Tomb Raider Review (Glix)
Tomb Raider is a good, but very confused, game. Lets dig in.
Tomb Raider is a 2013 reboot/relaunch of a very famous franchise that had lost its way over the years. It is a third person, action/adventure/exploration game starring Lara Croft, a young archeologist.
On its face, Tomb Raider has everything you would want from a AAA single player game. Stunning graphics, smooth action with great feel, excellent platforming, tons of secrets to explore and a big map. The devil, as they say, is in the details.
In Tomb Raider you and your teams boat crashes onto an unpopulated island that is hidden in the ocean and difficult for people to reach. At the start of the game, you have been separated from your group and you are injured. You have to pull yourself together, find a camp, and our adventure then begins. At first it seems like Tomb Raider is going to be some kind of survival game. You are injured, and need to find a camp, and supplies. The jungle is intimidating and beautiful. Very quickly though, the game forgets about your injuries, and becomes a pretty straightforward action/adventure/exploration game.
In Tomb Raider, you are constantly being reminded that you are playing a game. This is by far my biggest gripe with it. Over the course of the game, I estimate you kill somewhere around 750+ people. When this is contrasted with Lara’s arc, and her reactions, it makes NO sense. It is constantly hitting you in the face during story/dialog sequences, that don’t really make sense after you just killed 15 people in cold blood seconds earlier. Making it worse, is that it doesn’t make any sense for that many people to even be on the island in the first place. Additionally, you are able to fast travel between camps. Considering what a physical ordeal it would be to travel between them, it again, pulls you right out of game and makes sure you are very aware it is a game that you are playing. This would not be criminal in certain games, but in a narrative based game like this, where they are clearly trying to get you to suspend disbelief and get emotionally invested, it works against what they are trying to accomplish.
I feel the same way I did about Alan Wake. Tomb Raider would have been a better game if design was more “top down”. If the developers came up with the gameplay systems based on the story they were trying to tell (trapped on an island with a cult of people who are also trapped on the island), instead of feeling they *needed* certain types of gameplay, and systems, and game length, if they were going to charge $60 for the game at the time of release, and then trying to shoehorn a narrative around those systems.
My issues with it aside, Tomb Raider does a fantastic job returning Tomb Raider to its rightful place as franchise with big time, cutting edge, releases that you should be excited for. I’m looking forward to playing through the sequel and seeing where they took the franchise next.
8/10
(Edited to correct year the game released)