Tomb Raider

The original Tomb Raider emerged as a significant and influential early 3D action game, taking the market by storm and spawning an industry of merchandising, sequels, and adaptations. She sprang into existence and seemed to become an instant archetypal touchstone. Something of a pop culture frenzy ensued, with major media outlets covering all aspects of the game.

Everyone knew who she was. That popularity endured even as her games became more and more rote, and the gaming population's view largely soured on the games themselves. In a way, the character had outgrown her original setting. The tired, too-frequent sequels seemed to highlight the weaknesses of the character AND the developers. Little to no effort was made to address the awkward grid-based control scheme, making the games feel dated as other 3rd person titles embraced progress. A few grasping attempts to update and reinvigorate the franchise ranged from nauseatingly awful to pretty cool, but these titles retained undeniable genetics from the older games.

In Tomb Raider (2013), there is a definite sense of ground-up reimagining. Before she killed without remorse and performed death-defying stunts on the daily, Lara was a scholar first and foremost. Her noteworthy findings and radical theories lead her expedition to be stranded on a mysterious island with a sinister underbelly. Before long, the innocent girl has to confront starvation, torture, captivity, the elements, isolation, fanaticism, doubt and mistrust, and more. These heavy concepts hint at a mature and potentially fascinating story, and at the very least it amounts to one of the better basic premises for a Tomb Raider game.

What they came up with might just be the best game in the series, this coming from a day 1 fan of the original. The action merges a satisfying blend of flashiness and stealth, with a cover mechanic that just works. It's a visual tour-de-force on PC. Honestly some of the textures blow my mind. The island in general looks good, with weather effects and a nice diversity of areas to explore. Lara clambers on imploding stuff like Nathan Drake, but due to her stiff and mechanical climbing Uncharted features more fun traversal. The combat variety is impressive, showcasing a plethora of options to dispatch your enemies, or if you want, to sneak past them. Exploration rewards the player with documents that flesh out the backstory, and other trinkets that contribute EXP or salvage. At campsites, the player can allocate earned skill points into a rudimentary tree, making Lara fight harder and live longer. Salvage is used to upgrade Lara's weapons, conferring benefits to fire rate, recoil, and the like. In general, this cycle of exploring to get rewards, then upgrading, is fun enough, but for the next game I hope there's a little more depth to it.

But some significant missed opportunities or blunders left me frustrated that the game isn't as good as it could have been, and in my opinion, SHOULD be.

Like her first kill, her metamorphosis is quick and dirty. She once loved all cute animals, now she cleaves a swath through rabid cultists. Lara occasionally belabors heinous deeds via awkward and brief in-game cutscenes before swiftly returning to genocidal gameplay. An early conversation has Lara describe her first mass-murder as "easy." Still, grievous bodily harm seems to stalk Lara through every window and stream. Indeed, there are any number of Game Over scenarios which result in graphic, genuinely disturbing death animations. Here we see flesh and bone, reflexive grasping and gnashing of teeth, and agonizing futility... it's a raw and powerful depiction of mortality.

Contrasting the buzz kill fatalities is Lara's impervious plot armor. By the end of the game I lost count of the "run down the exploding/collapsing hallway" sequences, which all but consume Lara in shrapnel and gravity but she always survives. There are also scripted events that result in grievous bodily injury and gaping wounds that remain on your character model, but these are apparently cosmetic. For these, she employs hot traction in steaming rivers of sewage, defying exotic meningitises and waterbears to opportunistically colonize her festering gut puncture... I'm not one to toot the alternative medicine bell but hey, you can't argue with the results.

All of this has the effect of distracting from the grim and gory, and lightening the tone in general. There are some unbelievable flat stereotypes in the main cast. There are absurd moments that are presented as emotionally resounding yet fall flat due to these hammy characters. What the game calls "archaeology," is generally closer to looting or antiquities hunting. It's a travesty that flies in the face of peer review and I am disgusted! lol jk, obviously they can't put real science in, but 75% of the exposition in this game has the feel of being dumbed down from some hypothetically cooler or more intense concept. Would it hurt to portray real intelligence in characters that are supposed to be smart? It's hard not to root for Lara though, when she's doing the dirty work only to get blamed at by her friends, her mentor is an eternal skeptic who might be probably evil, and her quaint passion for a controversial archaeological venture that would raise an eyebrow of all but the most dubious of naked archaeologists. She doesn't realize it but it's just El Dorado or Shangri-La all over again, poor dear.

Anyway enough bs. Play it if you like action games or Tomb Raider games!