GAME REVIEW: TOMB RAIDER

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.