Tomb Raider

With the latest, freshly rebooted Tomb Raider game, a lot of emphasis is placed on rebuilding Lara Croft as a character. Lara begins the game insecure, inexperienced, and indecisive. She was created as someone for the player to empathize with. In order to hammer this point in, Tomb Raider takes every opportunity to abuse the living hell out of Lara. The game more or less begins with her dropping straight onto a conveniently place piece of rebar and getting pierced through the side. I consider myself to largely desensitized to awful things on the internet and video games, but at a certain point in the game, even I felt the latest bone crunching drop onto the unforgiving ground was a bit excessive.

Whether that is considered a success in terms of creating a connection between game and player or gratuitous character abuse is something I haven’t decided yet, but either way, it was effective. While Tomb Raider isn’t absent of ludonarrative dissonance, a big fancy term people like me use in order to at least feign legitimacy that basically means gameplay and narrative that convey different things, it does much better than the very similar Far Cry 3 did. Jason Brody goes from pissing his pants and scrambling through the forest to a tower climbing, outpost annihilating white messiah by the end of the first story mission. He’s also a stereotypical unlikeable privileged frat boy who spouts lines like, “This is awesome!” far too frequently for the situation he’s in. He’s not supposed to be enjoying himself, but he does and that makes him and his story dumb as a post. Meanwhile, in Tomb Raider, you won’t get too far before another reminder that Lara is in mental and physical anguish and wants nothing more than to rescue her friends and leave.

One of the failed attempts to merge gameplay and narrative is the game’s focus on survival. Characters speak about survival, actions are justified because of survival, and the words “A Survivor is Born” are inexplicably displayed in the middle of the screen just before the fade to credits, but at no point in my time playing Tomb Raider did I feel I was struggling to survive. There are two resources in the game, experience and salvage. Hunting and gathering mechanics exist, but they only yield those two resources, and it is neither required, nor time efficient to pursue either except incidentally. Would I want a hunger and medicine mechanic like found in Metal Gear Solid 3? Maybe not, but I do find it weird for a game to emphasis survival as much as it does without having anything remotely resembling survival as a mechanic. Simply having a health bar that replenishes through hunting and gathering instead of regenerating health that replenishes through me running in circles, scrambling in the dirt like a mad woman could have done wonders in patching up that one bit of disconnect.

Instead, survival is represented in classic Metroid style. Lara begins with nothing and over the course of the game, collects and upgrades all her equipment to further aid the attempt at a gentler, more believable path from defenseless victim to feared killing machine. While this is always a welcome mechanic in my book, most of the items made inaccessible until later equipment levels are minor and unrewarding, which, to me, takes the fun out of backtracking and seeking out these things. A handful of generic salvage and a bit of experience is not worth the trouble of going back for. Tomb Raider deserves credit for not being nearly as linear as expected to be based on its proudly promoted quick time events and cinematic set pieces, but the reward for straying from the game’s set path is minimal and the game and narrative both scream at you to press forward, the narrative by means of having very few moments where someone’s life isn’t in peril, and the game by constantly reminding you to use “Survival Instinct”, a vision mode that grays out everything not gameplay relevant and gives all objects you can interact with and your next destination a golden glow, whenever you decide to explore a bit.

The general feel of the character and equipment progression mechanics is solid and enjoyable. Lara gains experience points in order to unlock skills and collects salvage in order to upgrade her equipment. Major equipment upgrades that open up previously blocked paths are tied in with the game’s story. While there is nothing really wrong with any of it, the game’s systems feel as if they could have been more rewarding. I didn’t get excited about each weapon modification until the last couple, and certainly not excited enough to go back to previous areas and find bits of salvage 10-30 at a time in order to buy the 350 salvage damage upgrade for the pistol I never use. The skills felt similarly lackluster, as out of the 30 or so available, only two or three felt like they changed the way I played the game in any meaningful manner. While there is a big difference between the Lara you start out playing and the Lara you control at the end of the game, the transformation feels like continental drift, and I prefer spikes of power separated by plateaus in order to enjoy them to steady rises.

The combat in Tomb Raider successfully makes almost all of your weapons feel useful. At its best, you are fluidly switching between them depending on the enemy and situation, and it feels comfortable, effective, and satisfying. I preferred to use the bow as much as possible because, despite being more or less the same as firing a gun, it feels just different enough to be a nice change of pace. It is also the weapon that allows for a stealth approach to the game, which I prefer to the hide behind waist high cover corridor shootouts that the game degenerates into once you break stealth.

As good as I think the combat in Tomb Raider is, I think there’s too much of it, especially in the last third of the game. Once you screw up in your attempt at stealth kills and slipping by enemies undetected, there is no avoiding a lengthy shootout in order to continue as every enemy in that set area instantly knows where you are and begins firing on you, sometimes spawning even more enemies to join in on the fun. It is a shame, and I would have preferred a way to regain stealth and try again without reloading, but Tomb Raider isn’t a stealth game, though maybe it should be.

The environments and world have a good amount of depth, but again, there isn’t much worth looking for. There are a ton of collectibles, and maybe a point to seeking them out besides completionism that I don’t know about, but without a good reason to do it, I’m not the sort of gamer who enjoys clearing my map of pesky undiscovered item icons unless the game is called Assassin’s Creed. Each area contains an optional tomb or two, which is basically an area with a single environmental platforming puzzle that rewards a nice chunk of experience points and a map of the area’s collectibles. The puzzles are mostly pretty good, but since each tomb is just a single puzzle and takes a fair bit of time to reach, it is another aspect of the game that I find good, but not good enough to actively seek out.

Overall, Tomb Raider is a solid game that can go on to have a sequel I’m either really excited for or will avoid like the plague, depending on which direction they choose to go with. The progression systems in place are fine, if not fine tuned to tickle the pleasure centers in my particular brain, and the combat is good, but I’d love for ways to minimize it. The tombs were a bit too much of an afterthought and could have been featured more prominently if instead of littering them all over the place, they strung a few together and offered a nice juicy incentive at the end for completing it. Still, not a bad way to restart a series.