Reboot Review: Tomb Raider 2013!

Hey, it’s been a while. Sorry for the lack of posts (assuming that it’s really that big a deal to any of you). I’ve been preoccupied raiding tombs. Spent the past few days exploring ancient societies, finding lost artifacts, and, when I make time, blowing up old buildings and murdering waves of psychotic cultists. That’s right, I was playing Tomb Raider (the 2013 reboot) and now I’m going to review it. Don’t you just feel lucky?

First, I’m aware the game was released roughly 9 months ago, but I haven’t had much of a chance to play it with bouts of Minecraft, PayDay2, and Killer Is Dead among various other games, Tomb Raider was really low on my list because I’ve never been a fan of the series. Not because I actively disliked it, but because it just never drew me in to begin with. It’s like when you’re in a burger shop and you order all these different items. While a whopper looks good, it’s also a little more expensive and has excessive stuff that I don’t really want in a sandwich anyway. So why not just stick to a double cheeseburger or chicken strips? Why not venture into chicken sandwiches? I guess the metaphor works too since Tomb Raider is a functional game with excessive bullshit and you can tell most of the money was put into the expensive graphics it might have gone a little too far with.

But I feel there are two kinds of critics that can review a game like Tomb Raider properly. Those who have been fans of the series and can separate their fandom from their review to find the flaws and focus on making constructive criticism. Then there are those who have never seen a Tomb Raider game before and get to review everything with fresh eyes void of all rose-tinted nostalgia. For us, we’re currently in the second category with no preconceived notions of the series before playing. Oh, wait, I did play a demo of an older game in a target once. I guess I’ve been compromised.

Tomb Raider is a game about a girl named Lara Croft (as if you didn’t already know). In the reboot game, we’re essentially visiting her origin story which has never been properly touched on before (as is my understanding). So we get to see her first venture into tombs, cultists, magic shenanigans, and excessive amounts of violence for a job that generally only requires brushes and maybe a whip if you’re Indiana Jones. In her first venture she and a team of researchers (and a TV personality from the Discovery Channel) go to an island in the middle of a Bermuda-Triangle-like area in the ocean, called the Dragon’s Triangle. Creative naming there guys, real original. Certainly no one has taking the name Dragon’s Rhombus or Phantom’s Parabola.

Obviously the team is fucked, their ship crashes, and the island is already inhabited by a group of other people who have been stranded there. However they have formed a cult of psychotics with a goal to sacrifice an Asian because their racism makes them think they will be a perfect vessel for some kind of sun god. But they’re insane and psychotic, so racism can be sort of ignored at the moment. Because of that nonsense, it is now Lara’s job to not only figure a way off this island, but also to save the Asian from the cultists before she is killed. Though it would help if she was capable of defending herself for more than five minutes. Seems like whenever she’s left alone she gets kidnapped.

You start off with few tools to survive the harsh environments and fight off waves of psychotic rapists, but throughout the game you earn new weapons, parts to upgrade those weapons, and points to upgrade your skills. By the end of the adventure, Lara should be a certified dick-killing machine with a wide array of killing implements at her disposal. Though most skills are geared towards either movement or combat and has little to do with any real survival. The game gives first impressions that you might need to hunt for food to help stay alive, but that’s almost immediately thrown out the door. You kill your first deer, Lara gets sad in a cutscene, and then killing any other animal bears no emotions from her again. She’s too busy enjoying all the blood.

Here’s my problem with the game. While the gameplay is certainly functional and not at all bad in a totally different game, I feel a bit of a juxtaposition here. For me, being an archaeologist and one that investigates old tombs for the sake of raiding should be the type of game that focuses on puzzles, exploration, and have it all come down to the fine details of the world and how it’s presented. For me, being stranded on an island leaves me with the impression it should be a game that requires you to maintain your health by finding resources, building campsites, and hunting as being game mechanics that actually apply to you surviving and even thriving.

But the sad truth is that you tear away the conceits to have anything to do with archaeology and surviving this new island’s wildlife and climate, you’re left with nothing but an action game. And, unfortunately, that’s all this really is. Action games aren’t bad and this one, from a gameplay perspective, works just fine. But it’s not what I wanted when I picked up a game called Tomb Raider. It’s not what I expected when I figured I’d be digging through old tombs. If I want an action game, I’ll play something like Bayonetta or Killer Is Dead or even PayDay2 because their focus is action. Sometimes to a point where the story is so nonsensical that the action is there in spades to make up for it. And I don’t think Tomb Raider works well from that kind of logic.

You see, the story isn’t all that interesting. It’s just another copy of the Mario formula (which isn’t original either). Save the plot device from the antagonist to save the day, is all it really sums up to. There are some other layers, sure, but that’s the core of the story for the most part. Again, it’s functional, but that’s all it really does. And, no, I wasn’t expecting the finest writing in the world for a Tomb Raider game, god no. But I felt like a game in which you’re in ancient ruins studying ancient societies, that perhaps story would take a bit more weight. Even if it is the story of people that are thought to be dead, it’s still interesting to read and hear about them.

Instead the game decides rather than delivering something that could stand out as a truly unique game in a world of action games, allowing it to even outshine the original series, it’s just going to stick us behind some chest-high walls for a few hours and hope that will satisfy us. Again, another shame because the designers when through a lot of work on this, by the looks of it, to make a really good looking game. And spending so much of it behind cover feels like a waste of such assets. All that money Square Enix spent on this game to make it look as good as possible and it was for nothing.

Oh, let me get to that elephant in the room then. Yes, I’m aware this is one of the games in the past year that companies like Square Enix, EA, or Capcom made where it “failed” to meet their sales expectations while still selling millions of copies. And, yes, I know that the reason behind that was because the budget on this game, much like Resident Evil 6 and Dead Space 3, got out of hand because rather than keep things simple for a game that only had so big a fan base to begin with. They decided to go all the way with the latest and greatest graphics and hire well-known voice actors, all in hopes to chase that CoD money.

It’s sad to hear that Tomb Raider followed suit of Hitman Absolution and Sleeping Dogs in that it sold a lot, but didn’t make the money needed to cover the insane costs of making it because Square Enix has to make the visuals of every game as ridiculously over-the-top as their shitty Final Fantasy games. Because while it isn’t the greatest game of 2013, it’s certainly one to check out because it does enough right to be interesting. It does enough right to keep me engaged and playing it. There are just some things that don’t sit right with me, but that’s because I wanted something more and better. It shouldn’t be a surprise that Tomb Raider wasn’t some fun open-world survival/exploration game when companies like Square Enix are afraid to take risks on ideas like that. So rather than do something risky and make Tomb Raider into a game that I was expecting, we just get more action games.

Final word… I guess if you see Tomb Raider on the shelf or on Steam and you think the price being asked for sounds reasonable, give it a go because it’s still fun to play. It’s not necessarily my kind of fun or what I was looking for in a game, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be fun. And maybe you’ll make use of that multiplayer I never played because I didn’t give a shit. But, regardless, have fun doing that while I go off to raid some dungeons in Lorule.