Sunday 8 June 2014

No Game New Year: Tomb Raider


Last Monday night I finished Tomb Raider on the Xbox 360. This brings the total number of games I have finished during this challenge up to four; not quite what I was hoping for now that we’re well in to the sixth month of it but there you go. Tomb Raider was always going to be one of the games I’d have to finish, though. I got around three quarters of the way through the main story last year, and for reasons that most likely relate to one of the XCOM games I abandoned it. Which was pretty rubbish, thinking about it, and I think the game deserved seeing it through to the end.

 
So, what do I think of the game?

Hmm… difficult to say. I think I would do the game a disservice by comparing it to previous Tomb Raider games, since the whole point of a re-boot is to offer a new experience with the same intellectual property. But the inevitable comparisons arise, and I can’t quite decide whether the new game is better than the older games, of which I have played Tomb Raider and Tomb Raider II. In the new game, the world feels more accessible and at the same time more restrictive. The plot appears to be more realistic and yet more contrived. The introduction of skill development is welcome, but takes away some of the challenge of having to work out what to do and where to go.

That having been said, it is a very good game, and I’ll explain why in a moment, but to clarify: The rebooted Tomb Raider is an excellent game for the current/previous generation. It is a good game of it’s time – just as the previous games were good for their time. The franchise is nearly twenty years old now; technology and capability has come on a lot since then and it’s good to see that Crystal Dynamic made it work for the current generation of gaming.

 
I certainly like the new version of Lara Croft. Better proportioned, still conventionally good-looking, but with an air of vulnerability about her, the origin story does a lot to develop what has become one of video games’ most iconic characters. Up until the reboot, she has as far as I know time been portrayed as a kind of female Indiana Jones; polite and professional in the right circumstances, and an absolute badass when out in the field. This was great, and it certainly did a lot to promote the idea of a female protagonist. I can’t think of any other game in the mid-90s that was both an original IP and had a primarily female lead; strong female characters did exist but usually as an ensemble of at least an equal number of males. It’s more common these days, of course, but seeing the character whose main motivation is to get off the island and survive lends a new side to female characters, and indeed Lara Croft. Her previous fascination of history and artefacts are now secondary considerations, or side missions, and the idea that she’s less likely to throw herself lightly in to danger in order to pursue an interest makes her character far more believable. And she’s very well voice-acted as well, which does nothing but add to the effect.

There has been some criticism of the imbalance of her personality between the cut scenes and the game. The obvious example is the first time she kills someone; in the cut scene she’s horrified at what she’s had to do. Yet after this scene, she’ll gun down seven or eight guys at a time in open play and appear not to be effected by it at all, even uttering curses to her enemies later on. I can see the point of the criticism, but I think it is misapplied to this situation. The developers had to show that killing people is not something Lara does lightly, nor has it ever occurred to her to do so before; hence the cut scene. If the same thing happened every time she killed someone in the game – 200-300 people by the time you reach the end – then it would suck all the fun out of it and derail the whole thing. So it’s something of a non-issue for me.

 
The gameplay is good, the controls are fluid and responsive and the combat is as good as any 3rd person action game I’ve played on the 360 – at least as good as Space Marine, and probably a little better than Gears of War. The game rewards you for exploration; you don’t HAVE to look around all the tombs and solve all the puzzles, or explore every inch of the map for every item, but if you do, you upgrade your experience, skills and equipment as a reward. In my play through, I did what I thought I needed to and ended the game with a not-inconsiderable 82% complete. It was somewhat satisfying to find all the challenge maguffins in one area, and find enough artefacts etc to trigger the Achievement Points, but leaving it all until the end felt like more work than fun while trying to cover what I’d missed.

The elephant in the room of course is the Quick Time Events, which are a controversial issue amongst many people. I’m not keen on them. It’s not actually that much fun to be in a situation where the gameplay mechanic is: “Tap this button or you fail.” I find myself looking for the button prompts, almost ignoring the cinematic sequence that gives rise to the QTE in the first place! Thankfully, in this game, they don’t outstay their welcome, though I wonder if plonking one over what aught to have been the last boss was a good idea.

Lara now has a number of different skills to use with her weapons; bows and arrows, climbing axes and the like. This is commonplace in a lot of modern games, and does add to the overall experience, but falls down when compared to the older games in the franchise. It’s kind of hard to explain why, but bear with me:

In the old games, Lara has a specific set of skills and moves that stay with her throughout the game. Apart from the weapons, absolutely nothing affects these skills all the way through the game. That means that Lara is as good as she is from one side of the game to the other – and it is up to the player to figure out how to use those skills to the best effect. There was no hand-holding; the player had to decide whether she will be able to make the jump, climb the wall, and run fast enough to escape the trap, or swim to the other side of the lake in one breath. If a secret is revealed, it is up to the player to work out how to get it – it is certainly possible but the way won’t always be obvious. It puts the risks and their rewards where it needs to be: In the hands of the player.

In this reboot, Lara gains skills and moves throughout the game but their application is situational, and so obvious that it takes a lot of the challenge out of the game. Early on you acquire a climbing axe which can be used on certain walls. This is great, except that the walls which are climbable could only be more clearly marked if they had bolt-on holds. The only risk, then, is mis-timing your pressing of the X button, which can usually be saved by another QTE.

Another new trick you will be doing A LOT is using the bow and arrow to create ropes, for Lara either to pull something down, pull her up or slide down. You fire arrows with rope attached by pressing the right shoulder button, and your target is always a set of ropes wound tightly around something – or a climbable wall. If you’re creating a rope bridge, there’s a hooking post to which you attach the rope; it’s not rocket science.

Perhaps the most salient way in which the new game differentiates from the old one is the so-called Survival View. What happens here is that you press the left shoulder button, the screen goes black and white, then the areas of interest – say, climbing walls, rope attachment points or collectable items – will he highlighted. With the old games, you’d have to figure out what to do; with this new game, you can hit the left button and the game will give you hints like ‘Well, it’s to do with that hitching post, and that wall. Guess what you have to do…’

Obviously, there are positive connotations to this as well. It does mean that you’ll spend a lot less time doing something I did a lot with the previous Tomb Raider games, which was wander around the level hopelessly lost and confused, wondering where to go next and what to do. It’s kind of like having a walkthrough that they used to print in gaming magazines (and maybe they still do, I haven’t bought one in a while!) telling you what to do, and while that was pretty much the only way I was able to get anywhere in the previous Tomb Raider games, it does take away a lot of the challenge of figuring it out for yourself. But again, this is the generation we have now; we expect to be able to finish single-player campaigns in 20 hours or less without getting stuck. And a lot of the kids who will have played the new Tomb Raider game won’t even have been born when the first ones came out; they won’t remember the frustration at having to work out which key goes in which door – nor will they ever have the satisfaction of figuring it out.

These points fit in with a lot of what I’ve been hearing from certain Youtube channels, like TotalBiscuit, Yahtzee from The Escapist and some of my friends as well, about how the nature of games have changed over the years. That’s a whole blog in itself, and won’t be entirely welcome since a lot of those points will already have been made, but essentially comes down to this: Games these days rely far too much on spectacle, graphical fidelity, and multiplayer modes. It is what people have come to expect from games, but most people my age (I’m 28, the aforementioned Youtubers are a bit older and most of my friends are mid-late 20s or thereabouts) remember a time when we didn’t have the technology to provide this. What we had instead were well-designed levels, rewards for finding secrets that actually made a difference and replayable games; I’m not saying all old games had this, but the ones we remember tended to.

The game has already been re-released for the Next-Gen consoles, names the ‘Definitive Edition.’ Not yet owning a new generation console I couldn’t honestly say what difference it makes, having never played it, so I’m going on what I’ve found out over 10 minutes research: the game looks obviously better on the new consoles. The PS4 apparently has the edge in this, and there is significantly higher frame-rate in the new games presumably making for a smoother experience. (As I don’t play games on PC, frame rate is pretty much a non-issue for me.) From what I’ve been able to find out, the new game does have a little more content in single player, but not enough to justify buying it again if you’ve already played it through. So even if I do get a new-gen console, I won’t be buying Tomb Raider for it – though I may be interested in the sequel that’s supposedly in the works.

 
The game’s Multiplayer mode has been criticised for being lacklustre. I neither agree nor disagree with this, as to be perfectly honest I haven’t really been able to find out. I doubt it’s on the same level as the Call of Dutys, Battlefields and Halos of this world – and say what you like about those games, but their Multiplayer modes are well-maintained and very popular – but Tomb Raider’s multiplayer mode functions, if nothing else. There is your generic team deathmatch, and a free-for-all deathmatch mode that is the base of any multiplayer mode. There are some other modes based on survival and scavenging, that presumably fit in with the theme of the game. Unfortunately, by the time I bought the game, which was less than a year after it came out, the online community was already drying up to the point where you couldn’t get a game in anything other than team deathmatch. And now, well over a year after the game’s release, you’re lucky if you get that. It is the same logistical problem that many modern games have – multiplayer is all well and good, but absolutely useless if no one is playing it.

Tomb Raider stands up well enough on its single-player campaign for this not to matter so much, but the developers missed a trick here – Why not create a 2 or 4-player co-op campaign? There are certainly enough characters to make it work, and an alternative story could be created to work alongside the single-player campaign. There are even characters in the Multiplayer mode that, as far as I know, don’t appear in the main game at all – why not create a game mode based around a group of survivors who Lara and her friends never have the fortune to meet in their adventures? Or even an evil campaign based on the Solarii brotherhood would have been entertaining as well.

But there’s little use in thinking of what might have been. Tomb Raider is what it is: A solid third person action adventure, and a story well-told through the medium of video games. If you can find it at a cheap price, it’s worth a look – just don’t expect the old games!
 
Next, I'm giving Prototype another go; another game I never really gave the chance it deserves. We'll see how that pans out!