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 3^rd 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!

No Game New Year: Grand Theft Auto Five

Right, I wasn't expecting to come back to this blog quite so soon but something's come up and for some unknown reason I'm really excited about it:

No Game New Year.

This is an idea put forward by Brian Castleberry and Norman Caruso, the latter known on YouTube as The Gaming Historian. I suppose it all ties in to the New Year's Resolution we're all allegedly doing, but this is something that I can do and I'm actually really interested in doing it.

The idea is that we - that is to say, everybody who is doing it - will buy no new video games this year. Instead of that, we will play through the ever-increasing backlog of games we have. We play our old games, and if we like them, we keep them. If not, we get rid of them, either selling them, exchanging them, or just giving them away if we can't do that. There are more rules to this, just to clarify the ways you can get around not buying any new games, so here's a link to the Facebook page where you can see what's going on:

https://www.facebook.com/groups/256949654464181/

There are, of course, benefits to this. It will, for example, save me some money. Not much money - I rarely buy a game on release, after all - but some money, that could perhaps better be spent elsewhere. But the main benefit to me, as far as I can tell, is that I've got about sixty Xbox 360 games, some of which I've had for nearly two years and never played, and even more that I've started, got about a tenth of the way through and never picked up again. This is as good a time or reason as any to give them a go.

So why am I doing a blog about this? Well, part of the deal is that we're all supposed to be updating our progress on what games we're playing, whether we're enjoying them and whether we're making a decision on whether to keep the games or move them on. I could do this on YouTube of course, but to be perfectly honest I prefer to write. And the camera on my phone is rubbish.

This is supposed to be happening every week, however I think I can almost guarantee that there are weeks when I'm just not going to be able to make an update, for whatever reason. The two most likely are either:

• Personal circumstances meaning that I won't have time/internet access to write a blog, or even play the game. I'll usually know if this is the case and let you know in advance.
• Because some of the games are quite long, it might be the case that I've got almost nothing to say about it. I won't want to blog just for its own sake, and if this happens I might just make do with a post on the Facebook site if it's all the same to you.

However one thing I will say is that I'm unlikely to move any of my games on. I bought them all for a reason, even if it was only to make up a special offer, and I won't get rid of any of them if I still think I could potentially get something out of them (or while there are still achievement points to be milked!)

So that's the pre-amble. Now, on to the first game I'm going to be playing:

Grand Theft Auto Five

I had this game for Christmas last year. I'm taking a somewhat cautious approach to playing it. I've seen quite a lot of coverage on it so I had an idea what to expect, but of late, I've not been too impressed with the series. Let me give you some background on this:

I've played and owned all of the 'core' games in the series, from the first GTA game all the way up to this one. Not the expansions though, by which I mean not GTA London, not any of the PSP spinoffs from the GTA3 canon, and none of the DLC for GTA4. In that time, I've seen it grow and develop and constantly try new things, which is great, as nobody wants to play the same game twice. However, with a creative team as innovative as Rockstar and Rockstar North, there are going to be times when it doesn't go quite as well as they'd hoped, and personally, I think GTA San Andreas was as good as the series ever got. I didn't like GTA4 very much. I'm not saying it was a bad game, it wasn't a bad game. But it didn't engage me on the same level that San Andreas did. I wasn't rushing home from work in order to play GTA4, as I did with San Andreas.

The reason I'm saying all this is that a lot of the comments I'm going to be making on GTA5 will be in comparison to the relevant parts of the rest of series.

So, is GTA5 any good?

Well, yes it is. It's a GTA game, it was never going to be bad. The controls work well enough, the graphics are perhaps not quite what I was expecting for the time it was released but then again, I have it on the Xbox360 which is coming to the end of its iteration. The gameplay is good fun and I'm enjoying it so far. From having played what the game is telling me is 14% of it, here's what I'm getting out of it so far:

By far the best innovation that the game has made is the three characters. I say this even though I have only reached 2 of them so far (I haven't got Trevor as a regularly playable character yet,) and being able to switch between the three of them at almost any point is an absolutely genius idea for an open-world game. Lots of games want to tell a story. Rockstar have taken it a step further and decided to tell three different stories that interlink with one another. Well, good on them, because I'm liking it so far.

This innovation alone is good, but the characters themselves are very well designed, written and acted. Not necessarily likeable, but that's not the point. They are... compelling. I can think of no better way to describe it, except to add that it is a massive step up from the previous game. Let me go through the previous games and tell you what I mean:

• There really wasn't any personality from the first two GTA games; your character was there to play the game and that was about it.
• There wasn't much personality from Claude from GTA3 either. (While the lead character is never referred to by name during the game, he does appear briefly in San Andreas where Catalina calls him Claude.) However, this wasn't the point. At that time, a 3D Open World game was a relatively new concept and a VERY big deal, and the aim was to make that into a good game. Others had tried before, some got nearer the mark than others, but in terms of making a fun game to play, Rockstar took the mark and pissed all over it with GTA3. In the end, all that alluded to Claude's personality is how the player played the game, or more accurately how ruthlessly the player completely the missions, how indiscriminately they killed pedestrians, how often they forced a 6-star wanted-rating killing spree just for the fun of it. It was left to the overblown caricatures of the supporting cast to provide the personality of the game, and in terms of the way it was handled, for the time it was pretty good.
• Tommy Vercetti from GTA Vice City was much better. Having some discernible back-story, a background as a mobster and having the added bonus of being an absolute badass breathed some much-needed life into the player character, and we could be reasonably confident we weren't just playing the same game with a different setting and skin. Even though Vercetti was pretty much an anti-hero in every sense, the fact that he had something to offer meant that I actually cared about all those missions I found myself doing, and I wanted him to win in the end, even if it was not necessarily for the right reasons. Sadly I never played the game to the end so I referred to Wikipedia for the back story. Cheating, I know...
• Carl Johnson from GTA Vice City was probably one of the most compelling and well-done characters in any game that I have played. He tries to be, and probably at some point was, a really nice guy, and tries to uphold an honourable ideal, if not a very good one. However, he is desperate to win the approval of his gang and peers, desperate to clear his name of murder (which is kind of ironic, given how many murders he does through the game) and is prepared to go to any lengths in order to do it. Because the game pretty much for the first time gave you some control over how this played out, this struck a balance between the personality of the character, and the personality of the player. This is actually quite hard to do, especially in a video game where there can only ever be a finite number of options, and Rockstar did it quite well here.
• Then we had Nico Bellic from GTA4. And he was DULL. Not fighting for anything other than a new life, he somehow manages to get caught up in crime. He rarely gets angry at anything and seems content to do as he is told. Now fair enough, I didn't play much of GTA4 so maybe this improves later on. But as an opening statement, Nico let the side down quite badly.
• Now, in GTA5, we've got Michael and Franklin, (again I haven't found Trevor yet) who have their own set of ideals, and their own set of problems. They've got friends (sort of,) allies, patrons and their own quite unique ways of responding to them. Any of them on their own might make for more of an interactive movie than a game, but the ability to switch between them I think gives a well-rounded experience, and I'm looking forward to see where the game takes this.

That's a good part of the game. Now for a... sort of middle of the road part, neither good nor bad. And that is the missions: (this section contains some spoilers)

The missions themselves are actually quite good. They're well-designed as set pieces, set up pretty well though the use of flowing cut scenes (starting the dialogue for the cut scene as the character approaches the relevant trigger, and cutting to the scene with almost no load time, is a stroke of absolute genius and one I expect to see used far more in the future with the new console generation,) and have good cinematic points that fit the story. I've had some fun playing them.

The problem is that there's really not much scope for doing the missions that I've done so far in any way other than the way the game wants you to do it. For example: The mission where Michael and Franklin have to save Jimmy from the people who have kidnapped him in the boat he was trying to sell can only be done by driving close enough to the truck to allow Franklin to climb onto the boat, shooting the crooks on the boat and then driving underneath the boom arm to rescue Jimmy. There is no other way to do it. You can't, for example, switch to Franklin as he gets on the boat and get Jimmy off once you've killed everyone on it. You can't cut the truck up to stop it getting away. You can't use any gun other than the pistol Michael has in the glove box, and you can't allow Jimmy to die and get the boat back. (Obviously this last one probably wouldn't happen anyway since I have a feeling Jimmy will become more relevant to the story later on, but from the dialogue running up to the chase, Michael seems more than prepared to let that happen.)

This particular mission is designed as a set piece so there's pretty much only one way it can be done, but the other missions aren't much better. Whether driving, escaping from the cops, or corridor shooting, there's usually only one way to do it, the exception being when you have to escape attention from the police as that does at least give you the whole map to do it in. Now, I understand that if it's important to the story, certain missions have to play out in a certain way. But remember in GTA3 where you're ordered to kill somebody, and you could either nick a car and run him over, drive-by shoot him or go back to your hideout to pick up one of the many weapons you'd amassed there and gun him down? Hell, you could even do it as a fist fight, if you wanted to. None of that so far is in GTA5. There's usually only one way to complete the mission, and if the game thinks you need a new weapon or piece of equipment, it will give it to you in the mission pre-amble. For example: quite early on in the game, Franklin gets involved in a gang shootout. There are more enemies than can be reasonably handled with the pistol, but one of the guys you shoot early on rather conveniently drops a shotgun. There's still, therefore, a lot of hand-holding going on, where the game is almost telling you what to do. This is something that I think let GTA4 down quite badly, as it was still explaining game mechanics to me 6 hours in to it, and thankfully, it's not quite as bad with this game. But I still found myself thinking "no reason to go to Ammunation to get more ammo for my gun before I do this next mission; if the game thinks I need it, it will drop a new gun for me with enough ammo to complete the mission." I don't think that should be happening in this day and age.

I've also come across some of what I think is called "Jank," which I understand to mean: "An inconvenient necessity to make the game work," and I suspect I will come across it more and more as the game goes on. Where I noticed it was the mission where Michael discovers his wife's affair with her tennis coach. When the coach runs out of the house, jumps in his car and drives away, Michael follows him in a pickup truck that certainly wasn't there before, and for no reason explained in the cut-scene, Franklin is suddenly in the truck with him. Both are necessary to complete the mission, (you'll see,) but their sudden appearance is rather weak given the detail of the rest of the game.

That having been said, I think the scoring system for the missions is a good idea. You can now get Bronze, Silver and Gold rankings upon completion of each mission depending on how well you did and whether you did certain things in the mission, even if it's not always clear what you have to do to get the top score. It's more carrot than stick, because it rewards you for doing missions well rather than punishing you for barely scraping through with your life, let alone the mission objectives (the latter usually being how I end up doing most missions in any GTA game to be honest.) The reward in the game is, as far as I can see, rather abstract. You either get a gold medal or you don't, and if you don't it doesn't appear to have an affect on the progress of the game. But it's nice that, for the first time, the game is telling you: "You aced that, well done," or "Yes, you could have done that better, and here's how:" Competitive players and speed runners will love it. If I pay any more attention to it than I already have it will be to unlock an Achievement to increase my Gamerscore.

I do have a couple more things to say but I've rattled on far too much already and it's time for me to go to bed. However, a couple of points I'm going to be looking out for next week:

• So that I am not playing the game through like homework, I will interject my progress through the main game with the occasional foray into GTA online. I've had a go with it already and it looks pretty good so far, though I suspect I have been the victim of people farming kills off me which made it less enjoyable than it might have been. More on that next week.
• I'll be interested to see how the story plays out in terms of how you can influence the environment around you. The best game I've seen for this so far is San Andreas, where you could participate in a turf war that made, apart from anything else, some areas of the city safer to visit than others. I haven't seen it in GTA5 yet but that doesn't mean I won't...

See you all soon!