Tomb Raider (PS3)
Lara Croft is one of the most iconic gaming heroines of all time, the Tomb Raider series one of the first to achieve widespread success with a female front and center as the protagonist. Rebooting such an important and long-running series is, of course, a huge risk (although not a first for the series), but when the creators have a clear vision, respect for the source material, and good gameplay to back all that up, you get something like 2013’s Tomb Raider, a game that reinvents the series for the HD era of gaming.
Serving as an origin story for this new reimagining of Lara Croft, the game begins with the young archaeologist aboard a ship in search of the lost kingdom of Yamatai to research the legend of the Sun Queen Himiko. However, to do so takes the vessel into the Dragon’s Triangle, where unnaturally fierce storms run the ship aground on a mysterious island littered with ships and planes who had met a similar fate. Lara Croft, at the story’s start, is just a researcher thrust into a dangerous situation, her focus solely on survival after the shipwreck, with your goals as simple as finding food and warmth. However, as it becomes apparent some of your crew survived, Lara’s goals grow to rescuing her friends and finding a way off the island, only for the complications to continue to grow as unusually well-armed men seem hellbent on capturing or killing Lara and her crew mates. Lara must now focus on a different type of survival, pushing back against these aggressors while working towards her goal of safely leaving the tempestuous waters around the island.
Tomb Raider definitely falls into a genre subset I can only call “archaeological adventures”, examples of which include movies like Indiana Jones and fellow game series Uncharted. The goal of finding an important archaeological find is exacerbated by violent resistance, and for anyone familiar with Tomb Raider’s contemporaries, some of the truths about Yamatai can be figured out well before the characters in-game put the pieces together. That isn’t to say that Tomb Raider’s story is exhausted before the game finishes telling it, as Lara Croft has a few other concerns that make her slow realization of the grander plot not so bad. First and foremost is her gradual adjustment to the situation, as Lara goes from a simple researcher to a hardened warrior as she does what she must to survive, even though when you’re playing as her she seems fairly capable and never really impeded by inexperience. They do explain her climbing acumen as a history with other archaeological expeditions, but the game emphasizes her distress at having to kill people even though the gameplay makes it surprisingly easy. I do, however, think a line she says was quite effective in that regard, Lara reflecting on how terrified she was that killing people came far too easy to her. The other focus that helps keeps things from drying up entirely is on the people around Lara during her adventure, our heroine working to try and rescue as many as possible even as circumstance and their attitudes make it ever more difficult. There are crew members to like, hate, and just sort of accept the presence of, meaning that the personal journey of Lara sustains the game even once the island’s secrets seem all too obvious.
Something else that keeps the momentum of the plot going is the cinematic presentation. While having an odd shaky cam follow Lara during some scenes like the trembling eyes of some curious creature wasn’t the best decision, for the most part, Tomb Raider nails its presentation. Bombastic action scenes with crumbling buildings, intense vehicle crashes, insane weather effects, and more give the game a nice rise and fall, slower moments of exploration and quiet navigation ensuring that you don’t get overwhelmed by these over-the-top action set pieces. Admittedly, your interaction with them is often fairly simple, many times the game just asking you to move through them fast enough to survive or press some buttons at the right time, but success is not guaranteed and the checkpoints only push you back to the start of these segments so your deaths during them aren’t punished too hard. Surprisingly, despite being so cinematic, Tomb Raider does not shy away with the grime and grit of a real life survival situation, the game showing as much pretty early as Lara gets something jabbed into her side that she must remove and recover from gradually. Throughout the course of the game, Lara herself gets incredibly dirty from mud and blood, her appearance helping to sell the toils of the survival situation. Deaths in Tomb Raider can be surprisingly brutal though, especially if it happens during one of those over-the-top action moments. Close ups of Lara being impaled, crushed, devoured by wolves, and more will not spare the player from the grim consequences of failure on this hostile island.
Outside of the intense action moments, Tomb Raider’s gameplay includes two main halves that naturally intersect from time to time. The most present of the two is navigation and platforming. Many areas on the island are not quite straightforward, meaning that Lara can clamber around in search of hidden treasures or the way onward. For a player excited by exploration, Tomb Raider has many collectibles to find, and while some are generic like the GPS caches, there are documents that flesh out the characters and history of the island, historical relics, and most importantly, the optional tombs. While Tomb Raider does have some tombs on its main story path, the optional ones provide puzzles for the player to solve. Most of your adventuring around the island involves using your tools to get around, getting more as you go along, but the optional tombs involve tiny problem-solving challenges for small rewards. While the DLC tomb is a bit underwhelming since it costs money but is not much different from the others, most of them are fairly decent diversions just like the collectibles and they make the open areas you come across on your adventure enjoyable to explore. A rather nice touch to the exploration aspect also comes in how the story progresses. While there are plenty of unique areas in the game, Lara will sometimes find herself emerging from a back path or cave into a place she’s been before but now views it from a different angle. Looking down on a place you’ve been before from the upper path you couldn’t access earlier is a nice treat, the game quite intelligent with changing enemy placement or environmental events on repeat visits.
The second half of play comes in the form of combat, and while Lara seems fairly adept at any weapon she picks up, there is still a clear progression of power to be found in how the games spaces out its weapons. Starting with just a bow and arrow, you are given a useful weapon for long-range and stealth kills, but for proper shootouts, you’ll need the firearms that Lara gradually acquires during her adventure. Enemies usually are armed with the same kinds of guns you’ll get, and Lara’s health will recover gradually if she stays out of the line of fire long enough, but they’ve got a few tricks to outplay you such as shielded enemies and explosives. You do gradually get more attachments for weapons and the environment usually has a few tricks you can exploit like destructible walls and explosive barrels, but intelligent use of ammo is your greatest asset. The game usually has ways to make sure you’re never without recourse, but some of your guns will certainly run dry during the tougher firefights. The game has a few men who might be considered bosses, but they are mostly grounded in reality like a guy in heavy body armor or a man using a heavy turret. The environments you fight in are certainly the bigger factor in combat variety, some of them even exploding into their own bombastic events.
To make both navigation and combat more interesting, the game has an upgrade system that has appreciable effects on both but doesn’t dominate the experience. Resting at a campfire will save your game and sometimes give you the option to travel to other previously visited camps to search for more collectibles, but it also plays into the level up and crafting system. Lara can improve the efficiency and power of her weapons by finding salvage as well as unlocking new secondary fires for them, helping with that sense of gradual tool progress that the game keeps going for most of the experience. Your leveling up can give you skills to supplement the crafting process or give you new melee attacks and other combat edges, although the one that marks your map with all the collectibles is certainly the most useful skill for a completionist. You do have something called Survival Skills that greys the screen to highlight important objects in the environment, and the game does mark ledges you can climb to progress with white even outside this mode, but the collectibles, especially the GPS caches, can still be squirreled away and hard to see without those map markers helping you out.
Most of Tomb Raider’s components work well, some even work excellently, but the multiplayer feels a bit tacked on. What elements worked for single-player gunfights with computer controlled opponents don’t transfer perfectly into multiplayer, and while it has some neat ideas like setting traps for your enemies, it mostly comes down to a lot of jumping to avoid fire, melee slap fights, and weapons that worked in an adventure setting but don’t match the twitch skill shooting games include to make their multiplayer compelling. The multiplayer’s level up system barring so much content until you’ve leveled up only makes it harder to want to invest that time in a sub-par mode. This doesn’t really detract from the quality of the main game, it’s just an unfortunate footnote, one that stings a little after seeing the credits. It’s clear the creators of the game were passionate, and their special thanks section taking time to mention Tomb Raider fan sites and even their forum moderators stands out as a sign of their love for the series and its fans, but the multiplayer feels like it’s some corporate mandated addition rather than a true part of their vision for the game.
THE VERDICT: Tomb Raider’s reboot of the series certainly helped reinvigorate it, with Tomb Raider delivering on both the action and spectacle front. Lara Croft’s first journey as an adventuring archaeologist is fraught with peril that she gradually becomes properly equipped for, but sadly the multiplayer isn’t fleshed out properly and the story being told isn’t as strong as it could be due to some issues with its characters and the mystery’s structure. However, enjoyable exploration and competent combat couple well during regular play, and there’s an undeniable thrill to the moments Tomb Raider breaks out all the stops to make a flashy and exciting action sequence.
And so, I give Tomb Raider for the PlayStation 3…
A GREAT rating. While it didn’t nail everything it tried perfectly, Tomb Raider still manages to provide an excellent experience of navigating a mysterious island with your limited but growing set of tools and skills. Optional objectives, action setpieces, and tightly packed yet layered environments means Tomb Raider ensures that a few missed shots in the story department don’t drag down the experience, and it’s not like the plot failed completely either. It has it’s moments of intrigue and character growth that make sure that even if it gets predictable it doesn’t get boring, the game being the proper length and packed with enough content that nothing wears out its welcome before the finish. As a single-player experience it is certainly a Great title, but the multiplayer is at best a negligible supplement.
Tomb Raider puts Lara Croft’s reimagining on a familiar yet distinct new course, balancing the spirit of the originals with more of a modern gameplay design and story focus. Lara Croft may have changed, but she’s assured her spot as a video game icon by exploring a new direction for her series.