Notes whilst watching (to be clear, I want to play and like this game.)

- time to red barrel kill: like 2 minutes (better than Aliens: Colonial Marines, not exactly high tactics)

- She is shiny

- Drake would have caught that ledge, too

- The guard is blind

- Hope it’s been many months of slow progression to be able to run and gun with a shot gun…

- Chuckling at your (we’re humanizing her!) protagonist getting stabbed in the neck—kinda odd

- The shift from “I’m really freaked out” to “Dadada, shotgunning you in the face” is kinda abrupt and strange

- Storytellers: Having a woman find and save another woman is still a “damsel in distress” plot point. It’s no less overused, uninteresting, and sexist. In general, if your enemies are just torturing evil guys that have your friends, your story is not reaching for anything new or interesting. Funnily enough, Uncharted manages to never do this.

- If you’re going for realism, XP markers and points for killing is incongruous with your tone.

- The fire and the lighting is pretty. The water is not.

- Again, shooting a dude looking at everything and then shooting a barrel is not tactical—it’s video games.

- Upside down trap is neat in that getting out is not a quick time event. Shooting upside down is way too easy.

- Kill, kill, kill… squeamish with dead pilot guy? You just murdered 20 people.

- Metroid style gear gating could be cool, but this video does not show the openness

- Ha, looking for a first aid kit, find a lighter, everything’s okay?

Get over it.

This game is going to be mediocre.

Yep, I still think it looks cool. If you're going to nitpick at least point out how rubbish her ponytail moves.

It is slightly off that she screams and moans like a helpless person, your "damsel in distress" argument, but yet performs like a true Terminator when put to the test. Like you said she is cornered on this island and has to kill 100+ people; in her world, real individuals, to stay alive herself. I guess some people just have it in them. It is a great story in concept and it isn't meant to be realistic.

You do realize that you could take any chunk of any game and make a nearly identical list? And your call on sexism, seriously dude?

Oh, so it's a video game. Gotcha.

@rvone: Haha, looks like it. Its not the horror survival simulator people imagined?

@funkydupe who thought that?

The game LOOKS incredible. Not very colorful, but it is graphically impressive and I think they do open environments really well. As for the being squeamish with the pilot, I took that as her seeing someone who wasn't trying to kill her (at least as far as she knows) dead kinda made her uncomfortable. Also it's her being up close with a dead guy and having to touch him, not shooting someone from far away.

Thanks for posting this though, it actually got me really excited for this game. Also, upside down shooting was super cool!

Looks like fun. I'm looking forward to it.

The more I see of this game the more I wanna play it. Don't agree w/most of those critiques either.

oh hey a thread that wants to encourage discussion on the new Tomb Raider based on its merits in gameplay demos. I can't wait to partici-

ugh. Fuck it. I'm out.

I really hope this'll run well on consoles, as it definitely looks like the kind of game that will take full advantage of PCs, but will completely shit all over consoles leaving it with dicey framerate issues and the like. I have a sneaking suspicion that the PS3 version will be kinda crud at the very least.

Anywhoo I love the way this game ebb and flows. It definitely looks like it's taken a cue from the Uncharted games when it comes to animation. And jeez, that death where she gets her neck stuck on a pipe looked nasty. @_@ Without trying to sound overly reductive, this gives the impression of what an Uncharted game spliced with the brutality of The Last of Us would resemble. And I mean that as a compliment!

You know what I really don't appreciate in video games? When your character can be killed in really awful, disgusting ways. Laura getting her head impaled and struggling to get it out doesn't add anything, it just takes me completely out of the game and frustrates me. It's like the game is rubbing in the fact that I fucked up and I deserve to watch my avatar suffer in completely unnecessary ways. It's the same with enemies trash talking you after you die. It has never once contributed positively to a video gaming experience.

I guess I'm thrown by the tone shift. Opening your game with your protagonist trussed up in a creepy cave torture zone and, some hours later, she's running and gunning with a shot gun, ducking below cover, and shooting barrels to progress. It doesn't fit together well. It's not so much realism as consistency. Her character is confusing to me.

Drake gets totally freaked out throughout the game. I'm not saying that's a bad thing. That's human, man or woman. And his military efficiency is somewhat backed by his character. Lara is should be either afraid of touching a corpse or flippantly burning dudes. Being both is odd.

Just out of curiosity, if I didn't say "sexist" but just "overused and uninteresting" would you still be so disgusted? C'mon. Saving your friends trapped by oil baron torture freaks is a B movie premise, not a gritty reboot.

@mistasparkle: Regardless of disagreement, happy to show you something you liked!

My problem with that sequence is that you can't empathize with the character. The story may dictate that the character is hurt badly and desperately needs first aid but you wouldn't know it from the gameplay. Apparently, according to the narrator, she's been looking for first aid the whole time but there's hardly any indication until the cutscene.

The gameplay itself is just so generic and linear, all you're doing is following the only path open to you while gunning down a faceless hoard of inept guards before you get to the cutscene where the actual interesting bits happen...that you have no control over. I squeezed my enjoyment from the Nathan Drake games by trying to enjoy the action flick style story, but really any action movie that goes on for that long is not enjoyable by anyone's standards.

This style of game boring and old hat, game designers need to come up with a new paradigm for action games so they can get past this Mediocre Movie + Mindless Gameplay crap.

So far, the biggest issue I've had with this story is, in one of the trailers or demos or something, she steps in a bear trap.

All right. I can accept getting your stomach impaled by a thousand year old stick and getting up from that. I can accept gaining the will to kill pretty quickly. But you don't use an ankle that's been stuck in a bear trap like it's just a scratch. I just... I don't know, all I can think of is how she should at least have a heavy, painful limp. I thought this was something I'd get used to and just pass off as video games being video games but every time I see this game now, that's what I think of. You wanna know how to abuse a character without completely taking away believability? Watch Die Hard. This... isn't how to do it.

...oh, all right, I guess I'll rattle off some other issues. It looks like it's going to be a linear Uncharted clone with a story that tries to be darker and deeper than it really is, with maybe the occasional puzzle here and there, meaning I'll just kind of keep up with it on the off chance that I'm wrong and mostly forget about it until a five dollar Steam sale if most of the internet and myself turns out right. I doubt that the former will happen.

There, are your cynicism requirements satisfied?

@kierkegaard: No, because I have a very low tolerance for bullshit, and people who tut-tut a completely valid (and more often than not effective) trope in writing bore me. It shows a fundamental lack of comprehension when it comes to the craft of writing fiction. The worst part is that these same people who look down their noses at this trope are the same ones begging for help on creative writing forums because they have no fucking clue how to write a female character let alone not use one in a way they deem "not-sexist."

So basically it's like walking into a room and everyone is planking. You don't strip down and join the droolers, you just walk the fuck back out.

What are you talking about? She didn't seem very affected at all by seeing the dead pilot.

Also, this game looks like it could be quite an amazing Uncharted-style game. And I, for one, am all for that.

@oldirtybearon: Hehe, what are you, the ever-living protector of old storytelling tropes? I'm an english teacher, not a writer. I've been analyzing writing my whole life. Doesn't mean I'm good at it, but it does mean that I take doing so seriously.

I'm not going all objective storytelling critic here. Personally, I find a story where your enemies are faceless evil zealots often far less interesting than where they have some personality and depth. The Avengers is good, in part, because the villain is a flawed, ultimately self-doubting little brother so wrapped up in his own power he can't see how bad a plan he has. Hell, even Gears of War tries to humanize the Locust.

This game is coming from the weird camp that says you need your bad guys to be the baddest, sadistic, torturing dudes ever so that we care about our hero. Ooh, and they captured your friends so go get them back! Just because it's an old technique doesn't mean it's good. It's a standby, a relic, a crutch.

@redbullet685 You're totally right! When he shifts she's a little startled but I was wrong to call it squeamish. My bad!

So, only a few unnecessary nitpicks then? Alright, I'm excited.

So basically, now, the only characters that can be in need of rescue are male because if any female requires rescue it's automatically sexist? Because, frankly, this game does not seem sexist from anything I've seen. And yeah, it plays like a video game. Surprise, surprise. It looks gorgeous and seem like a fun game. Only complaint I have is that head impaling death was extremely unsettling in a bad way. I really don't like death scenes like that. They make me oddly squeamish. Other than that, I might have to pick this up now. Seems like it could be great.

@kierkegaard: Here's the thing, you didn't argue that the trope in use was ineffective, you just said the trope in and of itself was bad. There are shoddy uses of tropes all over the place but the difference between your first point and what you just wrote is the difference between stating an opinion and stating a fact. You don't like the damsel in distress trope and that's fine. I'm not partial to the Magical Negro character that tends to pop up in most race related fiction. The difference here is I know that said character has its place in fiction and I wouldn't try to scrub its existence away or try to shame a writer for using it. In the end it's a tool, the same as anything else.

Better cancel my pre-order then!

I'm guessing the first half of this game will be great, and the second half will be a tiresome slog.

@oldirtybearon: Wow. Did not expect that comparison. The magical negro trope is exactly the kind of thing to get rid of. Black character acts purely as a helper for white character? Come on. You really think that deserves deference? You can only get over mistakes of the past by not doing them anymore.

I recognize that Tomb Raider's story isn't something I like and I was being too judgmental at the top, but you have to admit that there are certain storytelling methods that have no place in modern fiction. What would a magical negro add to a game? What does a naked chick with no character but lots of tits being captured add to a game? It certainly didn't help Dante's Inferno.

The Tomb Raider series lost me the minute Lara Croft stopped fighting raptors and T-Rexes.

It's really the core concept I'm bummed more than anything. This game is yet another gritty series reboot, and I don't like the idea of taking a cheesy, but fun adventure story and making it all serious. It's lame.