Early quick-time events aside, this twelve hour adventure suffers so few missteps that it’s a genuine delight to play, even as the lead gets trampled into the seasoned pro we’ve come to know. Everyone take a bow… the first lady of gaming has returned.
Tomb Raider's reboot is definitely a success delivering a deep, adrenalinic and spectacular game with a new and charismatic Lara Croft. Our main complaint is with the lack of greater scale puzzles and more challenging ones, something the game should have retained from its predecessors.
A few things about the new Tomb Raider come across as wasted effort. The story of Lara’s transformation is sabotaged by the gameplay, and is frankly a little dorky, with an after-school special style multi-ethnic cast filled by lame sterotypes like angry black woman and scrap-happy Scotsman. Likewise a multiplayer mode, which nobody familiar with Tomb Raider would expect or even think to ask for, is competent but utterly unremarkable.
Crystal Dynamics built a gorgeous game, with a lot of good ideas and an astonishing artistic direction. Unfortunately, the game script is poor, and the lack of strong characters and design innovations make the latter part of Tomb Raider a spectacular third person shooter, but one without personality.
It’s really hard to be excited about the future of Tomb Raider after this game. It fails where more successful films and games of its kind succeed: in its characters. The way in which Lara goes from inexperienced to full-on action movie hero survivalist is so jarring that it’s near impossible as a player to remain on the same emotional wavelength as the story. Because of this the rest of the game falters.
This game is amazing! I can't believe it took me so long to play it! It has the best graphics I've seen in a game. Those graphics are backed by super fun gameplay
It was fine. It's really a game for when you feel like "I really wanna play Uncharted, but also don't want to replay an old one." It really does feel like that to me, not to say that I enjoyed it any less. It just didn't stick to me as much as uncharted 4 did, not to say it should or anything. It's good in it's own way.
I've never played the Tomb Raider series before, so I jumped on the reboot series, more precisely on Tomb Raider (2013). The game immediately captivated me with its adrenaline rush. Not much is expected here and you will immediately get the opportunity to play for Lara Croft and there will be something to see at the event. The event is great here. A good arsenal of weapons, thanks to which you will kill your enemies. The locations are good. The story is also nice. For me, a good game that will draw you into Lary Croft's franchise and her adventures. I recommend.
Bad things this game did:
Not an open world like it could have been
Horrible ending
Forgettable story and characters
Crafting (while good) you can't read what the hell you just did
had to find tombs on your own.
one location pretty much
"I hate tombs" **** that line
Good things:
Story: all be it, not brilliant
Combat was OK I suppose but it felt more like a cover shooter half the time.
biggest falt:
NOT ****ING TOMB RAIDER!!!!!!
For a game with so much hype surrounding character portrayal the supporting cast is weak. Sassy black chick serves as the critical voice to all the Lara’s concerns over the islands supernatural qualities. Cute Chinese girl functions as a plot device by being kidnapped like athat guy who always disappears in The Hangover films. Large framed and even larger hearted Hawaiian guy keeps everyone’s spirits up while the island’s indigenous shower them all with fire based projectiles. The supporting cast is a too wide and nobody gets enough screen time or engaging dialogue to make a real presence, the main protagonist included. Lara isn’t well fleshed out either. She displays brief turmoil following her first kill, but she soon goes on to find new and outlandish ways to expose the inner craniums of hundreds more men without showing any further remorse or having the excuse of being drugged up to the eye balls like Far Cry 3’s Jason Brody. The writers attempt to book end the narrative with mournful references to her dead dad, but everything in between reads like the script of your average cookie cutter action flick.
A lot of the narrative’s credibility has been tied to the portraying of Lara in a vulnerable light, but this doesn’t instantly make for thoughtful characterizing. If someone rewrote Mansfield Park and recast Fanny Price as a busty gun toting **** I doubt it’d be met with such appraisal, or perhaps it would; Pride and Prejudice and Zombies did alright, but I digress. While we’re talking literature, it’s worth mentioning that Tomb Raider attempts to embellish it’s narrative with collectable diaries and documents la Bioshock, but they don’t embellish it so much as contain every scrap of what could have made this story interesting. Additionally they’re so monotonously voiced and lengthy that players are like to harvest them for xp and swiftly move on. In further regard to the vulnerability aspect of Lara, it’s a tone that fails to resonate when she’s brushing off twenty foot drops every few seconds like some sort of human bouncy ball.
Average writing aside game play isn‘t particularly jaw dropping, not to say that it‘s altogether poor as it functions fluidly, but remains uninspired. The box art is tag lined “A survivor is born” although survival elements are sparse. An opening tutorial has Lara murder and cook Bambi for nourishment. Later a heavily injured Lara has to abandon aggressive modes of combat, instead making use of throw able objects, bow kills and takedowns. However such scenarios were gimmicky and fleeting when instead they could have been more intricate and permanent features.
More often or not oppurtunities to employ stealth are scripted and conclude with forced fire fights in which players need to hunker down in the same spot to pick off foes from behind cover. You can’t give a player the option to approach combat in their way for so long only to snatch it away. That’s like being invited to a dinner party where the first two courses are comprised of lobster and caviar, but turns out that desserts a massive un-optional sandwich.
A.I isn’t too intelligent, take out one enemy by yanking him with rope and arrow from a platform and his buddy two feet away will assume they’ve went for a spontaneous paraglide session. Enemies endlessly gravitate towards flammable barrels like they were full of winning lottery tickets and the island’s rigged with more explosives than a Wile. E. Coyote cartoon so combat soon becomes pretty, but stale.
Environments make impressive use of vertical spaces, but routes for dispatching enemies are persistently linear. Camera angles are occasionally an issue in woodland areas resulting in the player’s view being obscured by more shrubbery than if they were being tea bagged by a tree beard from Lord of the Rings. Woefully enemies can make better use of the vertical spaces than the player during combat and anytime the opportunity to perform impressive manoeuvres arises the game has the nasty habit of cutting to a cinematic or QTE, alarmed that the players satisfaction levels may be spiking.
Out with combat, tomb raiding is optional activity and when the ’tombs’, read ‘small caves’, are encountered they’re usually preceded by long needless crawls towards an area containing remarkably simple puzzles. The purpose of these is supposedly to give the player a long look at Lara’s arse so there goes you feminist angle.
The undeniably present lack of free will displayed in the game’s set pieces leads to the theory that it may have been Crystal Dynamic’s wish to produce a Tomb Raider movie. The abundant use of slow motion, cut-aways and the way the screen goes film noir when Lara takes damage would certainly suggest so. This in mind here’s the alternative to buying the game. Watch one of the old Angelina Jolie films with controller in hand and press the trigger every time Lara wastes some guy.
SummaryTomb Raider is a re-imagining of the infamous action-adventure franchise and explores the visceral origin story of this character. In the game, Lara Croft ascends from a frightened young lady on her first adventure and emerges as a hardened survivor. With only her sharp instincts and her innate ability to push the limits of human enduran...