Despite not shooting at a single dinosaur, there are plenty of reasons why Tomb Raider is a perfectly acceptable game that you should probably play. In fact, calling it perfectly acceptable is an understatement. Tomb Raider is a great game from bottom to top, no matter how worn and torn that top gets.
Aiming to go the gritty reboot route instead of continuing a franchise that had all but died off in recent years, Tomb Raider tells the story of young Lara Croft and a group of various archetypes heading to the seas to find the lost city of Yamatai. Thanks to Lara’s brilliant hunch, their ship ends up caught in a vicious storm, and they are shipwrecked on an island.
From there, Lara is bruised, beaten, stabbed, dropped, hung from her feet, shot at, and any other number of things that stand only to build her character from timid young woman in to the ultimate bad-ass. To the game’s credit, it does really well at conveying the human side of Lara croft, even if some of her injuries should probably hamper her ability to continue a lot more than they do.
Tomb Raider is a character story. The underlying plot seems to be pieced together from ideas from old adventure movies – the same that inspired the series to begin back in the 90’s anyway – and is good enough to be exciting, if not overly predictable. The real meat of this game is what Lara goes through from beginning to end. If this weren’t a video game, and there weren’t sections where you are mowing down waves of enemies, it would be real easy to believe the journey that Lara goes on to become the heroine that her name has become synonymous with.
It would be very easy to compare a lot of this game to the Uncharted series. This plays very much like a grown-up platformer with a lot of gunplay. Traversal does not seem to play as large of a role in Tomb Raider, but the late stages of the game seem to use the same interactive cinematic stylings of the Playstation 3 exclusive titles. That being said, the game doesn’t feel like Uncharted to play. The ideas are similar, but Tomb Raider feels different on a gameplay level. Traversal could be a little cleaner, but the gunplay and automatic cover systems are refreshing new takes on the genre.
Also, this is an amazing looking game. I played the 360 version, so I didn’t get the benefits (or drawbacks) of TressFX, but even on the consoles this game looks great. The environments are all really fleshed out and tactile. The horizon is always wonderful to look at as well. The character design is pretty basic (including a Vaas that took some therapy and ate his way to sanity), but most of the time you’re only seeing Lara anyway.
This game may cause nightmares for the obsessive compulsive, however; as the game is rich with collectables. Many of which require you to revisit areas you have already played through the game’s fast travel system after you acquire new gear and abilities. Aside from the journals, which add quite a bit to the story, these aren’t required for anything beyond experience and achievements, from what I have found.
Multiplayer seems to have also been added to this title, and while I didn’t spend a whole lot of time with it I couldn’t find anything about it that sets it apart from other tacked-on multiplayer modes. The game modes seem pretty standard, and aside from the trap element worked in to the levels, it’s pretty much what you’d expect.
I think that this ranks amongst one of the best reboots I have played as of late. It’s not just a reboot of the story. This game could be called anything but Tomb Raider, and you’d have no idea it was even related the Raider games of old. This one isn’t about dual wielding pistols while doing back flips and shooting at tigers. This game is about being taken on and adventure, and it’s exhilarating the whole way through.