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Tomb Raider Review
Developer: Crystal Dynamics / Publisher: Square Enix / MSRP: $59.99 / Played on: Xbox 360 / ESRB: Mature [Blood and Gore, Intense Violence, Strong Language]
Tomb Raider comes with a bold set of promises from the franchise’s longtime developer, Crystal Dynamics. Beyond just rebooting and modernizing the character of Lara, they have the ambitious task of retelling her origin story. In a way, you know Lara is going to end up as the badass action hero she’s known to be. This is a game that wants to show you how she gets there. But this begs the question of “how do you do this while making a fun game?” It’s one that Crystal Dynamics wasn’t willing to answer. Instead they rely heavily on genre tropes and high action to carry what little character development there is. The game is filled with disappointingly one dimensional characters, lackluster combat, and jarring disconnects between action and story that make even the biggest explosions hard to care about. Though they are nice explosions.
As with most origin stories, Lara is involuntarily flung into a crappy situation. As a young archaeologist, she’s part of a research expedition to the Dragon’s Triangle, an area of the Pacific Ocean just south of Japan. Lara and crew find out the hard way that it’s infamous for its brutal storms and they end up shipwrecked on a mysterious island. And it’s a good thing the rest of the crew has Lara with them because they all seem pretty incapable of accomplishing anything other than complaining and getting captured by the not-so-friendly group of cultists that happen to be inhabitants.
It’s here Crystal Dynamics attempts to tell (or retell) the origin story of famed series protagonist Lara Croft. Up front she is painted as an inexperienced adventurer who must overcome adversity and the elements to discover what she is capable of. The problem is the overwhelming disconnect between events of the narrative and the actions of the player. In a moment early on Lara balks before cutting open a deer she killed. However, this was immediately followed by me killing and opening three additional deer without so much as a peep from Lara. Shortly after that Lara is forced to kill her first human out of self defense. Any emotional impact of this traumatic event is completely washed away when five minutes later Lara is ducking behind cover and shooting large groups of enemies in the face like a trained military combatant. Tomb Raider is full of jarring transitions between narrative and gameplay like this. There’s a perpetual disconnect between what you’re doing as a player and what Lara is experiencing in the cut scenes to the point where it feels like they were designed separately and pieced together at the last minute. Tomb Raider’s narrative never really recovers from these huge deficits in its flow.
This criticism is not particularly unheard of for the action/adventure genre. The lighthearted tone of the Uncharted series often feels directly at odds with the murderous rampages of Nathan Drake. But there’s a difference here. In Uncharted it’s easy to be swept away by the charm of Drake and forget what he’s doing. Lara and the rest of Tomb Raider’s characters lack any of the endearing qualities of other popular action heroes. In fact, the most interesting Lara ever gets is with her action-hero physical accomplishments. Maybe she’s afraid to climb a tower? But then she manages to climb the tower. Ultimately, it becomes difficult to feel invested in the game’s exciting or dramatic moments with such flat characters.
This point is especially disappointing because on a surface level Tomb Raider does have some visually impressive moments made up of well-constructed set pieces. The game is filled with epic scenes of Lara ziplining from a burning building or narrowly making jumps across large gaps. While there is very little that resonates emotionally here, it’s not difficult to appreciate them from a technical perspective. In fact, that goes for the entire game. The environments of the island look gorgeous and are constructed in a way that’s makes it easy to forget they are crafted by a person. It all looks very organic.
And you’ll spend more time in these environments than you might expect from a modern third-person action game. Tomb Raider isn’t quite open but it does allow you to go back and explore parts of the island you visited previously. Taking a page from Metroidvania-style games, Lara picks up weapons and items that allow her to access different, blocked-off sections of the world. These usually end up being optional tombs or areas you can score salvage to upgrade your weapons at bonfires.
Of course you’ll be upgrading these weapons for combat. And much like its narrative, Tomb Raider’s combat makes some promises up front it fails to keep. Early on you’re taught a few key lessons: “stealth is a viable option” and “use cover.” But often this advice seems like a form of (unintentional) misdirection. Enemies tend to be very aggressive about rushing you and using fire bombs and grenades to draw you out of cover. But Lara is pretty fragile and the encounters tend to be designed to occur in tightly confined areas. This means you’re rarely afforded the tools or space needed to deal with these encounters in a strategic way. They are never particularly difficult but often my successes and failures through them seemed entirely random.
There are other elements of Tomb Raider’s game world that seem to react just as inconsistently. Like stealth, for example. More often than not it’s a useless and misleading mechanic. In only a few instances where all the enemies of a certain area were spawned before Lara encountered them (an uncommon occurrence) did the stealth mechanics really shine in any meaningful way. And their contextual nature frequently implies it’s time to go stealth when it really isn’t. Layer on top of this the occasional insta-fail stealth sequences (which aren’t clearly communicated as such up front) and you start to wonder how late into development his mechanic was shoehorned in.
Along these same lines are enemies that frequently defy the logic of the game world. Later in the game you’re able to upgrade Lara’s bow so that it shoots napalm arrows which, naturally, causes enemies to go up in flames. The problem is that many enemies would refuse to catch fire until they were hit with three or four arrows. While other enemies of the same type would catch fire immediately. This might sound like a small complaint but this poor communication in Tomb Raider’s design feels indicative of the entire product.
When you’re not fighting against Tomb Raider’s design, you feel like you’re just going through familiar third-person adventure motions. As you may expect, combat encounters are broken up by largely straightforward environmental puzzles. These usually involve figuring out how to apply the set of upgraded weapons or items that Lara has acquired through the game. On top of this, Tomb Raider is overblown with quicktime events. They are often used to pull you up from a ledge or open a door. They aren’t inherently bad but I often felt removed from the on screen action when all I was required to do was a press a single button to perform a death-defying maneuver.
Tomb Raider’s multiplayer is a largely forgettable, but inoffensive, experience. It’s of course filled with a string of unlockable gear that can be used to build custom load outs along with all the bells and whistles you’ve come to expect from a modern multiplayer game. The moment-to-moment gameplay respectfully attempts to integrate elements from the single player. So you may have a moment when you step on a trap and must shoot enemies while upside down or can blow up an explosive barrel near an enemy to take them out. While it’s a novel idea to try and make this part of the game stand out, these mechanics feel there just for the sake of being there and don’t provide any interesting gameplay benefits.
It’s really hard to be excited about the future of Tomb Raider after this game. It fails where more successful films and games of its kind succeed: in its characters. The way in which Lara goes from inexperienced to full-on action movie hero survivalist is so jarring that it’s near impossible as a player to remain on the same emotional wavelength as the story. Because of this the rest of the game falters. It’s appeal is grounded in intense, exciting action moments. But these are impossible to care about with the poor handling of Tomb Raider’s star character.
- Flat and inconsistent characters
- Jarring narrative
+ Intense action moments
6 / 10
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Sucks about the disconnect between narrative and gameplay. I wish developers would heed the advice Spec Ops presented us with.
Well, after playing the game all afternoon I can safely say that this review is completely inaccurate. Here’s a quick rundown of why:
1. The disconnect between emotions experienced after Lara’s first kill and those that come after it was added to the game on purpose as a philosophical statement. There’s even a radio call after Lara’s first battle in which she tells a fellow survival who is trying to comfort her that “it’s scary how easy it [killing] was.” It may conveniently serve the game’s design and compress the emotional timetable, but that behavior is very real; it’s called decathecting. Go ahead, Machinima, look it up.
2. The cover system works just fine. In fact, it’s arguably the best third person cover system I’ve seen. It goes away entirely when you aren’t in combat so as not to impede your movement and it works damn near flawlessly while you’re fighting. Do enemies force you to move frequently? Yes they do. We call that good AI. I’m sorry that you don’t like enemy types that don’t allow you simply sit behind the closest chest-high wall popping headshots in complete safety. I (and I think most gamers) would call that “boring.”
3. Stealth is not only viable, it’s usually the best option. I’ve only run into a few forced shootouts in six hours of play. In every other encounter I’ve employed stealth to great effect with no design hiccups. This leads me to the conclusion that you must be doing it wrong.
4. The character development in this game is among the strongest I’ve seen in the gaming medium. Lara actually changes during the game and players are clearly able to see her gain confidence as time goes on. She’s a very different person already in my playthrough, so I imagine that she will be totally transformed by the end. Her personal journey may not be as deep as it would if she were in a novel or TV drama, but in the context of gaming it is nearly unrivaled. The characters in Tomb Raider are far more relatable than bog standard space marines or supersoldiers. By the way, what score did you give Halo 4?
I’ll concede that there may be a few too many QTEs, but that’s about the only thing I can agree with in your review. You can spout all you want about the nature of opinions, but this review is quite simply wrong. Opinions are not always valid and this is one of those cases. It’s almost as if the reviewer went into Tomb Raider wanting to hate it and then found himself having to force a round peg through a square hole when he found that it is amazingly good. Or perhaps he simply hasn’t played enough games to be able to recognize Tomb Raider’s successes.
What I’m trying to say is that you shouldn’t let this review turn you off. The new Tomb Raider is phenomenal. I’d even go so far as to say that it’s one of the best single-player experiences this generation. Go buy it. You’ll be glad you did. And to Machinima: sites that use clearly false, contrarian writing to drive traffic usually fail far faster than those who simply tell the truth. Just sayin’.
I know that you and many others have thought that Shibley is intentionally giving a lower score just to attract attention, but if anyone wanted to attract more attention to Inside Gaming, the website wouldn’t be a RETOOLED WORDPRESS BLOG. Just sayin’.
Also, Billy still acknowledges the game is above average by giving it a 6 instead of 5 or below.
Inside Gaming seems to care more for maintaining the current state of their content to keep long-time followers, such as myself, satisfied, so I doubt that anyone would deliberately try to get views. Halo 4 did the exact same thing (catered to long-time fans), which probably explains why Kovic gave it a 10/10.
I just played and also watched someone else play a sizable chunk of Tomb Raider. From what I saw:
1. I can see where Shibley is coming from with regards to the stealth. While I am rather mediocre at that sort of thing, some scenarios seemed to deliberately set the player up for failure (i.e. the enemies are all looking toward the spot that Lara has to move through in order to ambush guy #1).
2. Combat works well. It isn’t like you’re glued to Mr. Wallsy McChest-High, and you have close range dodges, so you don’t need to camp in one piece of cover. The early groups of enemies all seemed to be of the ranged variety, so maybe there’s a difficulty jump somewhere that adds a ton more flankers. Billy probably had to fight through more enemies than most due to the stealth not working out for him, so that could be some of it.
3. Characters seem alright, Lara in particular, although it didn’t seem like a unique character experience that I wouldn’t be able to get in another game. Billy has been critical of characters in his past reviews, commenting (for instance) that Death in Darksiders II “is kind of a dick” and that the characters in RAGE were really forgettable. He liked Max Payne as a character in Max Payne 3, although there he also commented on a mild bit of gameplay-vs-story dissonance present. When Kovic and Miguel have reviewed, they haven’t commented too much on characters, which is why their Halo and Far Cry reviews, respectively (as well as Miguel’s DmC review) didn’t really mention the characters at all.
Speaking of Shibley’s previous reviews, to give some idea of what he liked:
He gave Portal 2 a perfect 10,
Borderlands 2 a 9.5
Max Payne 3 a 9
Dead Space 2 a 9
Dead Space 3 an 8
Darksiders II an 8.5
Assassin’s Creed III an 8.5
and a 9 for RAGE
If that doesn’t help you figure out why Billy dished out a six for Tomb Raider, don’t worry. Billy himself tweeted, “convinced I played a different game than the rest of the Internet”.
Though he evidently didn’t, as a Metacritic user scored Tomb Raider a 3/10. Some people won’t be able to have fun with it anymore than I’ll be able to have fun with Borderlands (it bored me to near-death). And Billy should say what he felt about the game, however negative, because that way, we are aware that the possibility of this game not showing us a good time does exist.
Could not disagree more. After about 9 hours in game, I can say I’ve experienced absolutely no disconnect whatsoever. Lara’s first kill is performed in the middle of a situation where she’s surrounded by people who want to see her dead. The hell is she supposed to do, get all weepy, curl up and sob herself to sleep in a corner somewhere? She’s doing what it takes to survive, and I think the transition is handled very well (and no, it’s nowhere near as immediate as you’ve stated). Much better than say, Far Cry 3 handles it.
Her cohorts do fall a bit flat, and the villain is pretty generic, but this game deserves far, FAR more than a damn 6/10. It’s at least an 8.
I think you’re just being contrary to pretty much everyone else in order to get more site hits.
Let me just say, I am not trying to troll or cause an argument just for the sake of causing an argument. I just really can’t gather where you’re coming from with many of the accusations you place against Tomb Raider. I just finished up about a 6 hour session with the game, albeit not completed, and I have to say I have been impressed the whole way through. Calling out the characters as being flat? I can maybe see that judgement going towards the secondary roster of Lara’s friends, but Lara herself I feel is incredibly well voiced and portrayed. As for the disconnect between narrative and gameplay, it seems as though you’re asking for a film out of what is a game.
By this I mean that a game requires engaging, entertaining gameplay as the framework holding the product together; however this doesn’t mean it can’t try and tell a story. Would you really be all that excited, to cite your example, if we had to endure hours of gameplay of Lara just to allow her to become comfortable with killing a deer? Now I’ll admit, the first few human kills should have taken more time to adjust to, but again if the developers tried that, then the audience/gamer would lose interest. It’s a very challenging story to tell in a video game for sure, but I think Crystal Dynamics did a more than admirable job pulling it off. I will concede one thing, the default difficulty should be harder, therefore challenging the player more, furthering the notion of helplessness and inferiority. In my play through I decided to jump straight to hard and I have only died during an encounter maybe once or twice. I do play a lot of games but for a game about survival it should have been slightly harder by default.
It’s a shame that you got so hung up on the supposed disconnect between narrative and gameplay because it really is a fun game to play in my eyes. To each his own though right? I hope you get back to me at some point, I would love to hear your response (I love discussions about games).
Im sorry this review is ridiculous, thanks for attracting me to it with the low score
Well i dont give a fuck this review, i just pre- orden this game and for me it was great, awesome game. but the MP lack of mode and suck…. 9/10
Inside Gaming, for the first time I disagree with you… a lot!
I saw the changes in Lara all the time. For instance, at one point she is begging her friend to come and save her, yet later on she is volunteering to save another friend from an enemy stronghold.
For combat I always knew what I was doing, the only difficulty I had was the final mission.
I will agree on one thing: the QTEs! TOO MANY! And some are quite difficult, it took me about 9 attempts to kill that giant wolf. Sick of seeing Lara getting her neck broken.
So, in summary, I think you’re wrong. I would easily give this game an 8/10, possibly 9. I understand you’re all busy there, but it sounds like you barely played the game and only saw bad things.
Also, one more thing: It seems you guys are the only ones who think like this. Most other reviewers are giving 8s and 9s out of 10.
Gotta agree with Shibley on just about everything he says minus the actual 6/10. I’d rank it as above average, but this game, while gorgeous and fun most of the time (I’m about 70-75% of the way through it) pulls A LOT of its generic tricks out of the same bags as everyone else these days (they even ripped a killer scene out of The Descent, which was AWESOME in the movie and totally lame in the context of this game).
I really felt like the set pieces, while well designed, started to get stale and it was really hard to shake the feeling that I was playing Uncharted: Lara Croft (I’m a huge lifelong fan of Tomb Raider and I love Uncharted). The lack of originality really irked me because I had high hopes for the reboot and was hoping for a new distinct Tomb Raider experience.
As far as combat goes, it’s not broken, but it’s not a ton of fun either and it’s difficult, as Shibley states, to take a strategic approach. I think a great solution to many of the “disconnect between narrative and gameplay”moments would have been a stealthier route but sadly it’s impossible and I’ll explain why. You are given much cover to sneak behind, but once you kill one of the baddies, there’s no way to dispose of the body. When said body is discovered, REGARDLESS of where you are, the AI begin shooting at your location, even though you haven’t been detected and are still behind cover: stealth, OUT, strategy, OUT, run and gun, IN! If you like run and gun, balls-to-the-walls all out gunfights, you’ll get that and you’ll be happy with it, but I don’t think thats the direction many were expecting this game to take. I for one was expecting options on the battlefield; however, I will say that the cover system does work great and doesn’t get in the way, it’s just that you can’t be discovered, hide out again and sneak away to get a jump on the bad guys (which you could do in uncharted, and which is a way of strategizing in combat). One more negative comment on the combat is the way that the AI weaves out of the reticule as soon as you get in a good shot. I don’t mind a challenge but I do mind cheap AI tactics.
One thing I’d like to add that I haven’t seen criticized in many reviews is the camera. In trying to be realistic, it’s just wobbly, distracting and often gets in the way making for a few unnecessary death scenes.
So, all of that being said, I think its a great game and deserves a higher score, but everything that Shibley critiques the game for is spot on and I just wanted to back him up in that respect. Unfortunately I find it a lot easier to turn off this game and walk away from a play session a lot easier than I thought it would be.
I agree completely with this review, but i would give it a little bit higher score 7/10 maybe. I really have nothing to add. People just have different tastes. So give the reviewer a break. Why do you even care about the score? If some guy gives it 6/10 do you stop enjoying the game? Just play it and enjoy it if you like it.
Brilliant response to this review Jimbo. Don’t know if you’ll see this but well done, concise and accurate. I’m convinced anybody who says this same isn’t an incredible game is just looking for things to complain about. If it went too deep into the characters and their story they would say, “oh it went on for too long with the dialogue”. And if they make too little then you complain as you did here. You just can’t win with the gamer-types, they are whiney shut-ins, you know the type. And furthermore the game actually DID have well done character development as Jimbo covered, and many of the nuances of their changes or feelings were slipped in so you had to pay sharp attention to the dialogue, even out of the cut scenes. At times I’d just listen to the guards talk and get whole new ideas about the story. You just canlt win with some people. I, and many many other in the community I’m sure, will never find another review from this source or its affiliates reputable again. Eventually people will catch on that your working an angle and this (if indeed it is) manipulative way to get views will collapse.
What a retarded review. Best game of 2013 so far and this person bitches all over it like a spoiled blonde housewife. Learn to rate games, asshole.
Overreaction much?
So, I finally got the time to play this game, and, I agree with “most” of Billy’s points.
While I feel that he was severely disappointed with the game, or simply didn’t got a break to escape the negativity, most of what he says has a point, Lara’s transition from sweet innocent girl to Navy SEAL spec ops is done way to fast, and while you can say that in moments of extreme desperation someone will forget it’s own humanity and so on, in her case is too drastic and she never pauses for a second to question murdering (with extreme prejudice) a whole freaking island of people.
Stealth is a wonky mechanic, it works, but there are very, very few instances where it’s actually viable, most of the times you end up screwing one shot, triggering an alarm and having to face 7, 8 enemies in a row, 5 sections in an area, that can get tiresome specially since eventually you do give up trying to stealth kill everything and justo machine gun everything.
I found leveling in this game to be useless, something just to cater to the COD generation, the skills you get from leveling’ Lara are mainly pointless and could be eased in the game itself, same way the weapon upgrades, instead of constantly fixing’ your guns (God knows how she’s able to do that) you could simply find better guns while you progress, but that’s nitpicking on my part.
The supporting characters are, bland and forgettable, only one of ‘em have a mild impact on the story, and only because you have the greatest interaction with it, the enemies are actually cool, they have some varied lines for different situations and the AI is not entirely stupid, which is actually a new one for grunts in action games, but they do tend to overwhelm you with molotovs and TNT while you are in cover, so cover ends being just a point of respite, and not “Just hold here and headshot everything, move to the next cover and do the same, ad nauseum” like Gears of War, and I kinda liked, it makes combat more dynamic in certain parts, in others, it becomes weird because you have very little room to move and the enemies keep pushing towards you with machetes and such,
Overall, I liked the game, it’s not Classic Tomb Raider, by any means, there is too much action and too little thinking on this game to be a Tomb Raider game, it really is Uncharted with boobs, but still, the game flow is not bad and it can only go up from here, I would have given an 8/10 but I’m way, way more forgiving at anything TR related. (I bloody love the movies, so, yeah I’m that bias;)
Wow! Cannot believe how far off this review is. I’ve had nothing but a good time with this epic game. I’d go as far as to say it’s within the top 5 so far this year. The reviewer must have went in with a mindset to hate this game from the start. 8 hours in and I haven’t run into any of the issues he’s bitching about. Mega-ubër troll for sure. I know that opinions are like assholes and like an asshole, his stinks alot worse than everyone elses.