God, I’m disappointed with Shadow Of The Tomb Raider. Not because it is particularly bad (it isn’t), or because it’s an almost exact carbon copy of Rise Of The Tomb Raider (it is, even down to the plot), but because I really think this incarnation of Lara Croft would be a much happier woman if she gave up the sham cover story of stealing ancient artifacts from their rightful owners and just accepted the fact that she really, really likes killing people.

I hammered on this point again and again in my Rise review, but Shadow really does push it to the point where it’s no longer a joke and is actively frustrating. Maybe it wouldn’t have gotten to me as much if there hadn’t been pre-release publicity about how Lara was finally going to “become the Tomb Raider” (as if the two hundred people she killed in the first game somehow weren’t enough to instantly qualify her). Maybe it wouldn’t have been such an issue if the Steam page didn’t have an embedded video of a mud-covered Lara stalking some generic mercenaries through the jungle like she was the fucking Predator. That made Shadow look interesting! It’s always bugged me how none of these games acknowledge just how lethal their protagonists are; I played through all of the Uncharted games last year and it was pretty ridiculous how the dichotomy between “Nathan Drake, devoted family man” and “Nathan Drake, Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse” was never explored or even mentioned. I was up for playing a game that stopped tiptoeing around the issue, finally embraced the reality that Lara Croft is the deadliest woman alive, and treated her with the respect she deserves.

Instead I got yet another installment of the reboot’s tiresome, wishy-washy, uncertain Lara Croft who has received almost no character development over the course of five years and three games. This Lara Croft — the one who shows up for the cutscenes — is severely at odds with the Lara Croft that I’m actually playing, the one who indiscriminately slaughters her enemies in a variety of horrible ways in pursuit of ancient artifacts. The playable Lara isn’t a very nice person, but she’s at least competent. She’s at least sure of herself. And it says a lot about the quality of Shadow’s writing that I would much rather have this deranged serial killer as my main character instead of a woman who contracts severe cases of Plot Stupid whenever the writers have backed themselves into a corner and need some way to continue to the next set piece. I’m just so tired of games where I spend forty-five minutes doing a bunch of platforming and puzzle solving to retrieve some artifact, only for the game to switch to a cutscene in which the protagonist suddenly regresses to a helpless infant while the villain swoops in to steal the MacGuffin. If there were any consistency with the character I spend the majority of my time with in the game she’d have shanked all of them before he’d gotten ten seconds into his tiresome monologuing and would have strung him up from the nearest tree, and to have to sit there while the developers tell me the last hour of gameplay was effectively a waste of my time makes me hate Lara, it makes me hate the story, and it doesn’t exactly get me thinking too kindly of Eidos Montreal, either.

I really wasn’t kidding when I said Shadow is a copy of Rise Of The Tomb Raider. It follows the same plot points almost beat-for-beat: Lara is in pursuit of a magical artifact (again) but gets interrupted by a Generic Secret Society called Trinity (again). In her pursuit of Trinity she gets stranded in a remote wilderness (again) and finds a hidden city whose inhabitants mysteriously speak perfect English (again). She makes friends with the city’s leaders and goes spelunking around various tombs to try and find yet another artifact (again), and encounters a group of Generic Monsters who live underground and who are tasked with protecting the artifact (again).  Finally, after finding the artifact (and promptly getting it stolen in a cutscene) she faces off against the leader of Trinity in a terrible bossfight (again), and then there is a spectacularly idiotic ending cutscene¹ in which she demonstrates she’s learned absolutely nothing from her tomb raiding experiences. Now, obviously this is lazy writing – it would be foolish to expect anything else from a Tomb Raider game — but I wasn’t prepared for Shadow to plumb quite such depths as it ends up doing; it is, in fact, the worst writing I have seen in a videogame since Splinter Cell: Blacklist, complete with a villain who might as well be called Dr Not Appearing In This Game for all the presence he he has during its 20-odd hour length, since he only ever shows up when the writers need him to take something of Lara’s, or for the end bossfight. Probably the worst indictment of Shadow’s writing is this: it makes Rise’s plot look competently written, and the original Tomb Raider reboot looks like fucking Proust when you sit it next to Shadow.

Gameplay-wise Shadow is, again, almost exactly the the same as Rise. It’s traded the snowy climes of Rise for the Peruvian jungle, and there’s a new mechanic where Lara can cover herself in mud to conceal herself from enemies with thermal goggles. This is a perfectly decent addition and having Lara burst out of a mud-covered wall to stick a knife in somebody’s ear is very entertaining for the, oh, call it two times that it’s actually used in the game. There have been some other additions to her repertoire of war crimes, such as:

• Going full-blown chemical weapons by manufacturing poison gas grenades.
• Booby-trapping corpses with IEDs.
• Firing a rope arrow through somebody’s chest and stringing them up to a tree as a warning to the others.
• Splitting out some of the skill tree abilities from Rise (such as bullet time when aiming a weapon) to a set of craftable hallucinogens that she can ingest using the D-pad to jack herself up during combat.

All of which are things that totally normal human woman Lara Croft would do, and not a drugged-up mass-murderer whose insatiable bloodlust is driving her to methods that would get her put on trial in the Hague if the civilized world were to ever learn about what she gets up to on her little field trips.

Still, Shadow is fine in terms of gameplay, I think. It cannot help but be fine, seeing how little has been changed from Rise, which was itself a perfectly fine game; Eidos Montreal even do something a little bit smart by taking just two hours to bring Shadow Lara’s moveset up to almost full parity with what Rise Lara had at the end of the game (rope arrows, grapple axe etc.), which does a lot to minimise the classic Metroid problem of having the main character lose all of her armour and equipment at the start of each new game. It also attempts to put a little less emphasis on Lara’s murder habit by having fewer encounters with human enemies compared to Rise — but this ends up backfiring, because it doesn’t particularly tone down the amount of combat at all. It just means that most of it is now Lara versus those Generic Monsters², who are far less interesting to fight because they just run at you and try to slash you with their claws. There’s no opportunity for stealth in these monster-battling segments, meaning that most of the new stuff that’s been added — such as the mud and the tree kills — ends up being underused.

And because the new features aren’t given much of a chance to shine, Shadow ends up coming across as rather more derivative than it would be otherwise. It doesn’t just feel like a copy, it feels like a copy of a copy, like more has been lost in the translation from Rise than there really should have been. The platforming is back, but there’s no new spin on it; Lara climbs the same collection of pitted rock faces and shit-covered³ ledges as she does in the previous two games, and it’s strictly a way of getting from A to B. The challenge tombs are back and they follow the same formula as Rise — a platformy bit to get into the tomb, followed by a puzzle of some sort — but they follow it a little too closely, to the point where every tomb feels exactly the same. There’s no Byzantine galley encased in ice here, no yawning chasm pulled straight from the ending of Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade. Just a set of recycled assets and puzzle elements that barely tickle your critical thinking bits; there was only one tomb that took me more than two minutes to figure out, and that was because it was so overwhelmingly brown my visual cortex hadn’t managed to parse a water wheel as actually being a water wheel. It’s all a fairly adequate experience when you actually play it, but it feels like “adequate” was all Eidos Montreal was ever aiming for. Because it appears to have no ambition to be anything more than a rehash of Rise, Shadow Of The Tomb Raider comes across as an exercise in calculated mediocrity.

That’s probably a little unfair on Eidos Montreal. Shadow Of The Tomb Raider has an extremely odd narrative structure that has all the hallmarks of something that’s been the victim of an overambitious deadline and which has been hastily assembled out of whatever gameplay segments happened to be deemed completable by the time that deadline rolled around. Its two best bits feel horribly out of place both because they’re atomic segments that have been spliced in mid-story that have almost no effect on the narrative, and because they display significantly more imagination than the entire rest of the game put together. The first is a flashback to a young Lara solving puzzles in Croft Manor, which is lent some charm by her ongoing narration of what she’s doing as an adventure with herself in the starring role, but I found the second more intriguing because I suspect it’s more along the lines of what the whole of Shadow would have been if Eidos Montreal had had their way. It involves Lara getting ambushed by Trinity and temporarily losing most of her equipment, and what was interesting about this was that she finally lost her self-restraint as well. What follows is a fantastic half hour sequence where Lara kills her way through the entire Trinity search-and-destroy party, butchering dozens of goons without a single iota of pity or remorse and generally acting the way I’ve been wanting her to act for at least one and a half games now.  Towards the end of it Trinity throws armoured cars and helicopter gunships at her and it barely slows her down, and it’s at this point that their morale shatters and they start outright panicking, which is the first and only time in the entire series that anyone has ever had an appropriate reaction to fighting Lara Croft. Scripted as it is, combat-heavy though it might be, it feels like a sequence from a much better game, and one that I would have been far more interested in playing.

And then, when Lara is standing atop the wreckage of an oil refinery surrounded by dozens of corpses and the shattered hulks of the war machines that tried to stop her, her companion and serial enabler Jonah arrives like he’s just stepped out of a taxi and isn’t happening upon a scene of indescribable slaughter, which is cutscene Lara’s cue to show up again and have a thirty second emotional breakdown before carrying on like the whole episode never happened. From this point onwards Shadow’s colours are firmly nailed to the mast of Just Being Average. It largely succeeds in this. Like I said in the opening, it’s not a bad game. I’ve played enough bad games to know that Shadow Of The Tomb Raider is not one of them; even in its weirdly disjointed final form it has enough intrinsic competency to be moderately engaging throughout most of its 20-hour length, if you’re into the kind of thing that it’s doing. The problem is, if you are into that kind of thing then I don’t understand why you’re not playing Uncharted instead; unlike much of the gaming media I don’t worship the ground Nathan Drake walks on and I think the series is incredibly flawed⁴ for something that’s held up as one of Sony’s flagship franchises, but there’s no getting around the fact that Uncharted 4 does everything Shadow Of The Tomb Raider is doing but better, and it did it first⁵. Not to mention the fact that Rise Of The Tomb Raider did everything Shadow did better, and first. If you must play a third-person platforming-puzzling adventure game with extreme quantities of increasingly bloody killing, I’d play (or replay) one of those instead.

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

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.

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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