The first thing is that the
game dumps you in very quickly, from selecting your difficulty to the
first instance of what will be a long, almost aristocrats joke level
of pain is less than 30 seconds, as the Endurance is racked by storms
and ripped apart, Lara almost drowning before being thrown off the
ship, waking up tied up in a sack. From here is a series of limited
gameplay bits, where you first set the sack alight, and fall on the
only spike on the ground. From there is a mini tutorial of sorts, as
you move and solve different little puzzles to get a hang of the
controls, or face a small quick-time event. Both of which have the
same conclusion, some sort of painful endeavour, before you finally
make it out into the Coastal Forest: the first proper area of the
game, though still mostly a tutorial, the goal merely to find the
means to survive, which means a source of fire and food.
And it's here that I can get
the actual gameplay aspects out of the way, so if you're after a
review of this as a game, rather than an interactive story, I'll
signpost the actual gameplay review parts. The graphics are
absolutely incredible. The character animations are smooth, the
textures are amazing, the character models manage to avoid the
uncanny valley effect by being both stylised and relatable enough to
reality and are really beautifully done and the attention to detail
is just staggering. The actual locations you explore are open world
and relatively small but the amount they manage to pack into the
areas is fantastic, full of little nooks and crannies and secrets
that I think I trebled the gameplay time just having fun looking for
them. The fire effects look amazing, and it's clearly something that
was a priority for the development team, given the large amount of
puzzles and set pieces that require the use of fire to solve. The
platforming is a heavily refined variant of the Underworld system,
being essentially jump, drop and move around on different bits of the
scenery. Unlike Underworld though, the climbing controls when not on
a straight ledge are far more responsive, so you don't often feel
like you should be able to climb to a nook that you can't. The
controls are very responsive, something that again wasn't in
Underworld due to a slightly dodgy animation engine.
The gameplay structures
itself as a pseudo-open world with different areas that you can
explore at will, full of secrets and different things, inspired more
by Assassin's Creed this time than Prince of Persia. Helping in this
regard is Eagle vi- sorry, Instin- damn it! Survival Instinct, the
latest incarnation of the very useful indicator system. Hitting the
left bumper makes a pulse hit and turns the screen grey scale to
identify all the useful things you need to know on the screen in
different colours. Enemies in Red, climbable stuff in white, where
you need to go as a shining beacon and so on. Basically if you didn't
like it in Assassin's Creed or Hitman Absolution, it's not exactly
necessary to complete the game but it does very much help,
particularly since in this very dense jungle there are far more
things to catch you out, like rope traps that send you upside down.
The final part of the
tutorial of sorts requires you to collect a bow from a poor former
explorer and hunt a deer, and people who like hunting a bit too much
will be pleased to know that both head shots and heart shots are one
shot kills.
It's this kind of attention to detail that you must value in review you know!
This allows Lara to get back
to the camp, enjoy some deer and watch some videos her best friend
Sam was to put on youtube. Yes, there's a found footage aesthetic in
the game where Lara and her surprisingly large supporting cast (for
comparison, in the early games you had maybe three characters total
including the butler, and even in the Crystal Dynamics games you only
had three sidekicks, also including the butler) interact and try
desperately to break the stock character types they've clearly been
assigned. Joining Lara on this intrepid adventurer is the Geeky one,
the Spineless one, the Ripley, the best friend with awful luck, the
native american, the old captain and the Northern Bastard.
The main issue is it's a
large cast for a survival game, particularly when for massive
portions of the game you only get to interact with one of them over
the radio, 'Northern Bastard' Roth. Each of them does get a character
moment, typically when they die, but the interesting part in the
discussion is generally Lara, not the other character, which in
itself is interesting since in most of these games you have the exact
opposite issue: A great supporting cast carrying a deliberately
underdeveloped protagonist.
One of the things I think
that is fixed right from the start of this is that unlike the
trailer, Lara is given some stellar voice work, and her writing and
vocal mannerisms capture a lot of different disparate effects in a
small amount of words, proving that some of Prachett's father's
influence rubbed off. The dialogue Lara has with other characters,
and more fundamentally with herself is very well told, and because
for large stretches of the game Tomb Raider is a one-woman show, she
is naturally the one who develops the most and in the most
interesting ways.
And speaking of which, it's
probably time to get into the scene that caused so much controversy
in June, to see if context aids the uncomfortable imagery, as Rhianna
Prachett argues.
The scene in question comes
surprisingly quickly, barely an hour into the game, at the end of the
second chamber, Lara and Spineless (sorry, his name's Whitman but for
almost the entirety of the game he's one dimensionally pathetic,
occasionally adding elements of prissyness) get captured by a group
of Russian-esque mercenaries or scavengers, who rough up the
captives, including backhand slapping Lara to the ground. This leads
to an interesting stealth section with your hands tied behind your
back where you end up in the situation in the trailer, caught in the
middle of a tiny hole in a structure, forced at gun point out and
trapped as the guard attempts to touch her in a rather uncomfortable
quick time event. There's only two (maybe three) vaguely sexual parts
to the scene until it becomes a struggle for the gun the scavenger is
carrying until the inevitable shot. Now, in the trailer it kind of
cuts away here, but the scene afterwards justifies the ordeal, as
Lara breaks down and swears that she's just killed someone, before
picking up the gun and attempting her escape.
Now, it's clear that there
is no actual threat of rape in the code, if you mess up the quicktime
button press Lara gets strangled: an awfully visceral death but not
sexual in the least. The issue I have is that they make the vague
pass at having the attack sexualised but don't do anything to justify
it or to imply it has consequences, as if it was only there to make
the man in question look like a sadistic idiot. A lot of people feel
better about it but I still maintain that adding a sexualised element
to it in any way was unnecessary, since any kind of sexual abuse,
assault or even harsh language about women (I think “fucking bitch”
might get said once throughout the game) isn't ever mentioned or
hinted at again. It's a gripe, but it's a gripe that is more than
forgiven by the following fifteen minute section of the game where
Lara escapes the abandoned village where she was brought to, having
to shoot scavengers that fire at her, which is probably one of the
most effective, tense and emotional fifteen minutes of pure gameplay
I've played in years. Part of this is the excellent gunplay and cover
systems. Gunplay is standard, LT to aim, RT to fire with Lara
automatically hiding behind cover, but the viscerality of it is
emphasised, and it makes you feel a thick cocktail of emotions. It's
not like Spec Ops: The Line, which made the gunplay adequate but not
fun, to add to the narrative's message on the horrors of war, since
it is still enjoyable in its own right, but the scene before it, the
first taking of a human life then the desperate cries as Lara guns
down people, asking them to leave her alone as she blows their brains
out is oddly effective, and makes me believe Rosenberg missed a
trick. I didn't feel like I wanted to protect Lara, particularly not
in that very patronising “I wish to protect you because you're a
cute girl” way he was implying, but there was parts to the initial
gunplay where the player and Lara's pain matched, at least to a
certain degree, which like in The Line, can only be a positive thing
regarding the effectiveness of the narrative. This is probably the
emotional high point, the big change where Lara stops being a
headstrong fastidious intelligent student and becomes a survivor and
an adventurer.
That makes this a
bildungsroman. I don't care what you lit snobs think!
There is actually a
significant amount of weight to this being a bildungsroman, which to
non-pretentious northern bastards like Roth and not like me, is a
novel of development, where a child struggles to become an adult and
find his place in society. Think something like Great Expectations.
The key to a bildungsroman is indeed the struggle and I suspect
that's what the developers were going for, in a rather hamfisted way.
The idea is you feel all this pain and horror and mangled emotions
first, and then, like Lara, build yourself back up through force of
will. It's surprisingly effective, and probably is why the majority
of the game looks less and less like the first hour and a half. The
game, as part of its development from a survival horror (indeed, the
bit in the mountain village feels like a very truncated version of I
Spit on Your Grave, albeit without the particularly grotesque,
gruesome and uncomfortably exploititive parts of that premise), but
the next few scenes feel less and less so. Sure, survival is still a
vital part of the game, with the game very tepidly promoting stealth
in a few areas (this isn't MGS3 though, don't expect to pull off a
no-alert pacifist run here), but ammo is plentiful, the controls are
good and you get greater rewards for fighting, although of course you
run the risk of death, which refreshingly unlike most games is
something that is actually quite likely on normal mode, even if you
adapt to the cover system quickly. Survival becomes less a matter of
concern and more a matter of getting more experience points which you
can spend at base camp.
Now that the more intense
parts of the review are out of the way I can finally get into the
last major part of the gameplay system: Base Camp. Base camp is
effectively the fires in Dark Souls, a kind of save point, but also
the place where you can upgrade yourself (with skill points you get
from XP you get from killing enemies, finding hidden items and
raiding optional tombs) and each of the four (well five, if you count
the axe you use to pry open doors and boxes) weapons you get (through
finding salvage, the other collectable). Both are fairly expansive,
though if you go off the beaten track even a tiny bit you'll probably
get enough experience to get all the extra skills, and most if not
all of the weapon components which get you the best versions of each
weapon. If it sounds like I'm not selling it much, all I need to tell
you about it is that you can get a shotgun that lights people on
fire. It's awesome, though I think it does reflect a problem with
video game narratives a bit, particularly ones which deal with the
theme of killing, since it tells you this is bad and you should try
not to end up like the monsters you fight and have the abyss stare
back at you, yet at the same time the more you play with the weapon
customisation and skill sets the more fun the gunplay is,
particularly when you unlock the weapon finishers, special moves you
can do up close when you hit the Y button after knocking someone
over. It's not a big deal, since the game does have moments where you
do feel that guilt the game is trying to make you, mostly early on,
and by the end it's part of the bloodthirsty nature of the character
people didn't like when she wiped out entire species of tiger in the
early games.
Speaking of the early games,
the primary challenge of the bildungsroman is to connect the scary
survival stuff with the supernatural tomb raiding of every other game
in the series, which is done through the Island itself. Yamatai, in
the Dragon's Triangle (the Japanese equivalent to the Bermuda
triangle) is an island racked by freak storms, most of which, in true
Resident Evil fashion, destroy your only means off the island, over
and over again. Seriously, at least three planes and helicopters get
demolished in the game that you try to escape on. The idea is there
is no escape, caused by the mysterious Queen Himiko, a sort of
Boadicea-like figure known also as the Sun Queen. The game's thematic
through-line is the nature of myth as a reflection of some kind of
truth. In game this refers to the question of how real the myths of
Himiko are, but you could take a metafictional reading here and claim
that it's a comment on the Myth of Lara Croft herself, and how much
of the 'reality' of the character was seen in the earlier games, or
more recently how much of the game itself was really seen from the
myth of the trailer. It's an interesting theme, and part of what
justifies some of the later interactions with the characters is their
inability to see the connections between myth and reality. Lara Croft
in particular is a well suited protagonist to a game suiting this
theme, as she herself is haunted by the ghosts of her pasts, of her
late father who she early on in the game condemned for believing in
myth, her feelings changing as she realises there was more truth than
she could first see, and that change, that acceptance of her heritage
and her family is also a symbolic acceptance of the heritage and the
tone of the older games, although whether it's an acceptance of the
shorts I think is a mystery that won't be solved until the inevitable
sequel.
The game itself runs about
8-20 hours, depending on just how much of a completionist you are,
and of course not counting DLC, which I didn't get any of with my
copy. The pacing regardless is superb throughout and there aren't
really many deadspots even if you're hunting for collectibles given
survival instinct and the beacons systems. There are optional tombs
to raid, although these are more like simple physics puzzles rather
than the huge multi-level environments of old. Still a ton of fun
though and I suspect what most of the DLC will consist of. There are
a few glitches with the game, particularly with regard to the physics
engine and how the game deals with Lara being out of the physical
bounds. Once I managed to make a box push Lara through the geometry
and out of the game world, which took me out of the experience a
little bit. Mercifully it only happened a few times and a quick
reload checkpoint thing meant I only lost about two or three minutes
of progress total. It's a very enjoyable ride from start to finish,
with only a few little lumps and bumps in between and tiny gripes,
and seemed to simultaneously enrapture me in its awe and wonder and
gave me enough to ensure that a critical reading of the game and its
story was positive.
The final question on
everyone's lips is whether this is a good feminist game and it
certainly tries to be, the little gripe with the trailer
notwithstanding. Lara is a character of deep layers and hidden
strengths and with each challenge another veil is parted to show
another strength. I get the complaints with the character in the
past, that she seemed to barely exist in the world where the
challenges exist. She knew the answer before it was asked and barely
seemed to be in any danger. They say legends are born from tragedy
and triumph, and with the new Tomb Raider, the balance is struck
between the two, and hopefully in the same vein, there is something
really empowering about Lara's tragedy and triumph here, that felt
organic, rather than either a cardboard character or the subject of a
feminist thesis.
Verdict: Just buy it
already, I can't recommend it more.
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