Lara Croft is a psychopath.

Oh, I suppose all action game protagonists are, to a greater or lesser degree. When you’re piling up bodies by the hundreds it’s difficult to stick with the reasoning that you’re doing this for the Greater Good. This is one of the indirect reasons why the great action protagonists of the 80s and 90s, including the original version of Lara, tended towards the wisecracking badass side of the spectrum; they were deliberately made somewhat inhuman, and that had the effect of rendering the world they inhabited rather less grounded in reality. The violence was also substantially more one-dimensional; she’d shoot guys and that was it, and while I’m sure getting shot is somewhat unpleasant it’s also drastically less graphic than e.g. smashing a bottle over somebody’s head and then glassing them in the neck with it. I’m not saying I want a return to similarly one-dimensional protagonists, but there’s a reason why Action Game logic, just like Action Movie logic, works in the context of what it’s trying to accomplish.

This is why I’m rather conflicted about the attempt to make the modern version of Lara Croft – first seen in 2013 series reboot Tomb Raider and now returning in Rise – more relatable. It’s been a successful effort as far as the cutscenes are concerned; the writing in both games hasn’t been exactly stellar, but it’s done a good job of the characterisation of Lara as a more human heroine. At the start of Rise she’s even suffering from PTSD and is desperately trying to prove that what she saw on the island from Tomb Raider wasn’t just a figment of her imagination, which is how she gets herself into something of a mess tracking down another magical macguffin in deepest Siberia. She gets separated from the rest of her party in short order, crosses swords with a Religious Conspiracy called (hnnngh) Trinity who are also after the artefact, and spends the rest of the game murdering them in a variety of extremely horrible ways on the pretext that she’s defending the resident lost tribe from their predations.

Seriously. The Source or the Power or whatever the artefact is called was almost relegated to a footnote at times, as while there’s a healthy dose of platforming and puzzling as you’d expect from a Tomb Raider game you spend probably 50% of it killing people. I raised the same complaint in my review of the first Tomb Raider, and I’m going to raise it again here: this makes no sense given the tone of the rest of the game. Lara’s body count from the Tomb Raider island was already comfortably into the hundreds, and she more than doubles it here as she chews her way through Trinity’s seemingly-inexhaustible supply of goons. She shoots them (with bullets and arrows), strangles them, snaps their necks, glasses them, buries ice picks in their skulls, stabs them in the brain with arrows, blows them up with IEDs, poisons them, burns them… and you’d better believe that nearly every single one of these methods of execution has an elaborate and visceral kill animation associated with it. It goes way past the point of survival or self-defence; the deadliest snipers from World War 2 do not have K/D ratios as good as Lara’s, and my interpretation of this particular depiction of Lara Croft is that she’s a psychopathic mass murderer to whom human life no longer matters all that much – because when you try to place a classical action hero in a more grounded environment, that’s what they are. There’s no getting around it.

(Interestingly Rise did almost acknowledge just how fucked up Lara is, as towards the end of the game she urges one of her companions to shoot an unarmed man they were holding at gunpoint. Unfortunately it then pulled away from this brief moment of self-awareness by saying that she was totally right to do this.)

Rise is somewhat oversaturated with combat. It flows just as well as it did in the first game, and while I was never unhappy to be fighting enemies from anything more than a thematic point of view, it just doesn’t gel all that well with the rest of the game. Lara’s stuck in the freezing Siberian wilderness and at one point she gets her coat taken away and runs around in just a tank top for several hours, yet nothing is made of the potential this environment has for survival mechanics other than the “kill animals to get animal bits to make bigger bags to hold your animal bits” crafting system pioneered by Far Cry 3. I feel like it would have been much more appropriate to play up that side of things a bit more and have the parts where Lara fights actual human beings be rare, significant and most of all difficult events.

Sadly Rise has a skill tree that’s broken to the point where it trivialises its own otherwise well thought-out combat system. Well, I should back up here slightly first: Rise gives you XP for nearly every activity that isn’t running from point A to point B, and you can invest this XP in the now inevitable selection of skills that improve Lara’s abilities. This made more sense in the first game when she was just starting out; it makes less sense here after she’s been through this whole process once already, but on the whole Rise managed to avoid making me feel like I was just relearning stuff I already mastered in Tomb Raider. About a third of the skills are focused towards hunting, crafting and environment traversal, but the rest are firmly combat-aligned. These are fine for the most part and mostly focus around giving you more options in combat, and I was actually quite pleased with how they’d managed to make nearly all of the skills feel powerful and worthwhile (especially the one that increased the radius of IED explosions, which sounded terrible on paper but which turned the feeble puff of flame from my molotovs into a raging blast of napalm that incinerated everything within my eyeline). However, there is an important difference between skills that feel powerful, and a skill that, say, lets you zoom in, lock on to up to three targets with your bow, and then headshot them all at once when you release the trigger. Headshots are (unsurprisingly) one-shot kills unless your target is wearing a helmet – even then it’ll stun them and give you more than enough time to line up a second shot, so unless there’s multiple armoured enemies this one skill is going to make any combat encounter a pushover, especially since 90% of the time you can make a stealthy approach and take all the time you need to line this super-shot up.

(Which incidentally meant that I almost never saw the excellent cover-shooter gameplay from the original, because I never got into an actual gunfight.)

This is a horrifically broken skill that, once you unlock it, means you’ll never use anything else ever again. And that’s a shame, because up until I did unlock it I was having a lot of fun using the multiple different tools at my disposal to dispatch enemies – improvising IEDs, poison arrows, booby-trapping corpses and so on. The headshot skill is at least stuck down on tier 3, meaning that it should theoretically take you some time to unlock it; unfortunately I min-maxed all of the bonus XP skills and got it about halfway through the game, after which my combat encounters became decidedly one-note. The bow is powerful enough on its own, to the point where I never used any other weapon; it didn’t need a skill like that to amp it up further. As it is Lara effortlessly slaughters dozens of Trinity soldiers¹  without batting an eyelid, which kind of runs counter to the attempt to make her more human, you know?

Bleugh. That’s my biggest problem with Rise; it’s just as confused as the first Tomb Raider, trying to have it both ways by making a “realistic” action hero who still goes through the same old action tropes, and it just doesn’t work. Now, on the bright side, I had a number of other complaints in the Tomb Raider 2013 review that have mostly been addressed. Number one are the titular tombs, which in TR 2013 consisted of six small rooms with a single puzzle inside. Rise expands things out a bit; there are now nine tombs, and while they still consist of a single “room” they are much more impressive visually, from a Byzantine war galley embedded in a glacier to what is basically the Leap of Faith from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Each tomb has a single puzzle to solve, but the puzzles are much more elaborate this time around; there’s also a crucial addition of a phase where you have to traverse some treacherous environmental obstacles to get to the tomb in the first place. In short the tombs are now a great fusion of the two best parts of the Tomb Raider reboot: the platforming and the puzzling. Each element is basically unchanged from TR 2013 with most of the same tricks – rope arrows, clambering up rock walls with climbing axes etc. — but they worked well the first time and they work well again here.

Arguably more so, in fact, since I think the mountainous environment suits it a lot more – or is at least a lot more visually engaging — than Tomb Raider’s grey, stormy island. Rise is a staggeringly good-looking game in general, and I’m actually a little surprised Crystal Dynamics managed to coax this level of graphical fidelity out of console tech. It does chug at times (it seems to have trouble with Lara’s hair) but it arguably looks better than 99% of stuff I play on my not-inconsiderably beefy PC rig, and the gorgeous levels add a lot to the game – the look of the tombs in particular is a night and day comparison when lined up against the dingy caves from TR 2013. Ultimately it’s just a reskin that puts what is mostly the same game into a different package and I’m disappointed they didn’t make more of the potential of the environment for interesting gameplay mechanics, but it’s still a massive improvement.

What else? Well, it seems that Crystal Dynamics have listened to the criticism of the cutscenes from the original — where they’d segue seamlessly into gameplay, which was all very cinematic but which often happened while Lara was e.g. fleeing over a collapsing bridge, and the total lack of cues that you now had control usually meant she went careening into some bottomless chasm — and have segregated them much more strictly from the parts where you’re actually supposed to do something. This has gone hand in hand with a ruthless purge of quicktime events, which were something of a scourge in TR 2013; there’s one for dodge countering, but I think that’s pretty much the only one in the game and could reasonably be defined as actual gameplay if you squinted a bit. They’ve also streamlined the world a lot, to the point where I want to call it out as one of Rise’s good points: it’s the first “open” world game I’ve played in a long time that’s actually felt manageable for anyone who is also trying to hold down a full-time job. I invested two Sundays and a few evenings over a two week period playing it, and by the end of it I felt like I’d seen everything worth seeing. It’s littered with collectibles as you’d expect, but it’s admirably constrained in scope and you can hoover most of them up as you traverse the various world segments on your way to other stuff. Unlike some games I could mention — most of which are made by Ubisoft — Rise of the Tomb Raider struck me as a game that knew when to stop when it came to throwing pointless make-work at the player. There’s some people for whom that’s going to be a downside, but for me it was ideal.

There’s plenty of incremental improvements that have gone into Rise, then. In a sense it’s almost the perfect iterative sequel – it’s basically the same game as the first Tomb Raider with most of the major criticisms addressed and many of the flabbier parts streamlined a bit, which is an easy way to ensure its better than the original. At the same time it introduces precious little that’s actually new aside from its visuals, and considering I felt she was already somewhat implausible at the end of TR 2013 the characterisation of Lara is increasingly at odds with what she does in the game. There’s plenty of room for a thoughtful Tomb Raider that’s more grounded in reality and fronted by a believable protagonist, but Rise is not that game and it’s worse off for trying to present itself as such. That might be something of a personal objection, and it certainly didn’t stop me enjoying the combat before I’d reduced it to arrowing everybody in the head; however, as it’s the major thematic thrust of the reboot I see it as a critical failure on Rise’s part to live up to what it’s trying to pass itself off as. I could get past that this time around. Next time, well, I’m not sure I’ll buy in quite so readily. Not unless they do something that’s genuinely new, as that’s the one problem with Rise being a set of incremental improvements: if they do that for the third game I’ll effectively just be playing Rise again, and while it was certainly fun it’s not something I have any particular interest in repeating any time soon.

The post Thoughts: Rise Of The Tomb Raider appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

I have fond memories of Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light. It was that rarest of beasts: a arcadey spinoff from a AAA series that actually worked, and moreover arguably transcended its source material with its emphasis on pleasingly brain-twisting puzzles that could be solved either solo or as part of a co-op team of two. The multiplayer puzzles worked so well, in fact, that I’d happily put Guardian of Light somewhere in my top five best co-op experiences of all time. Given that the first game was so good it’s a little surprising that it’s taken nearly five years for it to receive a sequel, but now that sequel is finally here. It’s called Lara Croft and the Temple of Osiris, and..

…it really isn’t good at all.

Colour me disappointed (as well as more than a little bit surprised) but Temple of Osiris, while not being out and out bad as such, has turned out to be no more than an exceedingly average game. This is somewhat difficult to understand: it’s the same developer, making a game that they knocked out of the park the first time around, so how has it ended up in such a mediocre state? I need to unpick this mystery of a game, and I have roped in my perennial co-op partner Kenti to do that.

Kenti: Do what?

Hentzau: Yes, very droll. For the uninitiated, Temple of Osiris takes place in the ancient Egyptian ruin of Duat.

Kenti: Actually I believe Duat is supposed to be the underworld?

Hentzau: It’s never adequately explained, nor did I particularly care.

Kenti: Wikipedia tells me it’s the Realm of the Dead. I trust Wikipedia implicitly. In any case, the voice acting is such that the characters saying ‘Duat’ sounds quite ridiculous in English. Within minutes we couldn’t help but follow up every mention with “Do what?” Of course unfortunately this was one of the few ways to amuse ourselves in this game…

Hentzau: It was much funnier if you were there. Anyway, the plot is utterly insubstantial tosh but that doesn’t matter; so was the plot to Guardian of Light. All that matters is that there are a collection of tombs full of puzzles, and all the Egyptian theme changes here is that… well, the puzzles now have an Egyptian theme.

Kenti: To be honest, I found the story approach less satisfying than Guardian of Light – that at least felt like a ripping Lara Croft yarn, with an appropriate degree of tombing and mythology. Here everything felt just a touch more ridiculous and silly, and not in a good, funny way. There are some pretty zany aspects of Egyptian mythology, but I don’t think the creators bothered to even remotely touch any of those, and all the trapping just felt drab and pointless rather than a mysterious background canvas to our puzzling.

Hentzau: Does ancient Egyptian mythology have a giant crocodile that chases you along collapsing bridges? That sounds like the sort of thing they might have

Kenti: Well, yes – Sobek, but in this case it just looked like a dog, and basically all it did was represent a moving line of death in a scrolling screen.

Hentzau: Temple of Osiris follows almost exactly the same blueprint as Guardian of Light. It’s an isometric puzzler with light shooty elements; there’s an overworld with a collection of tombs that unlock as you progress through the game, and each tomb contains a bunch of puzzles that need to be cleared in order to complete the tomb. In between puzzles you might have a brief interlude where you shoot some monsters and there’s the occasional bossfight (or running away from collapsing tomb/giant enemy crocodile¹ segment as detailed above), but make no mistake: just like its predecessor, Temple of Osiris is all about the puzzles.

Kenti: There are also “challenge tombs” and although these technically presented a little more of a challenge than those you traverse in the main storyline, they still did not feel all that involve or complex. Indeed, they were more challenges of keyboard/gamepad dexterity than critical thinking or puzzle-solving. Which was made all the more difficult by the vagaries of character control, netcode and for some reason isometric view confusion.

Hentzau: Osiris is supposed to accommodate up to four players in co-op now – Lara, plus fellow undead mugger Carter Somebody and ancient Egyptian gods Isis and Horus. Who are curiously un-godlike beyond having a few glowy staff powers. Anyway, with the increased player numbers comes a double requirement on the part of the developers: not only do you now have to design all of your puzzles so that they can be solved by one, two, three or four players (meaning each puzzle has to be designed four times over), but because you’ve now shoved the focus of your game firmly into the co-op realm you have to make your netcode solid.

Kenti: It was not. It was quite laughable in the week after release. And despite patched improvements still hovers somewhere slightly below ‘Adequate’.

Hentzau: Kenti was hosting most of the time so he saw little of the netcode woes, but even last week after they’d had a month to fix it up there were still several lag-induced deaths where I’d have successfully made a jump, only to die two seconds later as the netcode caught up and decided that I’d actually fallen down a spike-lined pit. Those running-away-from-giant-crocodile sequences were particularly awful for this, as a couple of seconds is often all the leeway you have and if the netcode has a bad moment – which it does, a lot — it’ll deem you to have been eaten by the crocodile and instakill you. Picking up gems was also difficult as it would take a second or two to register that I’d actually picked them up, giving Kenti plenty of time to swoop in and steal them. That one’s partly Kenti being a dick, though.

Kenti: There were plenty of issues affecting the host player too – instances where the next location would fail to load and after a long wait, it would just reload the place you had come from. Or failed to properly show me the position of the co-op partner so I had no idea what was going on in some timed puzzles. (And I should point out that both Hentzau and I are equipped with very fat Virgin Media cable pipes and rarely experience online problems.)

Hentzau: What’s particularly annoying about this is that it’s now 2015 AD and there’s simply no excuse for netcode this shoddy any more. We have progressed some way past the point where developers can claim that the internet is a mysterious, new-fangled thing that they just can’t get to grips with.

Kenti: Well, I suppose if they couldn’t crack the netcode, maybe they were just spending all their hard development efforts on making some really really good puzzles, fun enemies and funky weapons?

Hentzau: I’m actually willing to give them a point on the weapons.

Kenti: The weapons were actually indeed good. So 1 out of 3 there. You had pistols, rifles, shotguns, SMGs… and grenade launchers, miniguns and many many bombs. All of these were quite fun to use and were both doled out frequently throughout the campaign tombs and had more powerful or cool versions locked away in the challenge tombs or behind slightly more complex puzzles.

Hentzau: Such a shame that the enemies you shoot with them were so dull, though. Since ultimately you defeated most of them by, well, shooting at them. Ancient Egyptian beasties proved curiously vulnerable to hot lead; I think there was a grand total of one enemy type who required more than a brisk hosing down with an automatic weapon in order to kill them. Their behaviour wasn’t particularly interesting either, as all of them just run at you and try to hit you in close combat.

Kenti: That’s okay, we could also shoot each other. Also, bomb each other. Apart from a selection of weapons, you could also place down bombs which you could then detonate at will. These were wisely used to help you uncover more gold, defeat some more powerful enemies, solve puzzles and occasionally send your co-op partner flying. By the end of the game, it provided a sizeable chunk of the entertainment we were extracting from the experience.

Hentzau: While the weapons were a lot of fun, I’m really not sure about the rest of Osiris’s loot system. By which I mean “I’m really not sure why Osiris even *has* a loot system,” since it is so one-dimensionally terrible.

Kenti: You can get rings and amulets and hang them on your character. The rings provide very very mild boosts to your health/damage/ammo and the amulets give you a different effect activated by a power-up metre that charges as you kill enemies and don’t take damage. This was occasionally nice, yes, but it added nothing to the general experience and afforded very little tactical or strategic variation since both the ring and amulet effects were so minor and the enemies so largely unchallenging.

Hentzau: The kicker was the chests scattered around that you unlocked by spending the gems you constantly pick up while exploring the tombs. You’d feed in 1000 gems (which is quite a lot of gems) to one of these chests only to be rewarded by a Bronze Weak Ring of Fire that gives you a single plus symbol to your fire powerup. Exciting!

Kenti: I think the intention was for this to induce a little bit of competition between co-op partners to collect more gems so that they could roll the dice on some cool items. Unfortunately the items are not cool, and the randomness was pointless and so we just competed for gems to get more arbitrary score. We might as well have been ignoring them.

Hentzau: I don’t think any of this would have mattered, though, had the puzzles been up to scratch — since that’s what I bought Temple of Osiris for. I expected another 6-8 hours of reasonably taxing co-op fun, just like Guardian of Light, and anything else the game offered would have been a nice bonus.

Kenti: To be fair, the puzzles were decent. In comparison to Guardian of Light however, they just didn’t offer anything interesting, clever or particularly challenging. If this was your venture into co-operative puzzling, or you simply had to play the game with three of your friends, then I think the Temple of Osiris probably does the trick. Otherwise though, I think most people would get a lot more mileage from just replaying Guardian of Light again.

Hentzau: That’s the thing, though – the scalability from one to four players means that the amount of effort that’s gone into the puzzle design has been diluted right down. Maybe the four-person version of Temple of Osiris has super awesome complex puzzles that are a worthy challenge. That could well be the case, and we wouldn’t know because we were unfortunate enough to see the two-person version of Temple of Osiris, which can only be described as disappointingly basic. I think there were maybe two or three occasions in the entire game where we didn’t immediately spot a solution to a puzzle within the first ten seconds of looking at it.

Kenti: This might also have been fine if there was an interesting and complex toolset that would allow us to play about and achieve the goals we had identified (Portal 2’s co-op puzzles spring to mind). Every time though, if we struggled, it was in trying to shove the tools the game had provided into what may have been round or square holes and hope that the perspective or netcode held up enough for the game to count this as a puzzle success.

Hentzau: I remember the one puzzle with the pillars over water and some pressure plates to raise additional pillars. They give you a ball at the start, and it looks like you have to somehow get the ball onto one of the pressure plates so that you can create a route to the other side of the water, and this is what we tried at first. After accidentally tipping the ball into the water, though, we tried just standing on the plates ourselves and it turned out the ball wasn’t even necessary. I got a similar feeling during many of the puzzles in Temple of Osiris: that we weren’t doing it the “right” way, but were instead solving them by brute force.²

Kenti: And while stumbling through these puzzles, we would also find ourselves occasionally madly hopping about in one spot. Jump, move a little bit, jump again, move a little bit more, jump. Scream. Anyone watching our game would have been consumed by confusion, but there was good reason for our madness – the isometric perspective was slowly driving us insane.

Hentzau: It’s weird because I don’t ever remember having this problem in Guardian of Light, but Temple of Osiris uses a very strange isometric perspective that makes it very, very difficult to gauge the height of an object unless it’s physically connected to the floor in some way. There are several points in the game where it asks you to pick up an item floating over a waterfall, or a spike-lined abyss, and these were utterly infuriating because you have no reference as to the object’s true height or position (is it really high up on the right, or really low down on the left?) and are reduced to skipping up and down on a tightrope as your co-op partner slowly moves back and forth trying to divine the actual location of the object in question. When you hit these points it’s like playing an M.C. Escher painting come to life.

Kenti: At least the game helped glue you to the rope. Although sometimes it was a little too insistent on making the grappling hook attack to a character rather than a helpful hook. Bizarrely there was also no ‘let go’ or ‘drop down’ button, so if you happened to be hanging on a ledge, your only option was to jump back up, and if you wanted to come down, you had to somehow maneuver a jump well over the edge. On the one hand maybe you wouldn’t fall down accidentally, on the other hand you could end up madly jumping up and down a ledge hoping you could somehow get down to the next level.

Hentzau: Just before we enter the wrap-up phase I want to briefly mention the game’s performance on older/lower-end graphics cards. When I played it before Christmas I was using a 560 Ti, and the resulting experience was barely playable – I was averaging 20 fps, and would occasionally drop to 12 or even 10 fps during “demanding” parts of the game. Shortly afterwards I found myself playing Alien Isolation (aka the Best-Looking Game I Didn’t Play In 2014) on the same card on “Ultra” settings with nary a hint of slowdown. The framerate issues disappeared once I upgraded to a GTX 970, but this is not a game you should need a £300 graphics card to enjoy in all of its glory. It’s not bad looking, sure, but there’s nothing about it that suggested the performance would be as poor as I found it to be. It’s certainly not something I’d feel comfortable chucking at a lower-end machine, which is weird because that’s kind of what Temple of Osiris feels like it should be aimed at.

Kenti: I think that’s more or less all there is to say about Lara Croft and Temple of Considerable Disappointment. It was sort of ok, but placed next to the previous effort in the series also completely deficient in every way. Which is very sad considering that Guardian of Light was a shining example of co-op and puzzling excellency and short-form tight game development in general. Now Hentzau, you know what you must do.

Hentzau: I really don’t. Or at least I don’t want to. Instead, I’m going to sum up. Lara Croft and the Temple of Osiris is a painfully average arcade game with so-so puzzles and braindead shooting. Puzzle design in games is always a tricky thing to pitch since you need to make it hard enough that the player feels smart for solving it, but not so hard that they get frustrated and give up. This goes double for co-op puzzlers, and with the addition of two extra potential players I think it ended up being an overwhelming task for Crystal Dynamics. The worst of it is that the extra design effort expended scaling the puzzles isn’t really visible to the end user unless they play with a varying number of friends, and so from their point of view it ends up being wasted; it would have been far better to keep things focused on building a high-quality set of puzzles for one or two players. I’m somewhat sympathetic to the idea that they might have bitten off more than they can chew in terms of design, but it doesn’t excuse the generally poor technical performance of the game one bit. If you’re looking for a co-op puzzler and haven’t played Guardian of Light before, play Guardian of Light. If you’re looking for a co-op puzzler and you have played Guardian of Light before, still play Guardian of Light. It’s by far the better game.

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The post Thoughts: Lara Croft and the Temple of Osiris appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

Despite being old enough to remember rolling my eyes at the original media sensation over Lara Croft¹ I have a confession to make: I’ve never actually played a Tomb Raider game. Well, except for the excellent Guardian of Light spinoff back in 2011, but that game’s fixed isometric perspective and focus on co-op means that it doesn’t really count. They didn’t make Tomb Raider games for the N64, and when the first reboot rolled around in 2006 the gameplay looked distinctly dated since there were other, fresher games doing the same sort of thing – Prince of Persia, Assassin’s Creed and so on. In a peculiarly ironic twist, the Tomb Raider series itself always seemed to me to be just as much of an archaeological relic as the collection of ancient ruins that Lara explores in every game – and with five games in the original series and three more after the reboot, there were a lot of games. It’s no wonder the franchise looked a bit tired.

But now! Now there is yet another Tomb Raider game, and this time – presumably in an attempt to combat exactly the sort of stagnation I just described – they’re rebooting it properly. This means no more subtitles, no more previously existing history, and no more wisecracking Lara as she unloads a pair of pistols into a velociraptor’s backside. Crystal Dynamics (who have had custody of Tomb Raider since 2006) have taken both the gameplay and the character back to the drawing board, and while what has emerged is still just recognisable as a Tomb Raider game this second reboot infuses hefty number of modern innovations into the core concept in an attempt to make it relevant again. Did they succeed? Let’s find out together.

Tomb Raider rewinds things all the way back to what is presumably the start of Lara’s career as a globetrotting grave robber. Lara is a young archaeologist working as part of an expedition to find a mythical lost civilisation somewhere in the Pacific Ocean when suddenly their ship is hit by a sudden and inexplicable storm and dashed upon the rocks of a nearby island. Said island rather predictably turns out to be the home of the lost civilisation they were looking for, but it also turns out to be inhabited by a rather disagreeable cult of shipwrecked bums who don’t take too kindly to strangers and begin hunting Lara and her pals with a selection of makeshift/antique weaponry. Lara has to learn how to survive on the island, evade the unwelcome attentions of the cult and unravel the mystery of the lost civilisation before she can hope to escape.

This is a fairly decent setup for a game, even if the plot outline does read like somebody’s been watching a few too many episodes of Lost. You’ve got the player stuck in an isolated environment with no chance of outside help and a player character at the very start of her ass-kicking career with many future skills to be learned during the course of the gameplay; this means that the player’s progression through the game matches that of the player character perfectly – seguing from struggling to surviving to laying waste to everything around them – and results in a stronger connection to what’s going on inside the game that keeps the player interested. This is something I think has been lacking from those other franchises I mentioned (only the first Prince of Persia game really managed to pull off the same thing, and while I might have liked Ezio as a character I could care less about his struggles against a series of identikit Templar goons) and which did much to keep me more invested in it than I would have been otherwise. I’m not saying Tomb Raider’s plot is good – it’s actually one of the more hackneyed, trope-reliant pieces of writing I’ve seen recently – but it does make for a fairly solid foundation to build a game on, as well as ensuring that the Lara Croft character is rather easier to empathise with than she has been in the past.

As for how they’ve built that game… well, it could have gone a lot worse. With the game’s marketing harping on about survival I was rather hoping that the gameplay would focus on survival – i.e. foraging for food, scavenging equipment and generally trying not to die – but that was probably a bit much to ask of a mainstream AAA title. You can harvest fruit and shoot animals for XP and “salvage” (the game’s currency), but that’s just about as far as the focus on pure survival goes; instead, Tomb Raider opts for a strangely hybrid approach of welding together pseudo-open world gameplay – in which you can return to any area you previously visited to track down stuff you might have missed – with scripted, linear shooting galleries where Lara mows down hordes of unshaven goons.  These linear segments are reasonably entertaining for what they are, but still struck me as a somewhat hamhanded attempt to transplant the dated gameplay of previous Tomb Raider games into the modern era. It makes Lara rather less empathetic when she murders probably two or three hundred people during the course of the game, and personally I would have preferred encounters with human enemies to have been used rather more sparingly than they have been here.

What could they have replaced it with? Well, puzzles, for a start. Tomb Raider takes a Metroidvania approach to exploration and area progression, with new items Lara acquires opening up new areas as well as expanding what she can do in the older ones. However,  while this is a great recipe for exploration it never really makes for much of a puzzle, since the places where Lara can use her new toys are always clearly marked and there isn’t really any scope to use them outside of the very narrow and well-defined boundaries of linking one area to another. As far as actual puzzles in Tomb Raider go – i.e., the areas of the game where you actually have to stop and use your noggin for a minute or two – there’s maybe, oooh, twelve of them. In the entire thing. Seven of these are found in the titular tombs, which are incredibly underwhelming; every one of them consists of a single room containing one puzzle, often involving burning something with fire or weighing something down so that Lara can get to a treasure chest. One of them – I’m not even kidding here – had me weighing down one end of a seesaw so that Lara could use it as a ramp. This was a puzzle that was insultingly simple when I did it in Half Life 2 back in 2004 – and that at least had the excuse that it was one of the first games to implement realistic physics in a big way. Not all the puzzles in the game are that bad, but for a game about exploring the ruins of an ancient civilization and whose forebears drew more than a little inspiration from the Indiana Jones films it could have done with a few more examples, and better ones too.

So Tomb Raider is light on puzzles and heavy on action, and unfortunately for a modern game “heavy on action” means it features an explosive proliferation of that scourge of modern gaming: the quicktime event. Tomb Raider loves its quicktime events. The damn things are everywhere. By putting so many of them in the game Crystal Dynamics have done the impossible and come up with a couple of quicktime events that I actually liked – if you only just manage to grab onto a ledge with your fingertips you have to quickly press E to secure your grip, which is much better than having you plummet to your death for being a few pixels short – and you can at least get used to the player-initiated ones like counter kills, but any time Tomb Raider springs an unexpected one on you the chances are you will die at least once, simply because you don’t have enough time to both recognise that a quicktime event is happening and then react to it with the correct button inputs. It doesn’t help that Tomb Raider is bloody awful at communicating to the player when a quicktime event has started, or what they’re supposed to do. Sometimes there’d be a non-interactive cutscene, and then Lara would start running towards the camera, and then she’d plummet to her death because the game had actually handed control back to me at that point and I hadn’t realised the cutscene was over. Or I’d be in a cutscene which would obviously transition to a quicktime event but would only tell me which button it wanted me to press via one of two almost identical red symbols on a black background. One of them means E. One of them means F. Until you can tell the difference, you’re going to die an awful lot to an interactive cutscene.

Eurgh. The good news is, that’s most of the bad stuff Tomb Raider does out of the way. It might be a depressingly conventional game considering the premise, but not everything conventional games do is automatically bad and Tomb Raider actually manages to execute several of its key mechanics very well. Extremely well, actually; I’d even go so far as to say it’s probably the best implementation of third-person cover-shooter gameplay I’ve ever seen.  It manages this – oddly – by regressing slightly and removing the usual “take cover” button that sticks the protagonist to a conveniently waist-high concrete barrier like glue. Instead, Lara will simply shimmy up to any walls or crates when she’s near enough with no player prompting required, and because she doesn’t “stick” to them – being able to move about freely in any direction whenever she wants, even if she is technically in cover – this is far, far less annoying than the usual genre examples, not to mention making gunfights far less static. Lara’s movement in general is very good, which is probably not a surprise considering Crystal Dynamics have had three previous Tomb Raider games to practice getting it right; it’s probably a little too reliant on all climbable surfaces being highlighted in white paint, but I’ll put up with that little bit of artificiality if it cuts down on the amount of time I spend thinking “Now where the fuck do I go now?” The gunplay and combat is also solid; this is probably the main reason why the game being so action-focused isn’t too much of a problem, since there’s a nice selection of enemies with different weapons and behaviours to stop things from getting too repetitive. I never really felt like I was fighting the game to do what I wanted to do and often didn’t really think about the details of the movement or control systems, which is usually a good sign that you’ve done something right when designing them. This ensures that most of the time, when you are playing Tomb Raider, you are concentrating on having fun climbing cliffs or shooting puzzles, and not on making a series of pixel-perfect jumps in order to progress to the next area.

The last point I’m going to mention is something of a mixed bag, because there are some things about it I really like, but I also though it ultimately didn’t really work when placed in context with the rest of the game. During the game you collect both salvage and XP for nearly everything you do – hunting animals, killing bad guys, looting bodies, solving puzzles, progressing the plot – and these can be spent levelling up/improving your skills and weapons. Levelling up skills is fairly straightforward, although the structure of the skill trees and the bizarre decision to only have one of the trees unlock a third of a the way into the game hurts it, in my opinion. Improving weapons is a different beast, however, and probably the one single element of the game that really connects with the game’s setup of trying to survive with makeshift equipment. You start by picking up basic weapons – a Colt .45, a trench shotgun and so on – and then you spend your salvage to weld more bits and pieces onto them. This improves the performance of the weapon in combat, but it also changes how the weapon model looks when Lara is using it. You mod your Colt to have an extended magazine and after that it’ll always have an oversized box sticking out the bottom of the grip; with the bigger weapons this can lead to a hilariously jerry-rigged appearance since Lara is literally taping and tying all this extra stuff onto the gun, and it really does emphasise that this abstract salvage mechanic is representing Lara scrounging improvements from her environment to survive.

Now, if they’d managed to keep that makeshift theme going all the way through the upgrade process I’d say it’s probably the thing Tomb Raider manages to do best; I love games that visually respond to the stuff you do and the progress you’ve made and the guns can be a constant reminder of that. Unfortunately the upgrade mechanic is actually a mishmash of three or four sub-mechanics, none of which play together in any kind of logical or sane way.  You’ve got your salvage, which is fine, and you pay salvage to make improvements to your gun, which is fine. But then you also have “bow parts”, “handgun parts” and so on, which seem to be picked up randomly (I’ve found bow parts in tiny salvage crates in out of the way parts of the map). When you have a set number of bow parts, you can upgrade your bow into an entirely new model of bow, which leads to a preposterous scenario where Lara transforms a bundle of branches with a string into a carved recurve bow, or a Type 100 Japanese submachine gun into an AK-47 assault rifle, or a Beretta into a Magnum. I let this go as being a little bit too gamey but otherwise inoffensive, but since upgrading from one model to another unlocks more base improvements for the weapon it struck me as a bit weird that it would gate weapon progression using this seemingly-random parts mechanic. Finally there’s a couple of points during the game where a character will present Lara with a new version of her weapon in a plot cutscene, which then replaces whatever she was using up until that point. What is the point in having the parts mechanics around when you’re simply going to override it in a scripted event? I just didn’t understand why they’d come up with this perfectly good idea for improving weapons and then decided to make it coexist with two different and competing mechanics. It’s both confusing and unnecessary.

I went into Tomb Raider with  no preconceptions and no prejudices. Yes, I thought the series as a whole looked a bit knackered, but that was simply all the more reason to give this second reboot a chance. What Crystal Dynamics have produced here is a solid game; looking back on it this review seems to be mostly relentless bitching, but I think that’s because the things Tomb Raider does well it does rather unobtrusively. If your movement and gunplay systems are working well they tend not to get noticed so much, making way for the stuff that doesn’t work so well to repeatedly poke the player in the eye until they can’t take it any more and write a scathing post about it on their blog. This is a bit unfair because the game is rather fun in an unadventurous kind of way, but it is true that while the bad bits of Tomb Raider are comparatively small/abstract parts of the game I found them almost distractingly so. Perhaps if you’re less of a pedant you might be able to call Tomb Raider good. Me, I’m going to call it promising. This is a concept that isn’t quite there yet and is self-contradictory in places; perhaps if Crystal Dynamics were to take a second swing at it they’d end up producing something a little more coherent, but I’m not sure they can do this again. Part of the reason why Tomb Raider works in spite of its flaws is because it’s the origin story; it keeps you hooked in part because you’re watching the evolution of Lara from scared young woman to hardened adventurer, and in the context of this particular iteration of the series you’re doing many things for the first time. If I had to go through the learning process again in a sequel not only would it be stretching narrative credibility – it’s not like Lara can trip over a Metroid and have all her armour fall off, after all – but I think I’d find it rather tedious a second time around. Still, I’m on board for when the inevitable sequel rolls around in two years’ time. Perhaps they’ll surprise me.

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