I'm not sure how I would have reacted to this game when it came out a
few years ago. The game would have still been extremely glitchy, but
it's hard to say if it would have been as unacceptable then as it is
now. Were the two Crystal Dynamics Tomb Raider games from the previous
generation as buggy as this? They were still fresh in my mind back then.
They probably couldn't be, because the fact that they were actually
totally playable is what saved the series from getting completely
buried. Bringing the series to a new, higher standard of hardware should
have resulted in a more polished experience, not severely less. The
graphics are technically superior and the grappling physics are better,
but that's about the only improvement they made on the last couple
games. Lara constantly clips through pieces of the environment and fails
to leap in the direction you're pointing with alarming frequency. The
camera is easily the worst I've had to use in a game this generation,
and the game's concept of falling damage is amazingly silly.
It's like they're going for a certain level of realism with the series
(physically, anyway, because the plot is filled with winged demon ladies
and magic spells), and Lara can't fall even 20 feet without taking
damage and probably dying, bouncing off the floor in hilarious fashion.
They're not consistent enough to make this work, though. Lara can get
shot multiple times and feel fine after using a health item, but she
can't safely drop from distances other game characters can without a
hitch? While clinging to a wall, she can leap straight up and clear a
distance greater than her own height. No human alive can do this, yet
she gets killed when she drops a couple stories. The combat isn't any
good, either. It's a great example of the kind of combat that exists
only because the developers thought they needed to break up the
platforming and puzzles once in a while. Lara's pretty acrobatic, but
there's no real thrill to the act of fighting. You stay away from
enemies and hold down the fire button until they're dead. They didn't
even bother making any boss fights like they did in previous games. When
the best feature of your combat is a meter which when fully charged
allows you to make it go by faster, maybe you don't need combat at all.
Despite these issues, and they are big ones, I don't hate the game. It
takes you to some nice looking locations and let's you explore
complicated temples filled with elaborate but logical puzzles. Climbing
and jumping is still innately pleasurable, even if Lara can't jump
straight and seems to have terrible balance for someone so athletic. The
plot has a mildly intriguing crazier-Indiana Jones thing going
on. It delves deeply into Norse mythology and how it has impacted
religion throughout history, which is kind of neat if a bit arbitrary
(Okay, so the Mayans were totally just biting on Viking stuff they
found?), and it also wraps up threads from the two previous games,
forming a sort of trilogy. I don't know if they're rebooting the series
again now just because they want to or because of some reaction to this
game, but I guess I'd believe either one. My experience with the game
was much more up and down than it was with the first two, mostly because
of the technical issues. But it does naturally extend from them, and
adhere to a lot of the same ideas that made the franchise interesting in
the first place, and influence modern AAA games like the Uncharted series. Of course, Tomb Raider was itself influenced by other previous games, but that's the incestuous nature of game design.
The game does have two downloadable episodes that continue the plot,
which I have no access to due to them being exclusive to the Xbox 360.
Hiding the ending of the game behind additional paid content and making
paid content exclusive to a subset of your user base both seem like bad
ideas to me, and combining the two is even worse. I watched video of the
episodes online though, and I have to say I don't mind the results here
terribly. They do take place after the ending of the game, but they
feel more like epilogues than the real ending of the game. The ending
that was already there feels properly climactic, and these episodes are
just a bit more content to finally put a couple threads to rest. It
still seems poorly thought out, but I don't really feel cheated. If this
is the last we see of this continuity (I don't really know where Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light fits in), then it ends on a fine note, if a bit of an odd and clunky one.
