Tomb Raider (2013)

It's been a long time since I've played a full-fledged Tomb Raider game, so I'll back up a bit and detail the history of the series and what I've played and haven't. I think most of us have played at least part of one of the first two games in the series whether for PlayStation or PC. Tomb Raider and its sequel came out in 1996 and 1997 and became two of the best-selling games of all time not only for it's protagonist's huge breasts, but because they were great games with interesting environments to explore and huge multi-part puzzles that tower over little Lara Croft. People loved them. I played a good chunk of Tomb Raider II but never finished it (I was 11 and the Back-Blog wouldn't be created for another 12 years). Developer Eidos quickly ran the series into the ground with some less acclaimed entries in the years that followed, up through the horribly-received Tomb Raider: The Angel of Darkness in 2003. Granted, I've never played any of those games so I can't speak from experience. In 2006 the series was rebooted by Crystal Dynamics with the release of Tomb Raider: Legend, a game I did play, love, and beat the shit out of. I even completed all of the levels on time-trial mode as I was a bored college student. The game ends on a pretty major cliffhanger, which went unresolved in the next game- Tomb Raider: Anniversary- a remake of the original Tomb Raider from 1996 using Legend's engine; a game that featured none of the new characters or plot points from Legend but still ends with some unresolved threads of its own. The reboot wrapped up with 2008's Tomb Raider: Underworld, which improbably tied together both of the previous unrelated games under one conclusion. With that, Tomb Raider ended its second era of games. Shortly after that came Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light, a non-Tomb Raider-branded co-op game that Stan and I both played together and posted about recently. Finally the series returned for a second reboot in 2013 just called Tomb Raider again, and now I've gotten around to playing it.

 

There were high expectations for the game as Crystal Dynamics had some time to learn from Naughty Dog's similar Uncharted series, and the game also promised a sort of Metroidvania style of play- one huge world to explore with upgrades along the way allowing for access to previously unreachable areas. I thought this worked fantastically. Lara and a crew of researchers are on the hunt for the island of Yamatai, a sort of lost island/civilization myth that's supposedly somewhere off of the coast of Japan. Their ship runs into a huge storm and they find themselves shipwrecked on a mysterious island, guess which one. Since this is a reboot, this is supposed to be Lara's first real adventure, as she finds the island populated by a few hostile groups and must transition from a curious young woman to a cold-blooded killer to stay alive and save her friends. This was a major point of emphasis when the game was being discussed pre-release, although I thought it was handled rather sloppily. Allow me to back up again, here in just my second paragraph, to a time where I thought this was handled very well- Tomb Raider: Anniversary, that remake of the first game of the series. Throughout the game Lara's only ever killing animals who pose a direct threat to her, and since this was 2007 there were a few quick-time events added in where Lara acrobatically hops around to some well-timed button presses. Late in the game Lara catches up with one of the bad guy's underlings, and at a crucial moment he taunts her and says she doesn't have the guts to kill him. The game then jumps into quick-time mode, except instead of being some difficult combo of buttons every prompt has you pull the trigger again as Lara slowly walks forward and proves the bad guy wrong. Damn! I realize that tons of games have you mow down thousands of people from start to finish, but that was the first time I felt like a game made a non-clumsy statement about it. No jumping around, no fun challenge, just pull the trigger and take a man's life. From then on Lara basically goes completely nuts storming a compound and the game ends an hour or two later. Compare that with the most recent Tomb Raider where like 2 hours in Lara takes her first life, she's shocked, and then she turns into a killing machine who acts completely normal in cutscenes the rest of the game. It's not a major complaint, but having seen it done so well by a previous game in the series, I was kinda disappointed. The game is also a little gore-heavy too in a way that would fit better with survival horror games than Tomb Raider- I see Lara accidentally jumped off a cliff, and I get that she will die, but do I really need a scene showing her getting impaled underwater? Seriously, if you mess up she seems to get impaled a lot, which seems pretty Freud-ian to me.

 

Cut-scene tone-deafness aside, I did really love the game. It's a huge island with tons to explore and lots of collectibles to find; I decided to go for 100% and eventually got around to finding everything. There are tombs to raid, although they're more like extra missions and most will only take five minutes or so, but there's a healthy balance between action and exploration here that should keep anyone happy and is along the lines of what I assume the Uncharted games did (I still need to play 2 and 3 there). It's of course visually impressive, getting a nice upgrade going from last-gen systems to the Xbox One; I noticed one brief bug where an enemy got trapped in a wall, but other than that there were no issues. Overall I'm very happy with the game, so Keith, enjoy. The sequel should be out in about a year, so in the meantime I may go back and play some of the games I skipped over from the first series.