Anyone remember back in mid-2012 when there was this huge scandal
about a scene in the upcoming Tomb Raider
reboot that had themes of sexual abuse (see: RAPE)? But then Crystal Dynamics' studio manager came out and said "Oh my
god, there's no way we'd put anything like that in a video game!"? Well,
this is because there's no such thing as bad publicity and, let's be
honest, no one's given a flying fuck about the Tomb Raider franchise
since the Playstation 1. While
this game is generally considered a "reboot", there are others that argue that
it is, in fact, a prequel to the games that only a handful of people
cared about 17 years ago. They needed to stir up some controversy so
that the world would actually pay attention to the game when it
launched, though the whole thing failed horribly when everyone found
out that they'd been lying to us and the "attempted rape scene" was
merely some psycho being creepy. LAME! But if you're looking for Tomb
Raider porn, that's what the internet is for.
In any
case this article is about the game, not the idiocy surrounding
it. I'd much rather review the idiocy contained on the disc.
So, having minimal tomb raiding experience (with
the exception of my play-through of the Uncharted series) I decided to
give it a try. A strong female protagonist with believable character
development? Sure! Yay! Bring it on!
The game opens
with Lara and her ethnically diverse pool of friends getting shipwrecked
on some island in the middle of the "Dragon's Triangle" (which I discovered is actually a thing). The
early portion of the game is dedicated to trying to reunite with the
cast of a different color, in which you learn that the blonde American is a
selfish tool trying to make himself rich and famous, and everyone else
is an honest, helpful, altruistic human being. In typical
action-adventure fashion, the whole world is against you. Crazy island
cultists (who are apparently armed to the teeth, thanks to all the old
WW2 equipment left lying around) obstruct you at every turn, shit never
goes according to plan, and when you do finally manage to radio a
rescue plane, the motherfucker gets hit by lightning!
Sure, plenty of games are using the tired level-to-level progression of
"oh shit, your plan didn't work, some psycho/natural disaster/act of god
got in the way, go try something new over here", and that's just
dandy. It's the fact that everything seems to get progressively worse
for Lara as the day goes on. Sure she gets her brief moments of
respite here and there, but they don't last and Lara really gets a
taste of what it's like to be Nathan Drake for a day.
Now
hang on to that thought, because I've got a slew of comparisons to make
here.
Yes,
they're both generic chest-high-wall shooters with good platforming
mechanics. Yes, they both end up in places that the Nazi's were once
researching, but the biggest connection between the two I have to make
is this. Both games have a protagonist searching for a "lost" (see:
fictional) city. When they finally reach that city, they discover
not-quite-sane locals very dedicated to the city's defense. And, at the
end of the day, when all is said and done, we learn that there IS
actually something SUPERNATURAL here and that there is a very GOOD
reason that the city was lost in the first place.
Additionally, Tomb Raider takes about as much pleasure in sadistically
torturing its protagonist as Uncharted did, especially when Lara gets
impaled on a rock formation about 45 seconds into actual gameplay.
Ok.
Great. We've got ourselves an Uncharted clone. Nothing wrong with
duplicating a good game. Where would 2D fighters be if no one had
copied Street Fighter? Would we have platformers if no one had
duplicated Mario? Imitation is the most sincere form of flattery, blah
blah blah. The thing about Tomb Raider is that it's NOT Uncharted.
Uncharted was as much linear-action-shooter as it was summer action
flick. It's got all those moments that make you gasp. The almost
falling into the abyss because a ledge crumbles, the villain being one
step ahead of you, the explosions, the wanton destruction, the
arrogant, cocky protagonist who one-liners his way through everything...
Tomb
Raider is trying to tell the story of a young, starry-eyed
archeologist who stumbles across some haunted island. The character
progression is almost believable, if you just take for granted that
someone, at some point, taught her the necessary survival skills for
being lost in the wilderness. Or maybe she just watched a shitload of
Man vs. Wild. Maybe Survivorman instead, since Lara doesn't seem
inclined to drink her own piss. Which is fine with the caveat that the
first thing she does not a minute into the game (as previously mentioned) is get impaled and then
REMOVE THE OFFENDING OBJECT. Now, I'm not a boyscout, but even I know
that when an object is run straight through any part of your body, the
LAST thing you do is remove the motherfucker.
Second
point about the survival mechanic, and I call it a mechanic because the
game used the word "survival" to describe itself on the back of the
box. The stupid mechanic has nothing to do with survival. You can hunt
animals and pick fruit, but all it does for you is hand you
experience. You don't even get any fucking health from eating. Wow.
Way to flip my whole fucking world on its head. A video game where food
does not heal you. What's next? Platformers without a jump button?
The
currency in the game is "salvage", which you use to upgrade your
weapons. Which is at least believable, because when you do upgrade them
to say a "padded stock" or "double magazine" all you've successfully
done is duct tape shit together. What I fail to understand is how
finding "gun parts" or "bow parts" around the island can turn your WW2
Tommy gun into an AK-47, or your bundle of sticks tied together with a
string between each end into a modern compound bow.
Now,
if you play the whole thing through, following each main objective from
point A to point B, the game would probably take you a Saturday
afternoon. It's pretty damn short if you're not going to run around
looking for all the various collectables. The game has tombs to raid,
GPS caches (whatever the fuck those are) to retreive, artifacts to
discover, and a bunch of other, random-ass challenge things to find.
Most of these things glow yellow when you hit the "Survival Instinct"
button, which is TR's equivalent of Eagle Vision from Assassin's Creed.
Everything goes gray-scale except important locations, enemies, and
collectables. You can even put character points into making animals and
fruit bushes glow.
My bad. I forgot to mention that
this game also incorporated another genre into its radical spectrum.
RPG elements. Beyond using salvage to upgrade Lara's gear, she also
gains experience and levels, which award her points to put into "skills"
that help you kill things better or... actually, that's it. The points almost
exclusively help you kill things better with the minor exception of a
couple abilities that reveal more things on your map. Yes, you can put level
points into making the game less annoying for those of us that don't
want to canvas the entire fucking island to find random shit. At the
very least, Tomb Raider doesn't shove you from location to location like many games. It's an extremely
open world and allows you to roam around wherever you want for however
long you want to, though there are no side quests. Just more shit to collect.
Not
me. I've never been a completionist in any game. Never gotten 1000
gamerscore. Not a single 100% on anything. So needless to say, after I
had my leet-murder-skills topped off and my weapons maxed, I pretty much
just drilled story until the credits rolled. Which was way longer than
it needed to be.
I can pretty much break down Tomb Raider into 3 segments:
1. This game is new! It's all survivor-y. I have a bow! I'm Lady Hawkeye.
2. I have now acquired a gun. This is every other third-person shooter, but with a better cover system.
3. FUCKING GOD AM I NEAR THE END YET? MAKE IT STOP!
The one undeniably positive thing I can say about the new Tomb Raider is that it should set
the bar for all third-person cover mechanics from now until the end of
time. The cover system is context sensitive. There is no button to
jump in and out of cover. No sticky walls that keep your protagonist
awkwardly immobile as hostiles flank him. Instead, Lara wanders about
unrestrained, until there is an enemy close. Then she will, wisely,
walk around hunched over, leaning against crates and walls where
applicable, but still popping out to aim down the sights when told to do
so.
Let me rock your world one more fucking time. No cover button. No sticky walls. How does this work, you ask? Fucking spectacularly.
Now excuse me, I'm going to go play Uncharted 2.
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