Let's Talk... Tomb Raider

The reboot opts to go for a significantly bigger story focus than previous Tomb Raider entries, with an even bigger emphasis on Lara Craft as a character. The story itself sees a young and inexperienced archaeologist Lara Croft and her team of painfully stereotyped crew crash land onto a mysterious island in the pacific. The crew are in search of the lost kingdom of Yamatai and, more specifically, the legendary “Sun Queen” Himiko, who supposedly has shamanistic powers. Naturally, the crew crash land on the very same island that the very same Himiko once inhabited and the game immediately introduces you to the “Others”, who come straight out of LOST. The rest of the game follows Lara as she is brutally beaten to within an inch of her life every 10 minutes in her pursuit to get her and the rest of her presumably incompetent friends off the island.

It’s all pretty well done and decently written, but any attempt the game makes to develop the rest of the characters is defeated by the fact that they’re all just great big stereotypes. You get the classic survivalist expert/friend of the father type,      the self-obsessed archaeologist, and even an obnoxiously bad mouthed tough-guy Glaswegian. The sheer stereotypical nature of the characters makes them easy to forget, and difficult to tell them apart from one another. Also, there’s a significant disconnect between some of the story elements and Lara’s character, and the ridiculous nature of the gameplay and the some of the brutal set pieces that throw Lara around and just generally tear her to shreds. The game paints her as this inexperienced and vulnerable person who shows sincere remorse for killing a deer early in the game, but then follows up with her brutally mowing down dozens of dudes with ease. It can be a little jarring, and it certainly makes it hard to take the story seriously at times, but it’s a video game, so what do you expect?

The reboot paints Lara Croft in a much grittier, more serious light

Along with a shift in tone, Tomb Raider takes huge liberties with the gameplay you’ve come to expect from the series. Although you’ll still be jumping, climbing and scaling cliff-sides the frequent environmental puzzles come few and far between this time round. The game instead opts for an emphasis on Uncharted-like chaos, with Lara frequently scaling collapsing buildings, planes, bridges, anything that might collapse really. The game uses a very automatic and fluid climbing system that basically just requires you to just hold down the button for one direction whilst she does her magic, but you’ll also be grabbing ledges, latching onto walls you can scale with your pickaxe, and whizzing down self-made ziplines. It’s fast-paced and it’s manic, and it’s such a huge leap from the tone and pace of the previous games that if you removed Lara Croft and the Tomb Raider name then you’d never even suspect this game belongs to the series. It’s something that will inevitably put off and probably anger hardcore fans of the previous games.

The game also opts to follow in the footsteps of Uncharted again with its heavy emphasis on third-person combat. Your four hugely upgradable weapons, including a bow, will be you’re most heavily relied on tools as you traverse this hectic, and incredibly dilapidated, island. There is a lot of combat throughout this game; the game can barely go ten minutes without throwing a handful of enemies at you, which certainly keeps you alert at the very least. The combat really is your standard third-person shooter with some smart cover mechanics that will automatically put you into cover when you approach adequate cover, which is helped by the fact that Lara moves in a crouched stance in combat anyway. It’s perfectly serviceable combat and there’s certainly an element of satisfaction to it, but the game puts perhaps a little too much emphasis on what really is just pretty okay combat. Although the sheer amount of combat is balanced out by enough exploding set pieces to make you assume this game was designed for god damn maniacs.

There's enough high-octane action and fast-paced chaos to last you a year

Despite some of the major changes, Tomb Raider still stays loyal to its roots, even if those roots have been largely downplayed this time round. These roots of course being environmental puzzles and platforming, which appear in the form of general level traversal and optional tombs that contain more complex puzzles. A lot of the puzzles involve fire, with fire frequently being used to light torches or burn cloth in some capacity. The puzzles certainly aren’t majorly difficult, and perhaps aren’t as hard as ones that appeared in previous games, but they’re still fun and engaging. The puzzles will seem fine for anyone new to the series, but anyone who has played any of the previous games will likely be disappointed at how simplified or “dumbed down” the puzzles are in the reboot.    

The game looks pretty great, with a very great rugged look to everything in the world that adds a nice touch to whole survival aspect of the game. The PC version boasts its ridiculous “tressfx” that come with the vital addition of Lara’s more “naturally” behaving hair, as you can probably imagine it looks kinda dumb and in some cases her hair looks less natural than it does by default. The game runs pretty well, averaging a decent 40-50 fps at the lowest settings on rather out of date systems. The game also features some pretty good sound design, with some pretty performances and some alright sounding weaponry.

Fire plays a huge role in the game's mechanics and a lot of the puzzle sequences

The reboot of Tomb Raider does a pretty great job of essentially modernising the series, for better or for worse depending on who you ask, in a way that can appropriately be called a reboot simply because of how radically different the game is from its roots. This major departure from what made Tomb Raider the game will be either the best thing about it or the worst, and as someone who never really liked the older games the complete change in tone and pace is a refreshing turn for the series. Ultimately, Tomb Raider revitalises the series by taking it in a bold new direction whilst still adhering to the roots of what made the series so popular.