![]() ![]() 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. 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. 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. Something else that keeps the momentum of the plot going is the cinematic presentation. 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. 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. ![]() 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. 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. 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. ![]() 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. 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. 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. 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. 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 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, 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. 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. 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. 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. ![]()
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