This is a new Lara for a savvier and more inclusive generation. Gone are the enormous breasts, pouty lips and huge dual pistols. Realism, grittiness and simply surviving are the themes here, creating the first truly mature entry in the Tomb Raider franchise. Our new Lara is a 21-year old university graduate, assisting in the filming of a famous TV archaeologist’s show as he sails round the world. Searching for the mythical country of Yamatai, the ship runs into a horrendous storm, and Lara and co. are washed up on a desolate island. Lara is split up from her friends and learns the hard way that the island is home to a bunch of psychopathic, stranded pirates. Wham bam, you’ve got yourself a game premise.
It’s striking right from the start how stark and real Tomb Raider feels. Lara is not an all-powerful superwoman. She is scared, upset and obviously extremely distressed by the situation – the reaction of a real person. The opening hours of the game can seem at times like they exist for no reason but to
torture Lara Croft in various ways. The first five minutes have her falling onto a metal rod, impaling her through the torso, the player having to mash a button to pull it out. It’s extremely powerful, and difficult to watch, reminiscent of the famous finger-cutting scene in Heavy Rain. This is a world where violence isn’t shrugged off and forgotten about – it’s real, it hurts, and it’s horrific. Lara’s
default pose for several hours afterwards is her clutching at her wounded side, wincing in pain. Lara’s initial struggles do a great deal to endear her to the player. As she finally creates a bonfire to settle down for the night after escaping immediate danger, you realise that you already, after a mere ten minutes, care far more about this Lara than you ever did for previous, less realistic iterations. She
seems far more like a real person than a caricature, and it’s testament to Crystal Dynamics’ storytelling that you want her to succeed and overcome the horrible situation she finds herself in.
The opening hour is the most muted and perhaps the best. Lara is totally alone, wounded and hungry, hunting deer with a makeshift bow for something to eat. It’s a great way to get to grips with the core game mechanics, and learn the intricacies of the bow, which is going to be your best friend in the struggles to come. Lara is an athletic lass and can jump, climb and run with the best of them, despite her hastily-treated injuries. A key mechanic is her “survival instinct.” A quick tap of L2 drains all colour from the screen briefly as points of interest and objective markers are highlighted. It’s a neat trick that leaves the screen uncluttered from markers and such until you need a quick reminder of where to go.
Make good use of both instincts and bow and Lara bags a deer for some tasty eating. Not even this goes smoothly in the “real world” of this new Tomb Raider. The deer lies there, in pain, slowly dying, almost a parallel to the situation Lara finds herself in. She apologises to the deer and shakily finishes it off. It’s another great example both of how young and innocent this Lara is, and how different she is from her former self. The old Ms. Croft gunned down all manner of endangered species with
nary a backward glance.
Shit is soon hitting fans again though and Lara finds herself creeping through an enemy camp, searching for her friends. This is where the infamous “rape scene” occurs, the subject of much controversy in the press before the game’s release. In reality there is nothing to warrant the attention – a bad guy grabs Lara and holds her in a threatening and intimidating way, telling her how she’s about to die – that’s it. It’s unpleasant and disturbing, as it should be, but nothing specifically implies rape or the attempt of it.
A fight with her captor follows and one gunshot later, Lara has taken her first human life. This scene is extremely brutal, to excellent effect. The man lies on the ground, spluttering and choking with half his face missing as he dies. It manages to be far more graphic than your standard “exploding headshot” videogame trope, hammering home the realism of it all. Lara has killed someone, and even in self-defence, that is a terrible thing. Reflecting on it later, when asked if it was hard, Lara reflects that what is scary is “how easy it was.” It only gets easier From here, the game starts to throw human enemies at you, albeit slowly at first. Past Tomb Raider games have been puzzleheavy, 3D platformers with crap combat thrown in. This one is very much the opposite – gunplay is the order of the day, with a healthy dose of platforming to break it up and only the odd head-scratching puzzle. When it comes to comparative gameplay, the title that comes to mind is Uncharted. Tomb Raider offers a similar blend of action, platforming and theatrical set-pieces, albeit with a much darker tone.
We say gunplay, but the weapon you will be obviously spending the most time with is the classic bow and arrow. Allowing for stealthy kills and precise headshots, picking bad guys off with the bow is a thrill. Along with Far Cry 3, Tomb Raider is set to prove that bows are back in a big way. Can we have a Hawkeye game, please?
Lara only finds three other weapons in her journey – a pistol, a shotgun and an old machine gun (four if you count her ice-pick climbing tool). Four weapons may not sound like a lot, but each serves a distinct purpose and it fits with the realistic feel of the game to not overload Lara with weaponry. Players collect scrap metal and other resources from a variety of sources through the environment, from crates and supply stashes or looted from dead foes. These resources go towards upgrading your
weapons, increasing damage and accuracy, all standard stuff. Lara also finds key weapon parts that, once collected, actually transform the weapon into a shiner new model.
The bow, for example, transforms from a basic wooden affair into a more powerful recurve bow, eventually becoming the enormous competition bow. The machine gun goes from a WWII-era relic to a modern assault rifle. It’s a smart system. Upgrading your weapons into new versions feels like obtaining a whole new gun, when in reality your arsenal never expands beyond the original four. It’s not realistic but hey, videogame logic. Even in a game that prides itself on that real-life feeling, there has to be a bit of suspension of disbelief. One key part of Lara’s moveset that is extremely useful during combat is the scramble, accessed with a quick tap of O.
In any other game this would have been a roll, but here Lara quickly dashes across the ground on all fours, almost animalistic, in an attempt to get out of danger and avoid gunfire. It’s wonderful, managing to encapsulate everything that makes Tomb Raider stand out as a unique title. It just feels legitimate – this is the movement a real person would make, if forced into this horrific situation. To be fair, a second tap of O during the scramble will result in a roll, but again, it’s still a videogame at the end of the day.
Lara is simply a joy to control, her fluid movement and sprightly frame a world away from the weighty control of many other third-person games. Leaping across large gaps evokes the same visceral thrill of the early games, scaling cliffs is a breeze, scrambling between cover is useful and fun and aiming is responsive. One genius touch is that there is no crouch button. When Lara enters combat, she automatically assumes a crouching stance, keeping low to the ground at all times but still moving at the same speed. It’s that touch of realism that works so well it’s amazing no one else has thought of it before.
If you were in a gunfight, damn straight you’d keep your head down the whole while. Experience points are earned both with kills and from finding them throughout the world, used to upgrade Lara’s skillset. A good example of this is Lara’s melee attack. Initially this is a mere shove, ineffectual against the larger, stronger enemies she fights, aside from the odd plunge off a cliff. This becomes a
more useful swinging attack with her ice pick climbing tool, players eventually unlocking a quick kill move after a successful dodge, with brutal results – impaling a guy through the neck with an arrow but one of many. It’s yet another great example of how the game design complements the story – Lara is growing as an individual, learning to fight and survive, and the increase in abilities available to the player reflects this.
For the majority of the game, Tomb Raider maintains the dark, gritty tone of a girl out of her depth, surviving by the skin of her teeth. Most battles end with the player victorious, but feeling like it was a hard-fought, barelyattained win. It’s just the right balance, always difficult but not unfairly so. Frequent enemy use of Molotov cocktails forces you to stay on the move, never sticking behind one piece of cover for too long.
The story goes to some very dark places, with Lara being put through the proverbial wringer a fair few times as she grows from victim to hunter. Just when you think nothing worse can happen to this poor girl, something does. Mounds of corpses, rivers of blood, even more nasty injuries – this is a bad week in the life of lady Croft. It even feels more like a horror game at times.
Some of Lara’s deaths can occasionally seem a bit torture-porny, especially those that come as the result of a failed quick-time event. Metal rods through the jaw, skewered on tree branches, battered into rocks by strong underwater currents, it’s brutal stuff. Sometimes it’s a little over the top, but still
tends to feel fitting with the bleak setting. Unfortunately, the game tapers off slightly towards the end. The considered pace and dark, realistic feel of the story give way to huge shootouts and massive action-movie set-pieces, Lara screaming at her aggressors as she turns the tables and becomes a onewoman army. It does feel like vengeance of a sort, annihilating the enemies that have tortured you previously, but it lacks the same emotional attachment the game has done such a good job conjuring up to this point. The story itself also veers away from realism, taking some absurd turns into something more akin to the classic games.
It makes sense, we suppose – after all, this is a reboot of those same games – but it’s a shame to see a mostly mature story turn into something that’s frankly, a bit daft. Still, it’s nowhere near enough to spoil all the great stuff that comes before, and even when it’s being silly, Tomb Raider is still miles more involving and entertaining than most other blockbuster-style games.
Graphically, Tomb Raider is one of the best looking games we’ve seen, making great use of the extended hardware cycle to wring every last piece of power out of the machine. The island is stunning in its bleakness, with a hostile sense of beauty pervading the craggy cliffs, shipwreck-filled beaches and ruined ancient villages. It’s a world away from the sunny paradise of Far Cry 3, despite both being set in similar geographical locations.
Lara is the star of the show, and it’s her character model which is the most impressive. Not only does she look like a real person, she moves like one, with little mannerisms and facial expressions to further personalise her. Noticing the small things, like her arms shaking with muscle strain as she opens large chests, makes all the difference.
Gamers can expect to get a solid ten hours out of the main story, with a bunch of extra stuff to take up more time if they so choose. Chief among this extra guff are seven optional tombs to explore, the only time in Tomb Raider where you actually do so. These tombs are practically the only places in the game with puzzles, but all seven are extremely short. One puzzle apiece leads to a crappy reward
of some resources and a map, each time. It’s disappointing, especially if you remember some of the rock hard brain-teasers from the original PlayStation days. With only seven of them, the extra tombs barely add another hour of game time.
Dotted around the island are relics to discover, Lara offering a bit of information on each with some requiring additional examination to uncover all their secrets. It’s a nice way of adding some background detail to the island as well as portraying Lara’s love of archeology through gameplay.
Otherwise, it’s the standard open-world bunch of extras to find, ramped up to an extreme level. There is a LOT of random crap to pick up in Tomb Raider, all of it meaningless aside from upping a completion percentage and getting some trophies. It’s a bad, transparent way of artificially adding
replay value. The island is essentially an open world, but feels more like several large stages connected by corridors. Lara can fast-travel around from select bonfires, facilitating easy travel. Traversing the landscape is always a pleasure, but without any real reason to do so following the end of the story, there isn’t a huge amount of extra value here.
It’s lucky then that the initial Tomb Raider experience is so excellent you’ll more than likely just replay the whole story again instead. As a reboot it’s a huge success, stripping away all the crap from the old Lara and making her modern and relevant once more. As a game it’s a blast, with fluid platforming and responsive shooting. As an experience it’s mature and interesting, dark and gritty while rarely being exploitative. You will care about this Lara Croft and what is going to happen to her.
It falls off slightly towards the end, but a few other minor quibbles aside, Tomb Raider is still a triumph that is more than worth your time and money. Welcome back, Lara. We missed you.
Sam Smith
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