Tomb Raider 2013: Tomb Raiding Optional

What's crackin' y'all?

I think I missed a week there but all is well! I'm not so busy anymore so now I'll take a moment and jot down some thoughts on some vidya.

I picked up that new Tomb Raider reboot from last year on PlayStation Network's holiday sale and have been playing it this past week. There's stuff I like about it and stuff I don't.

Take a gander why don'cha?

So for those of you who maybe haven't been keeping up with these gaming times there's this series called Tomb Raider, right? It first debuted in 1995 or thereabouts for DOS and PlayStation.

I was just a boy then and remember those heady days of early 3D PC gaming fondly. The game was an action game made by a company called Core Design and published by Eidos where you took control of an Indiana Jones-like character named Lara Croft. She had short shorts and big pointy polygonal breasts. It was very much "for the male gaze" as they say.

Ten-year-old me didn't really care much for the polygon tits or the various "nude raider" mods floating around on the early Internet at the time. I just liked the game for what it was: a kind of clunky-yet-elegant exploration/action game.

Tomb Raider took place almost entirely in tombs, or places leading up to the tombs themselves. And these weren't just any tombs, see, they were often fantastical places like the Lost City of Atlantis or the tomb of King Midas.

The game was kind of clunky due to it's design. Being an early 3D game it was composed of mostly right angles. Lara Croft was exquisitely animated for the time but her animations were tuned to that game world made up of sharp right angles. Controlling early Lara Croft was kind of like driving a really old automobile. You had to stop often and slow down to turn if you wanted to get where you were going in one piece.

The game was quite successful because raiding tombs was pretty fun. You explored big areas, flipped switches, discovered hidden routes and secret doors to new areas all while battling hostile wildlife and avoiding spiked pits.

The game spawned several sequels over the years during the course of which the designers lost sight of what made the original game fun to begin with and fans in general got sick of the formulaic Tomb Raider design.

The designers lost their way because with each new game they kept adding more and more human enemies for Lara to fight until eventually the game was nearly indistinguishable from every other shootman game at that point. People got tired of it because, aside from all the shooting, the tomb raiding was getting stale. The environmental puzzles were becoming rote and predictable to the point that the game was getting to be more of a chore than an exercise in discovery.

By this point a company named Chrystal Dynamics had taken over the franchise and released three games, one of which was a remake of the original. After their third game, Tomb Raider: Underworld, they decided to take a break from Lara Croft and rethink their approach. The result was the 2013 reboot of the series, called simply Tomb Raider.

So New Tomb Raider is basically an origin story for Lara Croft, who in this new game is still a wealthy heiress with a penchant for archaeology. The game opens with Lara and a crew of academics and filmmakers who are searching for evidence of a lost Japanese empire led by a mythical figure known as the Sun Goddess.

The crew debates over whether or not to avoid an area of ocean known as the Dragon's Triangle, which has been known to be the site of disappearances of ships and airplanes throughout the years, but Lara talks everyone into going through as a shortcut to their destination.

As fate would have it, or rather the writers of the game portraying fate, their boat gets caught in a terrible storm and they are marooned on a deserted island home to a homicidal cult of people who worship the Sun Goddess. As the player you guide Lara on her journey through the island after she is separated from her friends and becomes transformed from an innocent student into a depraved mass murdering plunderer.

I wish I was exaggerating but Lara Croft kills a lot of people in this game. To be fair to Chrystal Dynamics it is the best manshooting they've accomplished. The gunfighting is very fluid, getting a headshot is always satisfying and there's even a multipalyer mode for the real murder heads.

But Lara Croft is not supposed to be a murderer. She's supposed to be an explorer.

Chrystal Dynamics uses the combat as a narrative device to explain how "soft" supple Lara gets "hardened" up over the course of time. This time around her character model looks more like a real person, if that real person is a waif-like fashion model, so it's a bit less "male-gaze-ish" in the sense of the original game. The short shorts are replaced by tight fitting jeans and the blue tank top remains.

The whole narrative arc of the game is not simply to have an adventure but to show in the grittiest way possible how Lara Croft becomes "born again". The first hour of the game has you wandering through a largely scripted tutorial area, flailing about helplessly and running from random scary attackers. You get captured and escape and explore a little and by the time you get out of the tutorial area via a big scripted escape sequence Lara is all bruised and battered, cut and dirtied almost beyond recognition.

It's all a little bit creepy at first and it climaxes with Lara taking a life. She agonizes over killing someone in a cutscene and then literally two seconds later you're back in control of her and you're killing five more people in a row.

Basically what I'm saying is this game is driven entirely by its story and that story, and the way it's told, is all kind of dumb. Which would be okay if the game wasn't taking itself so seriously but, man, it really is taking itself very seriously. Chrystal Dynamics plays it straight the whole way.

So what about the rest of the game? I said there were some things I liked about it and that's true, there are. I'll talk about them now!

There are a few big, open areas in the game where you can just poke around and explore and climb on things on your way to the next mission objective. I like these parts of the game the most. They're big, lush environments and they look great. The level design is set up such that moving through the area is a joy and makes backtracking actually fun.

There is a lot of collectible cruft hidden throughout to give you a reason to explore. Some people don't like collectible stuff in games but I do. Sometimes it's done well but most of the time it's just there so you feel like you actually have something more to do in a game than just hit each major story beat.

New Tomb Raider is the latter type of game. The collectible stuff isn't exactly hard to find. In fact, the game gives you a couple different ways to mark it on your in-game map so you don't even have to actually spend a lot of time looking for it. It's just there for the sake of completionism and I am something of a completionist when it comes to certain games.

But those big open areas! Those get back to what the original Tomb Raider was all about, which was gaining mastery over the environment via exploration and gaining a feel for the layout and setup of the level. In New Tomb Raider Lara is unable to access certain entry points here and there without the right equipment. It's a technique first popularized by the game Metroid, where you can only explore so far with the basic gear and then you need to find upgrades that will give you the ability to explore further.

New Tomb Raider has that a little bit but it's kind of shallow. Basically you only ever have a few weapons and items throughout the whole game, and that's fine. I like it when games try to do more with less. Instead of gaining lots of new weapons and items you collect scrap by exploring the environment and use that as a kind of currency to buy upgrades for your weapons and items at campsites.

This upgrade system is also kind of shallow but that's okay because more complexity in that area would probably just drag the rest of the game down. It shines most during those quiet moments where it's just you and the wilderness. You notice there's a collectible nearby and then spend five minutes figuring out how to get to it. Then you get it and move on. It would be nicer if the focus of the game had been more on that sort of thing instead of on shooting dudes.

There is one collectible that's a bit more than just a collectible, and which I wish was actually the focus of the game rather than the overwrought, sometimes creepy origin story that is the actual focus of the game, and that is the tombs themselves.

Each major area has a tomb or two for you to find and raid. There are only seven tombs total in the whole game and before the game came out they were described as more traditional puzzle levels for you to overcome. I was under the impression that this meant they were kind of like the tombs in Assassin's Creed II, which were basically big puzzle areas that involved puzzling and platforming to solve.

Nope. In this New Tomb Raider the tombs are just simple, single rooms with a physics puzzle to solve and maybe a little light platforming to do to get to the treasure chest, which always contains a map that marks spots for other collectible stuff for you.

On top of this, to add insult to injury, these tombs are entirely optional. In fact, unless you're going out of your way to find them it's quite possible to miss them entirely.

Tomb Raider 2013: Tomb Raiding Optional just about sums it all up.

So what else is there to say? Well, the game has very good art. Which is to say it has All The Graphics. Environmental design is top-notch in a lot of places but the game is too linear for its own good, always railroading you to the next story point. After the story is over you can travel back to each area and pick up any collectibles you missed but I've been grabbing them along the way before moving on.

The story is dumb and still pandering but now I'm not sure who exactly it panders to. Do women find this sort of story empowering? Maybe some do, probably, but I don't know. I'm not really sure it was necessary Lara Croft needed to be "born again hard" but I guess when the general theme of the game seems to be "survival at any cost" then it kind of fits.*

There's a multiplayer mode I'll probably never touch because the only people still left playing it by now are probably super hardcore about it and not any fun to play with. Well, that's not fair. Really I just don't like multiplayer that much. I mean I like a good deathmatch as much as the next murder junkie but when I need my fix for that I go to something like Quake Live, not Tomb Raider.

The manshooting is really well done but feels out of place because, to me at least, Tomb Raider was never about shooting mans. It was about exploring and shooting the occasional beasts. This game has exploring and beasts but it's all kind of watered down in that Triple A kind of way. Despite this it has the psychological hooks built in that are going to keep me in the story mode until I've reached 100% completion and can move on to something else.

Chrystal Dynamics took Tomb Raider, downplayed the emphasis on actual tomb raiding and turned the game into Yet Another Third Person Shooter. It's all pretty quality and well done, mind you, but if you're looking to raid some tombs you're probably better off playing another game. Like, well, Tomb Raider.

I'm not really sure what the game is trying to be at this point. It's not lighthearted like the Uncharted games though it could stand to be. It feels like it's all just an elaborate setup for the next game, which will be the actual Tomb Raider game with actual tomb raiding and such. But I doubt it. The next game will probably be of similar quality, but I have a feeling the tombs will be just as optional.

*For a good review of the game and a good explainer on the reasons why it's just a tad bit creepy check out CubaLibre's wrap-up review from his Let's Play.