I have bought a lot of video games; what I haven’t done is beat a lot of video games. For whatever reason, I’ve decided to go back and give some of these games another shot: this is the Backlog.

This Week’s Game: Tomb Raider

There’s a lot to be said about Square Enix’s revival of the Tomb Raider, not all of it complementary. But that has more or less been the case for the entire history of that franchise, except for a few games (Angel of Darkness) that are pretty universally thought to have been a bit shit. I don’t have a whole lot of history with the franchise, but I was always casually interested in it. I never could find a good entry point to the series, having grown up without a PSX, but eventually I was given my chance with the release of Tomb Raider: Anniversary. That was an interesting game (and yet another in my backlog), but it didn’t really grab me. This reboot, however, commanded my attention.

So the most obvious change to the franchise is the fact that Lara Croft is no longer a hot-pants wearing, buxom beauty. I would venture to say that this particular Croft is a little more realistically proportioned, but she certainly is one of the most durable and unfortunate. Shit just constantly is going wrong for this poor girl, almost to the point of absurdity. There’s a lot of impaling that goes on in this game, and I have to say it is the sort of subtext that makes me squint a bit and go “hmm…”

The story is interesting in a Lost sort of way, with the centerpiece being the growth of Lara from a frightened, damaged girl into an hurricane of destruction. Er, and a confident woman. That too. The first time that Lara kills someone, the game makes a big deal of it. It even makes a big deal of the next few times she kills someone, with her gruff mentor telling her that it was either her or them. After that, though, Lara just starts wasting fools, and the game kinda shrugs as if to say, “well, this is what you do in games, right?” The combat is satisfying, don’t get me wrong, but after making the first few encounters so nerve-wracking and morally fraught, the fact that she’s soon merrily setting people on fire and shooting arrows through their eyes makes it all ring a bit hollow. Lara’s transformation from hesitant heroine to badass is, from a gameplay standpoint, almost instantaneous. It makes the cutscenes where she is still scrambling to survive a bit incongruous with the rest of the game.

Actually, aside from her status as an ass-kicking savant, a lot of Lara’s animations imply her inexperience, from the way she flails through the air with her climbing axe when jumping for a far cliff-wall to the way that she is constantly wobbling and almost falling when crossing a gap on a branch or narrow pathway, this is a Lara Croft who didn’t exactly train for any of the shit that has gone down around her. She just happens to be an expert shot who kills with a ferocious intensity.

What I’m saying is that I think Lara Croft is a serial killer.

Stepping away from all that, the game plays great and it looks amazing on my computer, in spite of the fact that I cannot activate the fabled TRESSFX. What I can do is pull 60 FPS, which is a sight to behold. This is a great game, and I don’t know why I haven’t spent more time with it. I’m gonna try to buckle down and beat this one before the next one comes out.

That said, if it goes on sale on the XBox One, I might pick it up there. This is a game good enough to get twice.