Monday 16 February 2015

Tomb Raider 2013

I ended up with this game as an entirely unexpected Galentine's Day present this year. I've been wary of this one for the past few years because it is, of course, yet another reboot of Lara Croft. I didn't have high expectations of it.

The first thing I have to say is that Camilla Luddington has a very distinctive voice, and so I was picturing her in her Californication role every time Lara spoke. Things start off immediately grim as Lara is strung up inside a cave and left to die. When you figure out how to get her down, she's impaled by something sharp on the floor. You have to figure out how to escape a cramped cave full of skulls and bodies while contending with a serious injury and vision akin to how things look before I've put my contact lenses in.

Lara briefly ends up with pink hair in some lighting.


This is all part of Lara learning to be a survivor, hence the game's tagline, A survivor is born. Lara and her archaeological crew are now stranded on Yamatai, a once-real island within the Dragon's Triangle. Anyone taking to the seas or skies finds themselves victim to sudden and mysterious storms.
You very quickly become in desperate need of shelter and food. You soon set up your first camp. These allow you to upgrade your skills and weapons (perhaps if you sit and think about something for long enough around a fire, you become really good at it), and eventually to "fast travel" to other campfires.

Not a good day for Lara. Or any of those skinned people.

I keep ending up with games that put me in crawl spaces with skeletons.

I think the game could have given more practical hunting advice than just "Focus," and it would have been more interesting for Lara to have to craft her own bow rather than just find one. You do, however, get to upgrade the found bow with numerous salvaged bits of junk from around the island. The hunting method doesn't always seem quite proportional to the animal in question. For example, I shot a crab with an arrow and that seemed a bit bonkers. Having said that, past versions of Lara have used guns on scorpions.

It's not going well.

A floating torch in its natural forest habitat.

The gameplay is very unlike that of previous Tomb Raider incarnations. The only thing that struck me as being similar, was shuffling sideways along ledges and having to leap over to the next one. It can be quite unclear what you actually have to do in a given area, although thankfully if you get it wrong, you're likely to restart exactly where you were as the checkpoints are so frequent. The ledge edges aren't all quite as obvious as they have been in the past, but if you get stuck you can hold L2 for "Survival Instincts;" everything turns greyscale and relevant areas are highlighted in yellow or red.

Is that deer meat? Who bloody knows, frankly.

Well you can't eat it like that, can you. These people do a lot of strange things with dead bodies.

You unravel the mystery of the island by finding what appear to be entire journals that people have just left lying around. Listening to enemy conversations as you approach is very important, and if your hearing is anything like mine, you'll want to have the subtitles switched on. The font, though, is almost illegible on a CRT television.
The game doesn't really own the "Tomb Raider" title. At one point Lara even exclaims "I hate Tombs!"
There are various "optional tombs" to be found, and the screen will say "Tomb Raided!" when you complete them, but they are far from being the main point of the gameplay, and they are often discovered during times of urgency when you just have to run by and leave them.
There are numerous little challenges too, but these again tend to present themselves at unsuitable times and situations. You can't really be farting about in the woods looking for mushrooms when a bunch of angry men with torches are searching for you.

Here's a pig with an arrow in it.

Tomb Raider-inspired shenanigans on the family blackboard.

There are a fair few glitches, and other things that don't work quite so well. At one point I landed in some water after a fall, suddenly zipped over to be on land again, and then jerked all the way back into the water. Looting the bodies of some of the Stormguard seemed to cause Lara pain. Torches sometimes remain floating in the air after you've shot their owner. There's a point where you need to use a grenade launcher, but there is simply not the room to handle the kickback and you land in some flames.
Even though the enemies change, the main point of the game is pretty much fighting long streams of men, and this can get a bit boring. You also come across some repeated enemies with riot shields which are a pain the ass to kill.


As much as I hate to admit it, I really liked this game. I just think they should have invented a new heroine instead of rewriting Lara for the billionth time. If they wanted the assured audience of a franchise, they could have made her Lara's daughter or something. But maybe I'm just being an old fuddy-duddy.

The scenery is absolutely amazing, especially the background of the palace standing tall above the shanty town. I found the aesthetic of repurposed aeroplane wrecks and grass growing through the floors of crumbling concrete buildings, really appealing
The sheer number of dead bodies all over this island is macabre but also kind of fascinating. As a chandler I also can't help but wonder how they made all those candles. Imagining somebody having to actually melt, pour and set each one of them was almost enough to give me a headache.

After the end credits, you can press "Continue" and resume exploring the island to deal with unfinished challenges and tombs, pretty much to your heart's content. The weather is lovely, after you dealt with that whole thing. Areas are also seemingly free of enemies, with the exception of places that you missed the first time around. I do feel, though, that the opening scene of the game was never really resolved. The person responsible for hanging Lara up in a cave did not strike me as belonging to any of the enemy groups.


This is the gaming equivalent of a book I can't put down. It's hard to stop playing and there isn't really a good quitting point. There is a constant sense of peril, whether from the fragile structures, disgruntled animals, other people, your own hunger or the creepy ruins. This game made me say "Holy fuck!" out loud a lot. Things get so intense in places that you don't even know where you're leaping, but you just keep doing it.
I loved it, really.




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