![]() ![]() Smaller scale combat and stealth set ups fare a lot better, however, and are the norm for the vast majority of the game’s running time. It’s a game not really built for large scale combat, with a major battle scene featuring a ton of enemies – towards the end of the game – being a pain to progress through mostly because of the camera and the way that the game caters for mostly one-on-one struggles when up close with an antagonist. There’s a bit of a disconnect between what we’re shown in story – with Lara understandably and appropriately distraught at having to kill to survive at the beginning of the game – with what the game asks of you and rewards you for, as you’ll be engaging in brutally graphic takedowns of enemies with no further crisis of conscience on a massive scale (ludonarrative dissonance is, I believe, the correct term here). There’s an awful lot to discover though, should you want to – along with an absolutely ridiculous number of collectables in every environment, there’s optional, well designed tombs to find and beat as well. Though there’s a lot of exploration and some well implemented environmental puzzles, the story is compelling enough to drag you back to wanting to proceed without too much sidetracking. There’s a few jump scares too, which again wasn’t something I was expecting. It’s not uncommon to be making your way past decomposing human corpses, skulls or gorily depicted body parts, for example. ![]() Right from the start, the game has a surprisingly intense feel – and there’s a graphic, sometimes even horrific, slant to the subject matter that took me aback. One particular line of dialogue has quickly become one of my favourite in any game, ever: following his throat being cut (albeit not fatally), one character remarks “That’s nothing pal – I grew up in Glasgow!” The shifting motivation of a few characters we meet (Whitman, for example) is well set up and followed through nicely, and – what we’re all here for, of course – Lara’s development is believably handled too. The story is very solid and well told the script – by Rhianna Pratchett – is superb and really does a great job of giving us a bunch of people to care about, along with some truly hateful antagonists to pit them against. Along the way, Lara’s resilience and strength is tested and proven her journey to becoming the Tomb Raider we know begins here. Things soon get even more dangerous than surviving a shipwreck the island itself is inhabited by a dangerously devoted cult, looking to resurrect the mythical Sun Queen – whose trapped soul may be responsible for the lethal storms surrounding the island that ensure it remains isolated. It doesn’t take long for things to go very wrong, with the ship they’re travelling on being struck by lightning and Lara – along with her companions – washing up on the island they were trying to reach. An origin story, giving us an insight into what led to Lara becoming the hardened, no-nonsense explorer we were used to seeing in action, the reboot kicks off with a younger Lara’s first expedition, accompanied by a crew of nicely fleshed out characters. So, after working my way through the first game in what is already a well established new series of Tomb Raider games (thanks lockdown!), was it worth checking out? It’s super weird how this kind of cross media promotion affects the kinds of things that grab my interest – a similar thing happened with Jurassic World: Evolution, sparking a renewed interest in the Jurassic Park/World franchise that led to my first complete set of reviews of an entire film series. However, a chance encounter with an enormous Tomb Raider lightgun game at an arcade stoked my interest in trying out Square Enix’s gritty reboot (on which it’s based), which – almost unbelievably to me – originally released in 2013 (with the Definitive Edition releasing on Xbox One and PS4 in 2014). As time wore on, however, it felt to me that the developers in charge of the games really struggled to move forward with the series and they began to feel increasingly dated and dull to me. That said, I thought the two Angelina Jolie Tomb Raider movies in the early 00s were big, dumb, cheesy fun. I was never really a fan of Tomb Raider though the very first game was very impressive from a technical point of view way back in the mid-90s, the series never really grabbed me – and I found the ubiquity of Lara Croft as a cultural icon more irritating than appealing. Let the records show that I’m incredibly late to the party on this one. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |