Tomb Raider

I had a couple goals for the Steam Summer Sale this year. There was a lot of anticipation, controversy, and then rave reviews for the most recent Tomb Raider game, so it was on the list of games I had to buy if it came on sale. It did and I did. I don’t regret it at all. There will be some minor spoilers in this discussion. I don’t talk about any major plot points, but if you don’t want to know anything about where the game goes, avoid reading farther.

Classically, Tomb Raider has been on consoles and does not generally require a lot of twitch shooting so I decided to play with an XBox360 controller. It worked great. The controls are very tight; everything working as I would expect it to, and I very rarely had instances where the game did not perform the action that I expected it to given my input nor did I ever really fumble with the controls, forgetting how to execute something. Lara’s movement is quite fluid, using context sensitive button presses to execute her various options. I did have trouble understanding some of the combat contexts sometimes, I still don’t know how to execute someone in a dodge-strike attack rather than just stabbing their knee. This is a very minor gripe though, every time I was in melee combat it was because I decided to be. I never felt like I had to be in the situation where I needed to get an execute, but only managed to hit someone in the knee.

The game does a great job setting the characters up. Lara is a greenhorn to this exploration business, but it is definitely in her blood. The more experienced in the group don’t completely trust her but she has great intuition. This really solidifies the feeling of barely surviving through the ordeal that is to come. Her first weapon is a makeshift bow and arrow that she has made out of the local vegetation, reinforcing the survivalist attitude. I was disappointed at how quickly the game shifts away from this feeling. Getting a pistol, given the situation on the island, makes some amount of sense, but Lara quickly gains a shotgun and automatic rifle. As far as I’m concerned, if you’re carrying a shotgun you’re no longer in survival mode. I made an effort to preserve the survival feeling by using the bow as more often than anything else, but if you give me a shotgun I’m going to blow some people up. I would have appreciated a much slower transition from survival to offensive. Lara very quickly becomes a mass murderer in this game with a fairly high body count – easily over 100. This doesn’t seem to fit with the tone set at the beginning.

The game makes a compelling argument for Lara’s actions. I was definitely drawn into the story, and the virtual killings didn’t seem too ridiculous while I was playing. However, I was frequently pulled out of the story by the collection mechanic. Each area in the game has at least three different sets to collect. Now I realize I could just ignore these, and play through as if they weren’t there, but they are always in your face. You find a map and it shows you where they are, you pull up your menus and it tells you how many you’ve found, you collect one and it tells you you will get a bunch of experience if you complete the set. This all pulls the player out of the story and gives the player chores around the island. It ruins immersion. I think taking the metrics out of the game would have been enough to preserve the immersion. This is my biggest gripe with the game, it pulled me out of this beautiful world that I was trying to survive in to tell me, “Hey! Go find that thing over there!” Don’t do that. If I find that thing over there, great! If I don’t, oh well, it wasn’t a part of my story. However, I really liked one of the collections and it tied into the Tomb Hunter theme really well.

I didn’t notice it too much while playing but looking back, the game’s platforming puzzles were a bit weak. There are segments that are definitely platformer puzzle like but none of them seemed to have failing conditions. They were all remarkably straight-forward after all of the components had been seen. The game masked this quite well by making the environments fairly interesting feeding the exploration desire. However, there weren’t places where trial-and-error would have produced many (or any) errors or mechanisms to decipher. I think the game went right up to the line that would have made segments puzzles, but didn’t cross it.

The game wonderfully wraps back around to the other tomb raider games, sticking in bits of nostalgia here and there to really give Lara an origin story. Even though it was obvious what was going on, it still felt subtle. This is definitely a game to play, and if you’re a Tomb Raider fan a must play.