Lara Croft has come out of the darkness, and brings with her a new light. Gone are the double pistols, double D breasts, and double entendres. Lara is much younger, and as a result, she is unsure of her skills. Making this journey as much about discovery, as it is about self-discovery. Tomb Raider is back, and in a big way.
Title: Tomb Raider
Publisher: SquareEnix
Developer: Crystal Dynamics
Platform: Xbox 360, PS3, PC
Genre: Action/Adventure, Third Person Shooter
Release Date: March 5, 2013
Price: $59.99, $49.99 (respectively)
Rating: M
During the hay-day of the Playstation One, Tomb Raider was the king (queen?) of the third person action adventure games. Personally, I played the first two and loved them. Somewhere about the third game, my desire to play as Lara Croft fell off, and I really never went back. Lara languished in many MANY more sequels, along with a couple attempts to reboot the franchise, but nothing every took hold. After “Tomb Raider: Underworld” came out in 2008 to mixed reviews, Lara went silent for a few years. When the game reemerged in 2010 with a new image, it had a completely new vision of how to present Lara Croft: Tomb Raider.
Tomb Raider (2013) is not only a reboot of the franchise, it is a reboot of the character that is Lara Croft. From the very beginning of the new Tomb Raider, it’s apparent that Lara is not the Lara of the old games. She is much younger and just starting out as a relic hunter. She and a small crew aboard the Endurance (appt title for a boat given what she is about to go through) are off on a voyage to the island of Yamati in the “Dragon’s Triangle” off the coast of Japan. Lara and her crew are in search of holy ruins from the lost kingdom of Yamati. When they reach what they believe are the waters around the Devil’s Triangle, the ship is lost in violent seas and rocks. Lara struggles to reach her friends on the beach but is knocked unconscious and kidnapped. This is where her adventure truly begins.
Lara is awoken by strange sounds and finds herself hung upside down, in a room that can only be described as; grotesque. Freeing herself from her bindings, and her captors, Lara finds her way out of the cave and manages to make contact with a few of her fellow shipmates. Even after going through everything so far, she has yet to see the true horrors that the island of Yamati holds. This is how Tomb Raider begins. Quickly letting the player know that this is not the Tomb Raider everyone was used to.
As the story moves along at a pretty rapid pace, Lara and her friends are put through all manner of tortuous events. Lara discovers that the island is seemingly protected by storms that appear quickly, destroy anything in their path, and disappear just as quick. Lara must figure out how to get herself and her surviving friends off the island. To do so, she must protect herself, defeat a mad man, all the while trying to unravel the mystery of the island.
From the jump, it was easy to tell this was going to be a very different kind of Tomb Raider. Lara is much younger, she is unsure of her skills, and working with a team too. Not the loaner, expert killer of tigers (and T-Rexes) that some people remember. The game sets the mood early by putting Lara through hell. She is beaten, bloodied, afraid, and alone to start her quest. As she makes her way around the island of Yamati she learns skills that will help her survive and help in rescuing as many of her friends as she can.
While the game is called “Tomb Raider” because of the main character, as well as brand recognition, there isn’t a lot of “raiding” going on. There are “tombs” to be sure, but they are more like challenge rooms than massive locations to explore. Each Tomb presents basically a single puzzle for the player to solve, and upon solving it, given a small cache of helpful items and EXP.
Aside from climbing walls, jumping from crumbling environments, and solving simple physics puzzles, Lara does have to shoot a lot of dudes. The shooting in Tomb Raider is very well done. At her disposal Lara can use the usual weapons, (pistol, rifle, shotgun) but she also has a climbing ax, and a bow. All of the weapons are upgradeable via “salvage”. Salvage is found both on enemies, as well as animals and in crates. Collect enough of it, and Lara can craft new accessories for her weapons. It’s a simplistic version of the standard RPG crafting, but it works.
Lara may start out as a scared girl deeply disturbed by her first kill, but she winds up being a fearsome killing machine by the end. Over the duration of Lara’s adventure, she earns EXP in order to better become the adventurer/killer she ends up being. EXP is earned through making strategic kills, as well as discovering artifacts, documents, and (naturally) raiding tombs. Spec’ing out Lara is done at camp fires that dot the island and act as a sort of save/safe point in the story. Lara can earn skills in scavenging for resources, weapon skills, as well as just straight up murdering fools. I was able to almost completely max out all categories by the end of my first play through.
Finally, Tomb Raider looks, sounds, and plays beautifully. The vistas that Lara discovers are some of the best looking places I have seen in video games. Very moody, and all look like they had once been inhabited by a living breathing society, albeit a rather horrendous one. The mood is also crafted well in the soundtrack. Music never over-powers the actions on screen and sometimes feels so natural it’s almost unnoticeable. And while Lara’s constant “Okay” and grunts and groans stick out in the beginning of the game, they become less apparent as time wears on.
I ran into a couple issues while playing through Tomb Raider but they could have been more localized to my machine and play style than a wide spread problem. I had a lot of stuttering while playing, mostly when achievements would pop. Several of the bits of dialog that were spoken over documents or relics seemed as though they were at 2x the speed. Finally I had an issue figuring out why I couldn’t get my completion percentage to 100%. As it turned out it was an area of the map, one of the only ones, that didn’t have a fast-travel camp. That said, it didn’t stop me from playing, and Tomb Raider is one of the few games I took the time to not only finish, but complete.
Tomb Raider(2013) is vastly different from the original game back in the mid-to-late 90’s. With a much younger Lara just setting out on her first real adventure, it’s a nice way to get back (or kick off) the series. While I was a little let down by the ending, and the over all Scooby Doo vibe the story gave me, when the Lara uttered her last word in the game, I was PUMPED. I can’t wait to see what Crystal Dynamics has in store for her next adventure. Let’s just hope that they market it a little better next time around.
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