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Tomb Raider starts with a ship wreck, (not the stupid, G-rated, drawn out kind from Life of Pi) ), but a very quick vessel torn in half kind that gets you in the right place to raid some fucking tombs. Literally opening movie is Lara on a ship broken in half and Lara leaping toward this old guy named Roth who drops her ass into the sea. Lara wakes up on a beach and sees a small group of survivors from the ship. She begins to yell out to them, and gets cold cocked and passes out. Great start. I seriously was already riveted to the couch.Lara wakes up in wrapped in a canvas upside-down hanging in a cave. To escape she has to shift her wake to swing into a corpse - that must have woken up in this same state quite a long time ago - into a fire and then back into her to light her canvas bag on fire to escape. Getting set on fire isn't the worst of her worries either (especially this early) because as she falls she lands on up-ended rebar that stabs completely thru her and I'm shocked she doesn't have a pierced liver to boot. This ain't your daddy's Lara though, by the end of the game, not including all the horrible ways she can die, she's stabbed, shot, pierced, scraped up and knocked out repeatedly. She may be a super hero.
Playing this Tomb Raider - for me - seemed like coming home again. I had the original game on Sega Saturn and other than her having triangle boobs I had no issues with the game. At the time there felt like there was nothing like it. I saw myself as exploring and learning with her. I got the same feeling again, granted there are lot of people/survivors that you are in contact with almost constantly, suffering along with Lara. I felt her need to survive and the pain was she put through.
Once you get Lara out of the cave of death, she finds a bow on another dead guy dangling upside down and you get a tutorial on shooting. Another video establishes that Lara is cold and hungry, so you start hunting the deer and rabbits in the area. There is no cold or hungry bar, so there there isn't a goal in hunting other than you get XP per kill and search of the corpse. With skills you learn thru the XP you can begin to earn salvage from the kills as well.0Ssalvage is used to upgrade your tools and weapons in the single player story. The weapons include a handgun, rifle, bow and arrows, and a shotgun. There is a rock climbing axe that can be used to open tough doors, climb craggy rocks, slide down ropes and thru skills can become quite a formidable weapon as well.
Thru a video camera Lara finds, we see some backstory. The boat, The Endurance carried: an archeologist, Dr. Whitman, who is concerned more of striking it rich than anything else. Roth, an ex-marine treasure hunter, who is a family friend of the Croft's. Sam a friend and classmate of Lara's and filmer of the expedition and others who are made up of film crew and a bitch mechanic. The video shows us that the expedition is searching for the lost island of Yamatai, somewhere on the coast of Japan, and Dr. Whitman wants to continue the search in the same place everyone else already has. Lara's idea is to search elsewhere, which does lead them to Yamatai, but caused quite a lot of death and destruction. All of which Lara blames herself for, honestly I do feel that it is her fault, but that doesn't stop me from loving this game.
Tomb Raider does have its share of tense moments, not really scares, it tries its hand at some humor with having Lara say things like "I bloody HATE tombs!" While the humor is a pass the suspense is great and the shock value of watching the horrific ways that Lara is killed is in itself shocking, Tomb Raider succeeds on soooo many levels. The brutality that Lara must deal with both within herself and what she faces with the strange cult that inhabits Yamitai.
The cult is lead by a fanatic named Mathias, and he leads a large group of heavily armed thugs, carrying weapons ranging from dual machetes to Molotov cocktails to machine guns to dynamite. The cult is after Lara's friend Sam for some sort of ritual that will bring back the queen of Yamatai, Himiko.
For the first time in a long time this game has something lacking in a lot of games, good enemy AI. They run and hide, they flank, they destroy your cover, great stuff. There are some dumb moves where they hide behind flammable cover (only after you get flaming arrows) and will leap unto ropes that slide down to in front of you, one shot with any weapon drops them from the rope ride, to their death. Eventually the enemies vary further into Japanese soldiers in ancient samurai garb, katanas and all.
So all this said, I have told people I know (and I don't throw this around a lot) I have named this game the best game of the year so far.
Pros: Great graphics, horrifically brutal deaths for Lara, good story, and great AI.
Cons: Hunger bit not really fleshed out, collectables (every fucking game has collectables now, I can't just arrow down some deer and crows, I gotta hunt for eggs and relics and diary pages, shit I'm sick of hide and seek shit in action games) and press for the game, the developers have gone to the press and stated there will be tons of dock but no plans for story, I like multiplayer in games but charging 5, 10, 15 bucks for a different place to kill some fuckers I don't know or care about isn't worth it for me. I love story, why not have more.
In Summation: Tomb Raider is the game to beat for game of the year in 2013. Unfortunately it came out early in the year and with some stiff competition. I will be covering those new games as the are released and as I am able to play I will be covering them here.
- Your friendly neighborhood ASM
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Disclosure: This is a non-sponsored review. All product was purchased by me and the purpose of this review is based solely on my own interests. No product or monetary compensation was given to me by said company.
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