Tomb Raider

Quick Summary

Tomb Raider is a 3D, third person game developed by Core Design, released in 1996. Players play as Lara Croft, an adventurer commissionned to explore a series of ruins and caves in Peru in order to find an ancient artifact. The gameplay largely revolves around careful exploration of levels, platforming challenges,and third-person shooting. Levels are typically set in ancient ruins, cavernous natural settings, or a combination of the two, and contain traps, puzzles and enemies. While many of the enemies in Tomb Raider only have melee attacks, some can also attack Lara from a distance.

The game's levels do not have music, but instead often are fairly silent or use ambient sound-effects to produce a sense of atmosphere. Visually, the game tends towards a dark look, with many levels having large areas shrouded in darkness, and a general preference for brownish yellows , black and grey, and dark blues, though the game also employs some more colorful environments as well, especially towards the end.

Review (Steam Version) (No Spoilers)

Overall, Tomb Raider is a great game, but parts of it really haven't aged well. The game came out just as many developers were embracing fully 3D environments, but since this approach to videogame design was so new, many technical and conceptual problems stand out among the games of this time period. Developers have sinced learned a variety of tricks and design solutions, and so some of the problems which plague Tomb Raider really just don't exist anymore. But although parts of the game seem a bit clumsy by current standards, this can't obscure the fact that Tomb Raider is a very well designed game which definitely holds up as a classic of the mid-to-late 90s.

One of Tomb Raider's main problems is the way that Lara controls. The game not designed for use with analog sticks. Lara moves forwad or backwards by pressing up and down respectively, and she rotates left or right by pressing left or right, respectively. Unfortunately, Lara rotates fairly slowly, and so this aspect of her movement doesn't feel especially fluid, making quick movements very hard to achieve. Correspondingly, the game rarely focuses on speed, with much more emphasis on careful and attentive movement. Otherwise, the controls are pretty good, with Lara being able to do a bunch of cool moves, including some pretty awesome rolls and sideways and backwards flips.

Another big problem is the way the camera operates. Very often the player will find the camera is placed in a way that makes it difficult for them to see what they want to be looking at. It helps that you can adjust the camera by pressing a "look" button, but even this can be hard to use in certain scenarios, and Lara cannot move while your looking around. The combination of the akward camera and slow rotation make controlling Lara with speed and precision far too difficult. The player will find themselves running into walls and falling off edges for no other reason than there are these basic problems.

A third big problem is combat. Lara auto-aims when she is holding guns, as long as she is generally facing towards an enemy. There is no other way for the player to really aim at an enemy besides just trying to make sure that Lara is facing them with her guns out. This takes away from combat being a skill-based challenge, and one would think that it would make combat all too easy. Unfortunately, Lara rotates slowly, making it difficult to continually face a moving enemy, and the unwieldy camera makes it hard sometimes to see where an enemy is, and if Lara moves around quickly, the way the camera moves with her can be extremely disorientating. Often the best strategy is just to place yourself in a position where enemies can't get to you, and pick them off from that point. Lara can also shoot while jumping, and combat is most fun when you jump around and shoot, as this feels more like a challenge of skill. While combat is an important ingredient to the game's design, it's fairly dissapointing overall. It's too hard to be precise, and so I found myself just picking the easiest, cheapest way to deal with enemies. For tough enemies, I often found myself taking tons of damage, despite my best efforts to move around in a way that was difficult to target.

Despite these major problems, Tomb Raider still holds up as a great game, at least, for a certain type of player. The biggest challenge in Tomb Raider is often being patient, and anybody looking for fast-paced action will probably not enjoy this game very much, especially since the combat is not that good. Of course a certain amount of patience is required to deal with the above-mentioned problems. Since Lara rotates slowly, the player must pace themselves. Since the camera can be akward, players must take the time to play with it and adjust their position such that they get more optimal angles. And since combat is also akward, players usually must focus on positioning themselves in a difficult to reach area and take their time picking off an enemy from a distance. But patience is required not only because of these problems, but because of the general design of the gameplay. In particular, the game places a great deal of emphasis on thorough exploration and investigation, and slow-paced, careful platforming challenges.

At pretty much every step of the game, players must be prepared to scour around an area at length, looking for every possible pathway, and every way to open up closed-off pathways. Lara often opens up new pathways by pulling a lever in some other area of the level. It can be unclear at times just what a player has actually done by pulling some specific lever, or the pathway they have opened may be fairly distant, leading to a fair amount of backtracking and re-checking. Areas can also be hidden from view, or simply difficult to see, forcing the player to very methodically scan every area, examing it's layout and looking for possible pathways. I actually largely enjoyed this aspect of the game. You can't take any part a level for granted, since relevant paths or objects can be hidden all over the place. This forces the player to really take in their environment and get to know it intimately.

Also, since the game doesn't really allow for fast movement, the platforming challenges focus on carefully surveying a gap before making a jump. Players will find themselves making slight adjustments to Lara's position to make sure they are facing the exact right direction, and have the right amount of space between them and the surface they want to grab or land upon. More often than not, rushing through a platforming section will lead to Lara's swift demise, rather than a swift arrival at your goal. Thus the platforming focuses not on quick precision, but rather on looking at a series of platforms and carefully deciding how to navigate among them. Ultimately, it's more about spatial reasoning than the actual act of jumping, since once you know how to make a jump, it's usually not hard to execute it properly. The game rarely actually pushes you to jump around quickly, and when it does, it can be pretty frustrating. There was, as far as I can recall, only once section though where I really thought this was a problem. Overall, the platforming challenges were slow-paced but enjoyable.

I have to say, though, that at a certain point my patience with Tomb Raider started to wear thin. As my frustration with the camera, controls and combat grew, I found I had less patience to spare for the slow-paced exploration and platforming. While at the beginning of the game I really enjoyed slowly taking in each level and trying to investigate every nook and cranny, after about eight or nine levels I started to find myself growing frustrated with the pacing. I think this problem largely wouldn't have come up if not for the big three problems I mentioned earlier. If the controls, camera and combat were better, the game would be more engaging. But struggling with these problems at a slow-pace makes them even more frustrating. Also, at a certain point you start to feel like the game has shown you most of it's main tricks, and the levels can start to feel less fresh compared to the start of the game. The last few levels make up for this, though, as they are really well-designed, and I found my enthusiasm did pick up again towards the end of the game. There's just a bit of a hump to get over about three quarters of the way through.

The main thing that makes the levels in Tomb Raider fun to slowly explore and navigate through is the game's excellent aesthetic sensibilities. I loved the way that each of the levels looked, and the game has tons of atmosphere and a variety of different locales. The game largely eschews the use of music, instead opting for often haunting, echoing ambient sounds that make the levels feel large and mysterious. I often really felt like I really was deep in a dark cave, or discovering an ancient ruin. Often as you approach areas, they are shrouded in darkness, only slowly being revealed as you near, again adding a sense of mystery and darkness. Further, the developers were really adept at mixing together the cave environments with crumbing ancient ruins. The overall feel is that Lara is exploring forgotten, lonely places, abandoned by humanity and re-claimed by nature. It's an amazing aesthetic, and is, in my opinion, the biggest strength of the game. Although the blocky polygonal graphics might be a turn-off for some, I don't think they can obscure the distinct creative vision that guided this game. Tomb Raider constantly impressed me with it's amazing-looking and sounding environments, and is probably one of the best games I have ever played in this regard.

It's this element of the game that makes it a real joy to explore, and which compensates for the big problems. In the end, for me this game was primarily an aesthetic experience, since the gameplay was either not so great, in the case of combat, or else was largely good because it was integrated into this aspect of the game, in the case of the exploration and platforming. Without this atmosphere and haunting environments, I don't think Tomb Raider would be all that great. But with them, it really shines as a special game that is worth checking out. The enviroments are just so cool that I was often quite excited to explore them in their full depth, and there were a few times where I just couldn't wait to pick up the game again to see what would come next.

The story in the game, on the other hand, isn't all that interesting. It's mostly conveyed by rather generic action-movie like cut-scenes, and, to be honest, sometimes it just wasn't very clear what exactly was happening. By the end, I got the basic gist of what the plot was, and personally I found it all to be pretty dumb, but largely unobtrusive to the overall experience of the game.

One thing I did find pleasantly surprising though, is the character of Lara. Lara Croft has been a point of contention, as some feel that the design of her body reflects an unrealistic and offensive objectivizing male fantasy of the female form. This is definitely true, though how a collection of polygons such as Lara could really serve as an object of sexual fantasy is kind of beyond me. What I was happy to see was that Lara doesn't come across as a bimbo at all. She seems intelligent, aggressive and independent, and thus in these regards, is a pretty cool female protagonist. With a more realistic, less male-gaze determined body, I would be really impressed, but my expectations were actually much lower than what I got, so that was a nice addition to the game for me.

In the end, Tomb Raider may not be as great as it was when it first came out, but it's still a great game that is rewarding to play. Mainly, I was impressed by the aesthetics of the environments, which are some of the best I have ever seen in any game. Though hampered by a host of fairly frustrating problems, the ingenuity of the developers shines through. For the patient, aesthetically-minded gamer, this is a game to check out.