Tomb Raider Review (PS3)

 I used to be a big Tomb Raider fan back in its PSOne heyday, but hadn't played any of the games since The Last Revelation. I wasn't very interested when I first heard about this reboot, but I heard so many good things about it that I decided to play it. I was also interested because I heard that they were trying to take Lara's “sex symbol” status out of the picture to some degree with a more human and relatable character. Don't worry, I won't talk about that anymore lest we enter a rage filled discussion about such things.

     This entry in the Tomb Raider series is way different than the Tomb Raiders I played back in the day. It's basically half cover-based shooter, half exploration game. You go through different locations on the island you are trapped on. When you encounter enemies, you often have a chance to take them out silently with your bow, melee attacks, or silenced firearms. If the enemies spot you, the battle is on and plays out like many a cover-based shooter, although with a few little tweaks that make it a bit different (which I'll go into a bit in the controls section of the review). After the battle, you're off to your next destination, which you can see as a waypoint in the distance. You have to run, jump, climb, zip line, and work through physics based puzzles to get where you are going.

     The left stick controls movement, the right stick controls where you are looking or aiming if you have a weapon drawn. The directional buttons select your weapon (each button is mapped to one of the four weapons, so to draw your shotgun, for example, you simply press left on the d-pad). Square is manual reload. Lara doesn't automatically reload her gun when it is empty, she only reloads when she tries to fire and finds that the gun is empty. At first I found this annoying, but I liked it in the end as it adds to the tension when you go to blast a guy who is right next to you only to find you are empty and have to scramble to reload. Square is also used to activate switches and interact with stuff. Often you need to tap square rapidly to pry open a door with your climbing axe or turn a crank. It's also used to pick up stuff, because as is Tomb Raider tradition, you don't just pick up stuff by running over it, you need to pick it up! Cross is jump and climb up, circle is dodge. While dodging, bullets and arrows are less likely to hit you, and melee attacks will almost never hit you. You can also tap circle while dodging to go into a roll to get yourself away from danger quickly (such as when a stick of dynamite lands right next to you!). Circle also causes you to let go while holding onto a ledge. Triangle triggers your melee attack, which starts out as just a shove and moves on to swinging your climbing axe. Triangle is also used to do stealth attacks (along with tapping square to choke someone out) and to do finishing moves. You can do finishing moves on enemies that have been incapacitated. If you don't do it quickly enough, they will get back up and start fighting again. The finisher you start with is bashing enemies in the head with a rock you pick up off the ground, but you can get skills that let you do firearms based finishers that give you experience bonuses. You can also just shoot incapacitated enemies. Pressing L2 triggers your “survival instincts,” which basically highlights anything you can interact with. It also makes everything else less detailed, and is a bit straining on the eyes.

     Holding L1 aims your weapon. R1 fires it. If you are using the bow, you can hold R1 before releasing to draw it out to a full strength shot before releasing to fire. You can't hold it fully taught forever though, so if you can't draw a bead on your target, you have to let go of L1 to stop your self from automatically firing when you run out of strength. This makes stealth situations interesting, as you don't want your shots to go wild. L3 swaps which shoulder the camera is looking over, which allows you to aim around obstacles more easily. R3 zooms in on your aiming reticule a bit, allowing for more precision shooting with any weapon.              You'll notice I didn't mention any buttons to snap you into or out of cover. That's because if Lara is around enemies and approaches cover, she just automatically ducks behind it. This pretty elegantly eliminates a lot of the bizarre animations and control mistakes that often come up in cover-based games that make you manually lock yourself in behind cover. Lara is never locked into her cover, she can always just walk away from it. It's just that if you are near cover, she ducks behind it. It's simple and works surprisingly well. Once in cover, aiming will pop you out, and letting go of the aim button drops you back in.

     Encounters with enemies are usually pretty short and involve just a few skirmishers. A few encounters are bigger and involve lots of enemies in larger environments. The smaller encounters often give you a chance at stealth before the enemies notice you. You can often dispatch them by shooting an arrow near them to make one enemy go investigate. You can then take them out while they are split up. If you mess that up, you get into a fire fight. Some enemies throw dynamite or molotovs to drive you out of cover or set your cover on fire, which temporarily makes it useless.

     The bigger battles often have waves of attackers. Some may snipe at you with arrows or guns from a distance while other get closer and fire and melee attackers run or zipline in. These are really fun as you need to do a lot of different things during the battle. You do melee counters (where you dodge a melee attack and then shove an arrow into an enemy's knee), run to higher ground, zipline through active battlefields, dodge enemy attacks and then immediately shotgun blast them, snipe at faraway targets, shoot explosive items to damage enemies, shoot enemies as they are throwing dynamite to make them drop it on themselves, pull people off their high perches with rope arrows, and a few other little tactics. Enemies are great at flushing you out of cover, especially in hard mode. This really adds a lot of depth to what you have to do as you usually can't just sit there and shoot everyone. However, even on hard mode, the combat isn't too tough. Even if I died once or twice during an encounter, I often felt like I was dominating the battlefield, confidently striding up firing lanes until things got too hot and I was forced to take some cover or other actions. Ironically, the game was harder for me on normal mode as I was still learning how the combat worked. Once learned however, even hard mode becomes pretty easy. It could definitely use an even harder difficulty. I even purposefully didn't get a lot of skills or weapon upgrades on my hard run through for fear of making the game even easier, which I shouldn't have to do. I shouldn't have to hold back for fear of breaking the game.

     Getting from point A to point B (what you'll be doing between fights) is interesting. It's fun to jump and climb your way through levels. It's pretty smooth transitioning from climbing, to jumping, to rock climbing, to ziplining. I wish the areas were bigger though. Really, I wish this were an open world game with a really huge environment. As it was, I felt a little boxed in. I feel like the combat would benefit from this as well, as you could have emergent encounters were you run across enemy patrols and such. There are some interesting things that happen in combat, but they are all written in as events. It would be cool if those things weren't scripted, but just waiting out there in the world for you to stumble upon..

     Almost everything you do earns you experience. You can use this to buy skills. You also find salvage everywhere which allows you to modify your weapons. Both of these improvement systems are somewhat interesting.

     If you want that old-timey Tomb Raider feel of being alone in an area for a long time, all you have to do is try to find the tons of hidden collectibles. There are tons of things to find, and looking for them is actually enjoyable. It's also pretty doable, as you can find treasure maps that show you where to look for stuff. Challenges on the other hand, are a little tougher, as they make you find stuff that you can't find on a treasure map. I was able to find most of the challenge items without a guide, but needed one for the last couple of tough challenges. Finding this stuff is where you will want to use your survival instincts, although it de-saturates the colors, which makes everything look like terrible, so that's not cool. Stopping to find collectibles is a fun change of pace to the rapid-fire objective race that is the main story. Wandering leisurely through an area that you blazed through before is enjoyable.

     The graphics are pretty good. No major complaints. There is some cool design work to the look of the levels too, especially the shipwrecks and shoddily built makeshift structures and towns.

     One thing the game does really well is going into short little cutscenes right out of gameplay. You walk right into some of them and don't even notice that you aren't in control anymore. And then just as smoothly you are playing again. Very cinematic and executed nearly perfectly.

     Now let's get into the bad stuff. Notice how I haven't mentioned the story yet? That's because the story is pretty bad. It's a cool idea; you're stranded on an island that has seen many, many shipwrecks. The inhabitants are all from these shipwrecks, but are now cultists of some kind. There are also ancient ruins and tombs on the island, and old World War II Japanese military installations. Unfortunately it's messily written and poorly done. And the game is heavily story focused. So it's focused on one of its weakest parts. There are a handful of cool moments to the story, but by and large it's pretty bad. Voice acting is pretty good though.

     The themes are not very well done either. A handful of narration by Lara, including what should be some important parts, are so bad I was asking myself, “What is she talking about?” The theme of survival works ok, as Lara gets beaten up really badly by tons of falls and many injuries, which stay on her character model for the whole game. The combat, however, seems like a desperate fight for survival too, until you remember that you've killed dozens and dozens of enemies like you're the Master Chief, so there's a little disconnect there. This is relieved a little bit later in the game when you can overhear enemies talking fearfully about Lara. At least they realize she is a killing machine. Lara seems to realize it too, as she starts to yell threats at enemies during fights, which is pretty cool. But overall, it doesn't make sense. The game also has some really over-the-top set pieces. About half of them work and are really cool, and about half of them are so over-the-top that they take you out of the game a bit. Like, why is that exploding? I have no idea why that wooden thing just exploded. Most of them are fun to play though. They usually involve running around a structure that is collapsing or sliding down a steep cliff. There are a handful of physics based puzzles in the game, most of which are optional side quests. These are interesting, but make no sense thematically. You would never try the things you do to solve these puzzles in real life. You just do them because you see that the game will let you. Nevertheless, these puzzles are fun to figure out. Just don't press L2, or your survival instincts will show you what to do, totally ruining the fun. The game also tells you to press L2 during these sequences which is really annoying as it's basically saying, “Let me show you what to do so you won't have fun solving this puzzle. I don't want you to figure it out.”

     I also thought the game would be a little more realistic, but it is very videogamey. As soon as you walk into an area, you almost immediately know what to do. You can use rope arrows to pull on objects that are wrapped in rope. That makes no sense. Surfaces you can run up and climb all have the same look to them, no matter where they are or what they are made of. This is functional and all, but made me feel like I was playing a more cartoony game than something that is trying to look realistic. It also bothered me a lot that switching weapons makes them magically appear and disappear on the character model. A few moments are also so unbelievable that they really take you out of the game. Like, beyond Indian Jones-style unbelievable. There's this one zipline that would so obviously kill you if you used it. I really hesitated to go on it. It's at such an extreme angle you would basically just free fall if you used it. Then there's a few parts where Lara drops from one zipline to another, using her axe to slide along them. Think about free-falling and grabbing a zipline with your axe. You'd have to put your hand under the zipline to grab the axe on the other side. It's so near-impossible that it's distracting, but the game portrays it as an easy, normal thing to do. It would be ok if it was a one time thing that you barely pull off.

     There's something off with some of the cut-scene editing, as you don't get to see some things that I think you need to see. There's a part where Lara gets herself free from hanging, but then you see her in a cutscene already halfway through her fall. You don't actually see her start to fall. Why not? This is a visual medium, I want to see what is happening. I've noticed this kind of editing in a few movies and games, and it really bothers me. I can't tell if it's a mistake or a style, but I don't like it either way.

     The game is also buggy. Lara gets caught on level geometry from time to time. Sometimes animations get screwed up and go off wrong, especially the finishing moves. Many times I did a finishing move on the air as the enemy somehow got out of my grip (this still kills them though, lul). I also ran into a bug that made Lara invisible and unable to move, so I had to reload. During some optional conversations, people's lips don't move, and their gestures don't match what they are saying. That's not really a bug, I guess.

     The sound and music is generally good, nothing remarkable. But it seems to be poorly mastered, as sometimes dialogue would be muffled by sound effects. There was no way to adjust this in the options either, as dialogue and sound effects can only be adjusted together.

     Now it's time for me to give this game a low score. I know wrote about a lot of stuff I liked, but think about what I said was bad... the story, writing, and themes. Only gameplay heavy games can get away with these being bad or absent, and this is a very heavily story based game. Add on to that the handful of bugs and flaws, and it's not looking good. I had plenty of fun in some of the game's battles and exploration segments, but there's a lot of bad here. In fact, it's about fifty-fifty. That's why Tomb Raider is a Mediocre Game, Tier 2.