This is of course the 2013 reboot of the franchise that was distributed for free not too long ago. I rarely bother to claim all those free games nowadays as I know I won’t have the time to play them. But I had never actually played a single game in this series before so I thought why not. Plus something straightforward and relatively easy to play after how intense and demanding Il-2 Sturmovik is. I’m actually still playing that a little every day as I slowly work through the Stalingrad and getting a little better every time.
So I was very pleased that at normal difficulty, this was exactly what I needed as a kind of palate cleanser. As a reboot, this is set at the beginning of her career with a young and inexperienced Lara Croft setting out as part of a crew on sea expedition in search of a mysterious island nation. Naturally a storm comes out of nowhere to capsize the ship and leave them stranded on said island. The island is not only littered by ruins and relics of an ancient civilization as well as the detritus of past expeditions but is also populated by the survivors of past shipwrecks who have turned into a band of violent thugs led by a madman. As she traverses the island to rejoin the scattered crew members while fighting off the thugs and dealing with the island’s various dangers, Lara thus becomes a hardened and dangerous survivor.
The story is simple and utterly predictable but at least has the virtue of not being overly obtuse. What’s annoying is how often the game unavoidably has Lara getting captured and being threatened by enemies and how it grabs control from the player at key moments to tell the story. It also relies heavily on quick time events in cutscenes and my philosophy on those is always to keep them as non-interactive cutscenes. It’s just more pleasant for everyone. There’s also the perennial problem of everyone else except Lara being totally useless. Personally my biggest disappointment is that despite being billed as being about Lara as a novice, this game still depicts her as being terrifyingly skilled and willing to kill. Her resilience and stamina are essentially superhuman and I was surprised by how the game throws an entire army of human thugs at her. I always thought the Tomb Raider franchise was less combat centric than this.
Still, the basic gameplay loop is solid enough. If anything it feels to me that Lara has too many weapon and ability options given how short a game this is. Learning how to traverse the different areas and working through the puzzles were the most fun for me. Nothing too challenging but just tough enough to make you stop and think for a moment. Combat, at least at the default difficulty, isn’t too hard but I did find myself annoyed at having to manually aim with thumbsticks on the gamepad and fighting with the camera in melee as there is no lock-on whatsoever. It is kind of fun to set enemies on fire with arrows or blast them with the shotgun. The game also makes an effort to enforce different types of gameplay with a level when you’re mostly forced to play hide and seek with the bow only and one level where you’re meant to stealthily eliminate as enemies as possible before everything goes to hell.
As a final note, this is of course a 2013 game and looks the part. Obviously the graphics of modern games completely blow it out of the water but as I’ve said many time before, computer graphic technology is now good enough that small, incremental improvement doesn’t matter that much to me. Things like art direction and level design are more important and because of this, Tomb Raider looks and feels pretty good to me. Though it doesn’t make much sense in story terms how the ancient civilization could have built all these and how all those World War Two installations still work and have power, the world looks cool and is fun to explore. They’ve also put thought into making a varied combat environment with plenty of cover and places to double back to get behind the enemy. It’s a solid win in terms of production values.
This still isn’t the kind of game I would pay money for myself and I probably won’t play any of the sequels. It’s just one of those games that do everything in an alright way without being exceptional or unique in any way. But you can’t beat the price of free and I did enjoy myself in a kind of low-stress, undemanding way. Most of all, I’m really glad I’ve finally played at least one Lara Croft game.
