Tomb Raider: The Kotaku Review

Much of Tomb Raider re-contextualizes elements that will be recognizable to anyone who’s played a third-person action game in the last five years: specially timed finishers in melee combat, shooting sequences that rely heavily on cover mechanics and a segmented open-world design that opens up as you gain more tools and weapon modifications. Likewise, Tomb Raider uses an experience system that aggregates points as you play and offers up scads of unlockable collectible challenges. Lara’s Survival Instinct—a special sight that highlights enemies and collectibles in the environment—will also be familiar. There’s stealth, too, and thankfully it feels meaningful rather than tacked on. Brawling or blasting away out in the open is never a path to victory for Lara.

As Lara explores the massive Island, you can set up camps, which act as save hubs and fast-travel stations for when you want to return to certain areas. Those camps are also where you upgrade weapons, skills and gear with salvage that you collect.

Are there tombs in Tomb Raider 2013? Yes. They’re entirely optional, though, and are mostly hidden, combat-free zones concerned with environmental puzzle-solving. Exploring tombs gives you secrets and rewards—like skill points for upgrades and maps that show where relics and other collectibles are—so it’s worth the investment of playing through them. They’re also a quiet remove from all the human/animal aggression on the game’s main path.

The Metroidvania elements to Tomb Raider‘s game design feel well thought-out, too. When you get the Rope Arrow ability, for example, it comes across as the result of Lara’s increasing ingenuity, not just an expected design feature. The skill unlocking makes getting around Yamatai feel like the most fun part of a grim enterprise. As you launch climbable ropes across previously uncrossable chasms or destroy barriers with grenades or shotgun blasts, Lara feels less and less like she’s at the mercy of the environment.

The key difference from, say, Batman: Arkham City or any Uncharted game is how effectively Tomb Raider drives home the physically grueling experience of being an adventure hero. After all, you never see Batman sweat and, despite his grumbling, Nathan Drake tends to be very well-adjusted to what he has to endure. Not the 2013 edition of Lara Croft. She yelps, groans and screams in combat and traversal. You know she’s going to make that jump. But it’s going to sound really unpleasant when she does. And when she dies? The game unleashes truly gruesome death scenes—which, yes, call back to previous TR games—that turned my stomach no matter how often I saw them.

Ominous dread replaces intrepid sauciness in this reboot, and there’s little of the breathless wonder that distinguished the first Tomb Raider games. You will see beautiful vistas, yes, but not much joy accompanies those moments. A tight claustrophobic camera zooms in on Lara when she squeezes through tight crevices and, even in the game’s more open environments, a tense anxiety is never too far off. But that dread makes the play of the game feel deeply satisfying.

I grew to love the bow and arrow intensely in Tomb Raider, so much so that it was still my go-to weapon even after I’d gotten a shotgun and a grenade launcher add-on for my rifle. Lara spends so much of the game with wracked nerves and hiding from bigger, more vicious male aggressors. The bow gives you a way to weaponize all that angst. I always tried for headshots, to make sure the awful bastards shooting at me went down as egregiously as possible. Kotaku video editor Chris Person did the same, only he aimed for the crotch. Either way, pulling the string taut and letting fly feels like dishing out comeuppance.

Take the oppressive mood, the women-centric plot and the intimate nature of Tomb Raider‘s violence and this feels more desperate than any Uncharted game. There isn’t as much dissonance between the narrrative and the play. You’ll believe in what’s at stake and in the need to come out on top.

Initially, players will have to weather too many incredulous and affirmation-style statements—”Oh, God, what am I doing?,” “I can do this,” etc.—but eventually, Lara starts growling back at her antagonists. Despite that, Lara winds up feeling like a sacrificial lamb on the altar of commercial video games. This is a video game icon becoming who she needs to be to stay alive and you’re privy to an exhausting rebirth. Even when you come to the end of the game, you desperately hope that you and Lara will never, ever have to go through anything like that again. I liked what I played but I really want Square Enix and Crystal Dynamics to get Lara on her way to being cockily self-assured again.

That layering—like the overall shift in tone—serves to gin up the experience in a counter-intuitive way. It’s the kind of feel-bad that feels good. If you miss the old Lara, you’re compelled to finish this title to get her closer to the snarky, actualized persona of the PS1 era. In the game, Lara has been a doubter of the tales her father brought back home with him. “The lines between our myths and the truth is blurry,” she realizes at the game’s end. The truth here is that this game is a finely crafted reboot, one that ensures that Lara Croft herself won’t become a relic of the past. It’s gloomier, yes, and laden with a thick sheen of meta-awareness. This new origin story throws more trouble at its heroine than ever before. But the changes folded into this Tomb Raider add a turbulent urgency that the old adventures lacked. We’re left with a Lara Croft that we know better. She can handle what’s coming, especially when it looks like she can’t.

Note: Tomb Raider offers online multiplayer but I hadn’t yet sampled the experience at press time. Once I get the chance to evaluate the game’s online modes, I will update this review.

Update:

Tomb Raider‘s multiplayer offering is a lot like its single-player campaign. It’s filled with variations of match types and progression systems that you’ll see in Call of Duty, Battlefield 3 and other shooter-centric playgrounds. Just like in loads of other games, you earn XP for nearly everything you do and memorizing the maps is key to success in Tomb Raider multiplayer.

But, while both halves of Tomb Raider are built on familiar foundations, the multiplayer lacks the set-up and urgency that makes single-player play so satisfying. None of the desperation you feel on the part of Lara or the Solarii true believers comes through in the middle of a Team Deathmatch.

There’s a slight bit of reward for exploration in multiplayer, in the form of salvage that you find. You need salvage to purchase new weapons and skills. You can have an Offensive Skill and an Survival Skill active while you play, letting you suffer less damage from certain weapons or earn more XP for finding salvage.

You’re playing to level up a character and earn unlocks. That’s about it. (If you want to play as Lara or other important storyline characters in multiplayer, you’ll need to farm enough XP to unlock them.) The experience was stable enough and I had no trouble finding matches. Is it fun when you’re playing a group that’s found its groove? Absolutely. But it never felt special.

It would’ve been great if the design of the multiplayer organically encouraged more co-operation but instead I experienced the same kind of chaos found in all too many competitive shooters. The design of the levels is wonderful, though, with ziplines, twisting, branching footpaths and oodles of foreboding energy throughout.

Two modes have slightly interesting imbalances built into them. Cry for Help has the survivors gathering batteries for three radio transmitters that they then need to activate and defend. All the Solarii need to do in this mode is steal 20 batteries. Rescue makes the survivors hunt down medical supplies and return them to a base while Solarii are only able to kille the opposition with melee strikes. Team Deathmatch and Free For All are what you’d expect.

There’s noting like playing through a campaign full of well-crafted emotional trials to make multiplayer feel like a fumbly add-on. Loads of other narratively ambitious games have impaled themselves on the supposed necessity of online competitive modes. Sadly, it’s a trap that Lara Croft can’t avoid either.