittier Lara (very
Christopher Nolan I thought), I was immediately interested.
As the game starts, our young
Lara is aboard a ship called the Endurance, looking for adventure. Things get
going quickly. A violent storm dashes the ship against rocks, and Lara barely
escapes to make it to the shore of a nearby island. But this island is not
uninhabited. Men with guns (of course) patrol everywhere and some strange
followers of a cult are up to something. Added to that, some pretty strange
things are going down. Lara spends the game finding other survivors from the
Endurance, finding ways to get off the island, and trying to figure out what on
earth is going on around her.
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| After being shipwrecked on the island, Lara finds herself in a strange tomb |
That’s all I will say about the
pretty solid storyline. Pacing is good, and enough is added to the story at the
right intervals to keep you going and interested. A brief backtrack via a
camcorder will fill in some of the events before the game started.
Gameplay is standard third-person
with the ability to swivel which shoulder you overlook. Lara will automatically
take cover against walls and behind barriers when enemies are nearby. Most segments
of the game give a fair amount of leeway with regards to how you go about your
objective, and wandering off the standard road will often uncover handy boxes
of supplies or one of the several optional ‘tombs’ for you to explore. If you
get lost or confused at any point there is a handy ‘survival instincts’ button
(LB in the Xbox) that will point out the direction of your objective, as well
as valuable information around you. That button will prove to be useful,
especially when you enter a tomb to plunder its hidden treasure.
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| The yellow ray of light shows your next objective when the 'Survival Instincts' button is pressed |
On the subject, I must admit I enjoyed
the puzzle-solving quality of the tombs, yet always found it odd the precious
item Lara found at the end was never revealed. Each time she would reach into a
lit up box and pull out…something. But we never know what.
At the start of the campaign Lara
has nothing but her hands to defend herself, but as you make your way through
she will uncover various weapons, ranging from the trustworthy bow and pistol
to rifles and shotguns later on. Scattered all around the island you will find
ammo for your artillery, as well as ‘salvage’. Salvage works as a sort of
credit system in the game. Each crate you snap open awards a certain amount of
salvage, which can be used to upgrade Lara’s weapons and other gear at resting
camps (checkpoints). You will also be awarded skill points during the game,
although I never figured out what exactly for. Every once in a while I just
noticed they were there. These are used to upgrade…Lara, for lack of a better
phrase. You can make her deadlier in combat, better at hunting, a faster
climber…whatever.
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| Arrows can also be used to scale drops and pull over unstable structures |
All pretty good, right? I think
so. The game certainly feels good to play for the most part. Aiming is easy and
comfortable, and there is nothing quite as rewarding as a neat headshot,
especially with an arrow. Scaling rocks and large cliffs is also pretty fun,
blighted only by the occasional strange camera angle. The ‘shanty town’ and ‘monastery’
sequences in the middle are breathtaking and had me hooked for hours. Little
changes in the gameplay throughout the game add a nice touch, and solid voice
acting makes it all the more believable. And thank you Square Enix for syncing
the audio and mouth movements of the characters.
Like any game it isn’t perfect,
and two specific areas stand out to me as weaknesses.
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| Pistol in hand, Lara enters the burning village to hunt her enemies |
Sometimes the dynamics don’t
quite make sense. Lara will jump as if she is attached to a rope, sailing
through the air at a strange and unnaturally long arc to reach a cliff on the
other side. And then two seconds later, a similar jump will be no more than two
feet forward, followed by a long fall to death. When halfway through a long
jump in more or less the right direction, Lara will suddenly correct her course
mid-air – like a ball hitting the boundary of a track. It’s not a train smash,
I admit, but it does detract from the game just a little.
Also, I have to say the small
changes to the gameplay I mentioned earlier do become tiresome eventually. How
many times can you navigate Lara down a slippery slope, shooting out barriers
and missing trees? Only a few; then it becomes tedious. The changes are
welcome, but overuse tires them out.
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| Ropes are regularly used to move across larger portions of the map |
As for multiplayer, I had not
tried it. I heard horror stories about the servers being a complete mess. What
I do know is you can be either a survivor or a scavenger, and the two teams
square off in different match types. So nothing ground-breaking (to my knowledge).
I have to add, however, that the
good points of the game far outweighed the bad. Playing through the campaign
was great fun, and I am excited for what the team at Square Enix will do next
for our reborn heroine.
Overall, I am happy I played Tomb
Raider. And you should play it too. It is a well told story with enough game
time to make it worth your cash. Just look past the small bits that aren’t quite
up to scratch and you will have a great time.
