Before I begin with my review in earnest, some full disclosure. I am not that big of a Tomb Raider fan. In fact, despite owning every platform the series has ever released a game onto, the only Tomb Raider game I played prior was Tomb Raider: Legend on the Xbox 360 and only for the first few levels before I put the game down and never picked it up again. Not because it was bad, it was quite good from what I remember. I just moved on to other games and never picked it up again. That’s not to say I never wanted to play any other Tomb Raider games, either. I own the first two games for the PS1 and have Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light and Tomb Raider: Underworld installed on my PS3, but, similar to Legend, I just haven’t played them yet.
So how did Crystal Dynamics tackle reinventing the iconic series to be more accommodating to Tomb Raider newbies like myself? Well in the bare simplest terms, they took the stealth, semi-open world, exploration, and character building of Batman: Arkham Asylum, combined it with the cinematic focus, platforming, and third person combat of the Uncharted series, and then dropped Katniss Everdeen into the middle of it.
The game begins with a 21 year-old Lara Croft fresh out of school joining an archeological TV show expedition on a ship named the Endurance to find the legendary lost Japanese kingdom of Yamatai, basically the Japanese version of Atlantis that is famed to be ruled by a queen named Himiko who was said to have powers over the winds and the storms. Joining Lara is her school friend Samantha Nishimura, who claims to be a direct descendent of Himiko, as well as Lara’s mentor Conrad Roth, who knew her parents, and James Whitman, the archeologist who is the host of the TV show and whom Lara is a protégé to. The crew of the Endurance is rounded out by characters such as Alex the ship’s technician, Reyes the ship’s mechanic, Jonah the ship’s cook, and Grim the ship’s helmsman.
After several weeks sailing on the Pacific Ocean and finding nothing, Lara tries to convince the crew to do the unthinkable and ignore searching the locations all the texts about Yamatai say to search, and suggests instead heading into the Dragon’s Triangle. The Dragon’s Triangle is a deadly patch of ocean off the southeastern coast of Japan that is essentially the Pacific Ocean’s version of the Bermuda Triangle and in real life has been declared a danger zone by the Japanese government after several ships they sent themselves to search the Triangle have never returned. Everyone protests Lara’s suggestion, except Roth, who is also the captain of the Endurance, and so they sail into the Triangle.
One night while the Endurance is in the Dragon’s Triangle, Lara is peacefully listening to her MP3 player when suddenly the Endurance starts shaking, throwing Lara headfirst onto the floor. When she leaves her quarters she is almost immediately swarmed with a surge of water. It turns out the Endurance was caught in a storm and was sinking. Lara is barely saved from drowning by Roth, but when she tries to reach for Roth after jumping across the breaking ship, she slips from his hands and plummets into the sea below. Lara washes up on a beach and notices several of the crew members on a cliff in the distance and tries calling out to them when she is knocked unconscious by an unseen person.
Lara wakes up hanging upside down in a cave and it is at this point that players finally take control of her. You have to move the analog stick back and forth in the right directions to ignite a fire that sets Lara free, but doing so causes Lara to crash down onto a piece of rebar that she has to pull from her abdomen. After doing this you must guide Lara out of a tutorial cave and onto the island. As the rest of the story unravels Lara must take on an all male cult that is out to kill Lara and her friends, while also trying to find a way to escape an island that won’t let them escape.
The story is pretty interesting and gets bonus points for tackling a mythological lost city that hasn’t been covered to death in pop culture. If you’ve played any of the Uncharted games you can kind of guess what kind of twists to expect from the story, though. The real star of the story, however, is Lara’s steady transformation from a naïve bookworm into a tormented and emotionally grounded badass. She isn’t afraid to wear her emotions on her sleeve, but at the same time isn’t too reserved when it comes to casually blowing up enemies with a grenade launcher or driving her climbing axe into skulls, either.
Probably my biggest complaint with the story has to be that, Roth, Sam, and Whitman aside, most of the Endurance characters just aren’t that well developed or interesting. For example, Reyes is for the most part a token angry black woman stock character. Yes she is given some characterization, particularly her concerns about ever seeing her daughter again, but for the most part all she does is complain to everyone, mostly to Lara though. In fact, an odd thing I noticed is that almost half of the Endurance crew is nothing more than ethnic stereotypes with a few slight bits of characterization added on via collectable documents in the game. And the villain is also a stock nutjob cult leader. He, too, is also further expanded with collectable documents, but they only further show how crazy he is.
Moving on to the gameplay, I have to say that Tomb Raider might quite possibly have the best overall gameplay in a third person action-adventure game to date. First off, the stealth mechanics in the game are brilliant for one little thing, they are organic. What I mean is, unlike all other stealth gameplay in third person action adventure games that require you to press a button to cling to cover or to crouch, in Tomb Raider, Lara takes a stealth position automatically whenever you walk up to any of the genre’s now staple chest high walls and objects.
Playing the game stealthily is probably the best course of action, as it means you can quietly dispatch foes with Lara’s new signature weapon, her bow. And trust me you will want to kill enemies with her bow over and over again. Much like how Metal Gear Rising has finally given gamers a truly satisfying swordplay experience, Tomb Raider does the same for the bow and arrow. Using the bow – especially in its upgraded state that allows you to also use flame and explosive arrows – is just so fun.
Now not all of the weapons Lara can use are as fun to wield as the bow. For example, the machine gun is highly inaccurate, spraying all over the place. Admittedly pretty realistic for a novice using such a weapon, but makes it hard when you are trying to save ammo with potshots. Lara’s climbing axe is also really hard to use in combat as, even when you upgrade the specific skills to use it in combat, Lara will swing it in wide arcs that leaves her open for counterattacks.
The weirdest thing, however, about the game’s combat is it has no blind fire mechanics. Which I feel is an odd choice as blind fire is pretty much a staple of third person shooting combat nowadays, and it would kind of fit Lara’s character with her just blindly firing from behind cover or whilst running around. But, if the choice was between this game having its silky smooth stealth mechanics and blind fire, I would gladly take the improved stealth mechanics.
Outside of the combat, Lara can traverse the game’s semi-open world in a variety of ways with each destination you need to get to having at least two possible paths you can take, and you can use the game’s campsite upgrade hubs to jump around to the parts of the island you’ve already been to and do more exploration in those areas. There are several incentives to backtracking to areas you have already passed through that include things like collectable character documents, GPS caches, relics, and optional side tombs.
You see that little red light way in the distance? That’s your destination in this particular part.
The side tombs are fun quick diversions. Each tomb is a single room with a relatively easy puzzle that upon completely lets Lara reach a storage cache that holds are large amount of XP and salvage. You can find smaller additional XP and salvage caches stored throughout the island as well as gain XP from killing animals and enemies and gain salvage by searching their bodies.
When you accumulate enough XP you gain skill points that you can spend on upgrading the skills Lara has. For example, one skill you can buy is a dodge counter move where, when you dodge an enemy’s melee move, if you succeed the QTE that follows, you will stab them in the knee with an arrow. And yes, there is a Trophy/Achievement that references the Skyrim meme if you do this dodge counter a specific number of times.
As for the salvage, you use that to upgrade Lara’s weapons. Such upgrades include things like padded stocks on the shotgun and machine gun to reduce kickback for better accuracy or larger magazines. You can even give all four of the primary weapons alternate fire options, like the aforementioned flame and explosive arrows for the bow. There are also ways to upgrade the weapons into newer, more advanced models by finding specific parts in random salvage caches. For example, over the course of the game you can upgrade Lara’s bow from a primitive bundle of sticks tied together all the way to modern day competition bows.
Thankfully the game doesn’t just end when you finish the story mode. After the story is finished, you can continue running around the island to collect the items and finish any tombs and challenges you didn’t already finish. Overall, if there are any real problems I had with the gameplay it is two big things. The first is that the game has what is seemingly becoming another genre staple in the form of an alternate vision mode. In this game it turns the whole world grey and highlights the enemies and the in game objects you can interact with your various gadgets and weapons. This makes the game’s puzzles, especially the tombs, way too easy. The other issue is that some of the game’s QTEs have a very small reaction window, like the QTE is over almost immediately after flashing the button prompt, so you don’t have enough time to react the first time the QTE shows up.
Now in terms of audio and visuals, again, this game gets top marks. The music in this game is great. The epic set piece moments have the right kind of music playing to them, and crawling through cavess and sneaking around enemy encampments causes the game to play some very tense and dread-filled songs that really sets the atmosphere. The voice acting in this game is pretty good too, with Camilla Luddington doing an especially amazing job voicing Lara croft.
Visually, this is, in my humble opinion, the best looking multiplatform game to come out this generation. Almost on par with the platform exclusives in terms of overall quality and in some areas actually surpasses them. The fire effects in this game are amazing, making the once jaw dropping flames in Uncharted 3 look less impressive now. The way water reflects light onto cave walls I don’t think I’ve ever seen before in a game. The game also has some great screen effects, such as splattering drops of blood onto the screen when Lara does a brutal up close kill or having water cascade down the screen when Lara stands under waterfalls.
But the most impressive thing about the visuals to me is Lara’s animations and how her look evolves over the course of the game. Lara gets progressively more bloodied and dirtied as the game goes on, and her clothing takes on realistic damage. Her animations are fluid and dynamic and there are even some great touches like how her in game model visibly has the look of fear on her face at times or how if you run out of arrows in Lara’s quiver and try to shoot another one, she’ll grasp at thin air and then look at her quiver with disappointment.
Even Lara’s death animations are great from a technical standpoint, and even more horrifying because of those little details Crystal Dynamics put into all of her animations. For example, there are some sequences in the game where Lara can be impaled through the throat with a giant spike, at which point she’ll hopelessly claw at the spike before taking her last breath and going limp. The amount of gruesome death animations for Lara in this game are only outnumbered by the amount of animations in the Dead Space franchise. These animations do reinforce Crystal Dynamics’ goal of making players want to keep Lara alive.
Now, there is one last thing I do have to talk about with this game. And that’s the multiplayer. In this multiplayer, you either play on one of two sides, either the survivors of the Endurance, or as members of the all male cult. The multiplayer, while in no way, shape, or form a bad online experience in terms of overall gameplay, is completely unnecessary and feels really tacked on. To begin with, there are only four total multiplayer modes.
The first is Rescue, a mode where the Endurance survivors must steal medical supply kits from the cult members and bring them back to a specific location on the map. The second is standard Team Deathmatch where you just kill the other team a set number of times. The third is Cry For Help, where the Endurance survivors must turn on radio transmitters to send out a rescue signal. Finally the last one is a standard Free For All mode where you have to kill the other players a set number of times.
In addition to the measly four modes, there is only five maps, a low amount on its own only made worse when you remember that a sixth map was used as a pre-order bonus at virtually every retailer that carried the game. As you play the four modes, which you can play in either casual or ranked lobbies, you gain experience and can find crates of salvage throughout the maps. The experience increases your level, which in turn unlocks new weapons, weapon mods, player skills, and character skins. You need to spend the salvage to purchase the unlocked character skins and weapon mods.
Amazingly the gameplay mechanics from the single player works surprisingly well in the multiplayer. However, be that as it may, the online isn’t without flaws outside of the limited modes and maps. Plain and simply, the starting weapons and skills suck in this game. You will have to grind a lot before you can use the weapons and skills that makes this online remotely fun. In other words, no matter how good at video games you might be, if you are a low level player engaging in a firefight against a high level player, you will almost certainly die every single time, unless you are smart and use the maps’ hazards. Another issue I have is it is vastly more easy to win matches in the Rescue and Cry For Help modes if you are playing as an Endurance survivor. For instance, their victory conditions are much easier to obtain than the cultists’, especially if the cultists are lower level players.
Lastly, there are some technical issues with the online. I have seen some players literally turn invisible while in combat with them, and other players I have seen teleport over short distances. On top of that, there have been a few times when the game freezes on the transition screen between rounds in a match, leaving me staring at a blank black screen and forcing me to quit the game and load it again.
All in all, while there is some fun to be f in thounde multiplayer, it is overall a shallow experience that probably should have been left off of the final product. I think they should have taken all the time and effort they spent on the multiplayer and spent it on the single player. More specifically on the tombs to either give us more tombs to raid or make the existing tombs bigger and more complex than single room puzzles. I really hope the majority of the DLC for this game will be for the single player in the form of new areas and tombs to explore and not just things like maps, modes, and characters for the online.
Overall, when you get down to it, Tomb Raider is a great game. I feel all gamers should play this game, because this is a prime example of how to do a game starring a female character. But beyond that, it is just a damn fine experience with great gameplay and is an audio and visual treat. There are still several months and great looking releases to come, but for right now, Tomb Raider is my favorite game of 2013. Tacked on multiplayer suite be damned.
Tomb Raider is rated M for Mature. It was released on March 5th, 2013 for the PS3, Xbox 360, and PC. I played the PS3 version for this review.