Tomb Raider (PS3): A Change of Heart.

When worked at Blockbuster as a teen, I subscribed to a fledgling 99 cent game magazine called Incite gamer. Cool interviews, fun to read, inexpensive. In the first issue, I sent a card in for a chance to win a free game. Surprisingly, I received a brand new shiny copy of Tomb Raider 3 just before that magazine went under.  I was not good at this game. I could not figure out where to go, what to do, or how to stay alive.

So we parted ways. People played the series and it never bothered me. But what did bother me, is I was a big fan of the Fear Effect games. I was anxiously awaiting the 3rd installment of it. The problem is Eidos put in all their eggs with Tome Raider: Angel of Darkness. A game so horrendously bad it almost closed Eidos for good and thus dashing my dreams of ever continuing with the Fear Effect franchise as many projects got scrapped as a result. I swore an undying hate for the series from then on.

However, a series of trailers and footage videos of the series reboot really started to catch my attention and was giving me crazy urges to try it... Can we come to terms and meet at a middle ground? We shall see.

TOMB RAIDER:(PS3)

Our reboot begins with a very young Lara Croft (gotta be age 16-21) on a boating expedition to make her mark on the world and find the lost Japanese island of Yamatai. We start off In Medias Res with their ship being violently thrashed in a storm as their boat splits apart. After a few close calls with drowning she finally washes ashore and tries to rejoin her group, only to get sucker punched and knocked out.

Lara awakes to find herself bound upside down in some apparent flesh sack around similarly draped dead bodies and skulls around demonic looking altars. She shakes herself to freedom but impales her side on her landing and tries to make an escape to ground. As she tries to escape the cave starts to cave in on her and it becomes a desperate race to sunlight, some unknown set of hands keeps grabbing for her and screams for her to stop. After narrowly escaping the cave in, she returns to ground and starts searching for the rest of her crew to find a way off the island.

Since this is the first Tomb Raider that Square Enix has been a part of, some of their tells were very apparent to me right from the onset. It's always been a bit Squenix thing to start off in the middle of the action, and story focus here is definitely apparent. As you play through the earlier segments it back tracks to before the boat wreck through video logs with Lara's college roommate, Samantha. You find that Lara is pushing expedition from the bottom despite celebrity archaeologist Dr. Whitman's protests, and Sam is trying to make sure she gets her credit for it.

I definitely liked that it started with sequence that grabbed my attention in the first place. That original E3 trailer starts with that whole flesh sack segment and honestly I had no idea it was a Tomb Raider game until the trailer had ended. As I've complained about lately, nobody seems to do survival horror right so I see settings like this and I'm drawn like a moth to a flame.

Shit like this starts the game off on the right foot with me

The first actual kinda "game" segment works as kind of a tutorial where Lara goes around open maps and tries to survive. You set up camp, find a bow and arrows, and do some hunting. Which pretty much got me right in the correct mindset to play this game. The game industry seems to really be pushing the bow and arrow mechanic and its super fun here. More so than that, they do a pretty good job of using this segment to kind of characterize that Lara is not the same we've known from previous Tomb Raider games. She comes off as weak, frightened, and vulnerable.

It fails to hold water for long though because you find that the island is overrun with kind of a cultish militia. They are armed from everything from bows, pistols, automatic rifles, and explosives. They aren't looking to make friends either. The game quickly shifts to 3rd person shooter style combat. With only a limited number of weapons with cover for fire fights and I already hear Uncharted ringing in the back of my head. Although that's probably not the most fair comparison....

See, despite the fact that this game is knee deep in the cover based shooting mechanic I find this to be one of the few situations where it actually works. One girl with a bow vs an unknown number of people with guns. It makes sense she would take cover. On top of that, there is no real button for getting into and out of cover.  If Lara gets close to a place where she can take cover she just naturally crouches down. I still have freedom to move and run without feeling handcuffed to the walls like I sometimes felt Uncharted does.

But more so than that, it adds a much bigger stealth element to the game which as we know I am a big fan off. In Uncharted, you usually can sneak around and make one kill before the bullets start flying. In Tomb Raider you are able to slink around, pick off one guy with an arrow, change position, sneak behind someone and kill them before their buddy turns around. The game does make you pay for it when you fuck up though. when stealthing you need to kill only a few. If you are noticed, some of the fights seem like they can go on forever with the amount of reinforcements that come in.

And while perhaps it is a bit more linear than most Tomb Raider games usually are, it still provides you big open maps to explore and climb around on. Usually for stupid item collection, but it at least didn't give me the inclination that I was just following a predetermined path from one cutscene to the next. It made exploration interesting and fun to do. And for you Tomb Raider regulars it affords you plenty of opportunities to make a leap of faith, miss a ledge, bounce off the rock wall on the way down before being impaled on the jagged rocks below.

That being said, there were points in the game were it felt like Lara was trying to "Out-Uncharted" Nathan Drake. There is one ridiculous mid-game sequence where a couple of things start blowing up and you run through no joke 8 floors of explosions above and below ground. Enemies logically are running for their lives instead of shooting at you, but as this was taking place I was just scratching my head at the ridiculousness of the whole thing. "How the fuck can this entire place still be blowing up???"

You have no idea how long this sequence goes....

Speaking of ridiculous I am fairly sure I am fucking going to hell for this game. Not for the constant killing of my fellow man, or harm to helpless woodland animals. But for the nonstop snuff film I am subjected to every time you die. Its bad enough I fall from high ledges with bone shattering crunches when I hit the ground, but there are a number of hideously visceral death sequences that are so cringe worthy I feel like I am watching a snuff film. God of War could take a hint from this game. If you aren't squeamish DavidTheBarbarian1 made a video of all the major death animations. Some repeat, but it might be the most brutal 4 minutes of gaming violence ever. 

It's not just the deaths either, Lara gets the shit kicked out of her this whole game. If you are not controlling the action, you can count on something stabbing her, punching her, biting her and so forth. It creates this huge controversy of gender politics. Some people think the game goes too far with violence against a female protagonist, others think its realistic considering her overall size and stature vs the given odds and situation. Ladies might find this incarnation of Lara empowering as she defies the odds, others might get indignant from all the abuse she takes. Personally, I think she was asking for it for straying too far away from the kitchen. (Joking people, dial it back before the hate mail starts.)

If I had to make some complaints about it, I would say its biggest flaw is the Multiplayer. First off, I don't think it needs to be there. Its pretty basic: a free for all game, a team death match, a CTF variant where survivors need to steal fuel tanks. They are all entertaining and I don't need a fucking online pass to play it, but the frame rate in them are abysmal.

All of the maps have some active rain or snow taking place so it looks cool, but as soon as I start shooting the frame rate drops down to about the speed of a PowerPoint presentation. It quite literally makes the game unplayable. Do the devs not test this and realize that? Maybe this is just a problem because I bought the PlayStation 3 version, but that should be a non factor. The game should be designed to run smoothly. Maybe this is something they can patch but I'm sure I'll move on to a new game before they do. 

My other issue with the online is the stupid ranking system. These really need to go away. All it does is give the high level people more shit than new players, and the shitty online communities will just load up the experienced players on one side and proceed to thrash new players, if they don't they kick them. Its bull shit.  If you insist on keeping this system, public rooms should have an auto balancing system so teams are divided up between new and experienced players. I think that'd make a more satisfying experience for everyone. 

Don't get me wrong, It looks awesome. But the hardware just can't handle it in multiplayer.

Another complaint is a lack of bonus or end of game content. Going back to the Uncharted example, as you collected items it gave you points to unlock cheats, costumes, or characters. Why couldn't this have been done here? It would give me more incentive to collect everything, and more reason to play though the game multiple times. Forgive the chauvinist in me, but I'm always a little disappointed in a game that has a female protagonist that doesn't have some unlockable french maid outfit (don't judge me). Seriously devs, unlockable costumes are the shit, NOT dlc costumes.

There's only like one actual boss fight too, and its kinda lame. Huge hulking enemy with a weakness exposed on his back? Been done to death.  Thankfully, you have to dodge around him to get a shot off while he's swinging at you. So that is at least a step up from watching him charge into a wall and then you pop shots at him. Still, games like these need to bring back boss fights. The endless stream of regular enemies doesn't make for exciting endings.

My last major complaint is the protagonist. I fucking hate Lara Croft. She is literally in almost every incarnation of her the super powered, huge titted, "Mary Sue" protagonist.  Undying, unbeatable, and completely flawless in every aspect. That's why this new incarnation appealed to me, she didn't want to fight and she was just trying to survive. She seemed realistic and genuine, which in turn makes her relateable as a character to the player.

But then that slowly changed as the game went on. At first she was afraid, not wanting to fight and to sneak around confrontation  Then she starts bantering with her attackers, kind of egging them on and proclaiming she won't lose. OK, she gains a little bit of confidence, I can accept that. But then by the end of the game she's all but calling people out like the raving psycho I've known her to be, and it just completely turns me off to her as a heroine. There is a fight were you fight a guy like 3 times her size, and she's basically shit talking him as they fight. In any real spectrum some massive 8 foot fully armor neanderthal would murder 18 year old archaeological girl. 

They do such a good job characterizing her at first. It makes me crazy that it flips by mid game
I guess it makes sense in the context of the adventure and the need to get stronger, But I found it jarring.

Ultimately though, I found myself surprisingly into Tomb Raider. I came into this game not really wanting to give it a chance and with years of franchise disdain behind me. After a few hours I was completely immersed in slinking around and readying my bow, gradually growing a massive smirk on my face as I'd see my arrow plunk in to the skull of some half witted idiot who never even saw me there.

I never felt lost in this one, but it didn't feel like I was just walking a straight line from set piece to set piece. It blended a lot of the major 3rd person shooter selling points while still allowing it to feel like a Tomb Raider game to me without it aping is previous incarnations. I hate to say this, but I really liked Tomb Raider. Its a reasonably lengthy game and the story was pretty good. Would have liked a bit more after game content but overall it was a very satisfying experience for me and I would recommend it.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have to scrub myself down with Lava Soap.