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!
