I started playing through the Tomb Raider games again in 2018. I figured it’d take a while to get through them all — ha! You can read through my previous retrospectives here and here.
To be fair, I didn’t get these latest three games until quite recently, and a new computer on which to play them even more recently, but now let’s finish this retrospective series with Crystal Dynamics’ second trilogy, or ‘reboot trilogy’, starting with…
Tomb Raider (2013)
Remarkably, this game was released on the same platform as Tomb Raider Legend (2006). The two games look at least a generation apart! Well, they kind of are. Legend was cross-generation with the PS2 era, while Tomb Raider 2013 only came into its own on more powerful systems.
Let’s talk about that name for a moment. This isn’t ‘Tomb Raider: Origins’, or ‘Tomb Raider: Young Lara’, or ‘Aventures of Tomb Raider: Island Survivor’. No, this is TOMB RAIDER. So confident were Crystal Dynamics (or publisher Eidos) in their product’s quality and authenticity, that they gave it the same name as the iconic 1996 original. I can see why, then, so many people were disappointed that there weren’t many tombs in it.
Tomb Raider 2013 takes a leaf from Nathan Drake’s book and very much apes the bombastic style of action and cover-shooting from the Uncharted games. This is supposed to be an origin story for Lara Croft, but it’s been altered from what was originally shown, and now a young Lara finds herself shipwrecked with some friends on an island full of murderous cultists, with a supernatural storm preventing them from leaving.
The story attempts to show how Lara became such a brave survivor, but it doesn’t take long enough to establish anything because of the breakneck speed of the plot. Within minutes of playing, Lara is shrugging off life-threatening injuries, killing animals and humans aplenty, and making death-defying leaps onto and around precarious structures. She goes from having to psych herself up to kill a deer with an arrow, to learning finishing blows with a pickaxe or a shotgun to the face. It’s crass, violently gory and poorly judged. But beyond that, it simply doesn’t have many tombs in it. Occasionally, you come across an optional area you can explore, but these ‘side tombs’ are usually just a single room navigation puzzle. They’re fine – all of the game is fine, really – but nothing here excites, nothing is original or surprising or unique any more. It’s a glossy, over-the-top action game with some crap characters in it, lacking in the awe and wonder that made the series so successful.
That said, the game apparently did very well and warranted to a sequel, so what do I know?
You can watch my entire playthrough on YouTube below:
Rise of the Tomb Raider (2015 / 2016)
Crystal Dynamics’ second attempt at ‘NuTombRaider’ takes the template of the 2013 game and basically makes everything bigger, more polished and more fully-featured. As a proven survivor and adventurer, Lara now puts her skills to the test in search of an ancient relic in snowy Siberia. The game doesn’t delight in torturing Lara as much as the first one did, but it still portrays her as a ruthless killer with an arsenal of deadly weapons (including the return of the bow and arrows) as she is pitted against a secret organisation’s trained militia. Perhaps in an attempt to rescue her humanity, the game features friendly characters you can help with little jobs and side quests.
Everything Tomb Raider 2013 did is back and built upon: crafting weapons and equipment, making ammo, upgrading abilities, fast-travelling between campsites, finding relics and solving optional tombs. To its credit, the level design integrates tombs more organically and more frequently, but it still strikes me as ridiculous that they’re considered optional challenges in a game called “Tomb Raider”. The climbing and traversal mechanics are good and the game has many nice-looking indoor and outdoor environments. The simple joy of throwing yourself around, climbing walls, vaulting over obstacles, rope-swinging or sliding down zip-lines is retained and enhanced. If the game was nothing but that, I’d be perfectly happy, but with everything else, it feels over-designed, stuffed to breaking point with things to find, collect or kill.
The game would also do well to know the value of silence, to know when to shut up and let the imagery do the talking, but its world is instead littered with too many audio logs, old letters or irresponsibly discarded tape recorders, robbing the sense of mystery from the game’s world-building. The story and dialogue are generic and clichéd, but the gameplay is enjoyable and mostly easy enough to push through to the end. Outside of the game’s main campaign, there appears to be some kind of build-your-own combat scoring component that makes use of randomised loot boxes and in-game currency (adding to an already overstuffed package) but I would very much like to ignore all of this ‘modern’ games nonsense, so I’m pretending it doesn’t exist.
Again, you can watch my entire playthrough on the below YouTube playlist:
Shadow of the Tomb Raider (2018)
I know I’ve called this the ‘Crystal Dynamics second trilogy’ but it’s worth noting that they only did some supporting development on this third game, with primary development being handled by Eidos-Montréal. Not that you’d be able to tell, the game looks and plays very much like the previous two, and with production values pushed even further. Aside from some graphical glitches here and there (flickering lights and a character having invisible arms at one point) the game looks pretty incredible and makes me wish I had an HDR display or OLED to truly do it justice.
Unfortunately, the game also continues to double down (triple down?) on all the aspects that I didn’t like about the previous ones, such as its side quests, crafting, levelling up and bombastic set-pieces. The actual environmental traversal and exploration is enjoyable (grapple-rappelling is great fun), but it doesn’t let you just get on with it. Instead, the game delights in putting you amongst small villages and populous settlements, with NPCs giving you quests. Resources are quickly maxed out unless you frequently sell them at markets, leaving a world full of things that you can see but can’t collect. It’s unnecessary, overstuffed and over-designed. (I was occasionally reminded of Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness, and that’s not a good sign.) When Tomb Raider is eventually rebooted again, I hope a simpler approach is taken; I hope it can go back to basics.
The ‘Challenge Tombs’ are easy to miss in a first playthrough (I only found two before hitting the end credits) but you can go back and search for them later. Going off the beaten track, using your rope and equipment to lower yourself into unexplored tombs, and finding these hidden underground caverns filled with ancient contraptions, is very cool. It captures the essence of Tomb Raider for me and I wish the entire game was like that. There are also extra tombs accessible from the main menu (which can apparently be played in multiplayer), but these are not integrated into the main game. They are quite good, though.
One last time, you can watch my entire playthrough on YouTube below:
As a series, Tomb Raider has undergone significant changes, reboots, adaptations and spin-offs. I don’t really know what the future of the series will be, if it will keep chasing cutting edge graphics and expanding all of its mechanics in an effort to become everything to everybody. That’s not really what I want from the series, but perhaps if it can offer those little moments that feel distinctly Tomb-Raidery, I will keep coming back for more. For now, however, this is the end of my series retrospective and video series. Thanks for reading and watching.
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