{"id":10855,"date":"2013-04-03T11:46:07","date_gmt":"2013-04-03T01:46:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/?p=10855"},"modified":"2016-01-17T11:55:59","modified_gmt":"2016-01-17T01:55:59","slug":"tomb-raider","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/?p=10855","title":{"rendered":"Tomb Raider"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"tombraider\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Platform:\u00a0 <\/strong>Xbox 360<\/em>
\nDeveloper:\u00a0 <\/strong><\/strong>Crystal Dynamics<\/em>
\nPublisher:\u00a0<\/strong><\/strong> Square Enix
\n<\/em><\/p>\nA<\/span>s reboots go, Tomb Raider<\/em> is a particularly tantalizing prospect for any prospective developer.\u00a0 The franchise’s popularity has been lumbering in the last decade, even as the quality of the last few games improved.\u00a0 Yet despite the unfulfilled potential, there was always a sense that gamers wanted to see the franchise succeed.\u00a0 They would be ready to jump back in with the right game.\u00a0 I believe that by making some concessions to Uncharted<\/em> and third person cover shooters in general, Eidos have done it.\u00a0 This is the game to launch Lara Croft back into the spotlight.<\/p>\n

That’s not say it was a sure thing.\u00a0 Tomb Raider<\/em> had some pretty rough PR in the lead up to the game’s release thanks to a notorious E3 showing last year that appeared to portray Lara getting sexually assaulted by an armed henchman and an ill-advised remark from a producer who said he hoped gamers would want to ‘protect’ Lara.\u00a0 This didn’t bode particularly well for a game that aspired to show the roots of one of gaming’s most beloved heroines.<\/p>\n

Fortunately, the actual game itself has no problems conveying Lara’s transformation from a young, inexperienced adventurer into a seasoned treasure hunter.\u00a0 It’s refreshing to see a game actually chart a character arc in this fashion.\u00a0 When Lara first gets stranded on the island Yamatai, she is startled, frightened and unsure of herself.\u00a0 For a big budget adventure game, it’s pleasing to see the developers have some patience in charting Lara’s confidence and gradual development in her abilities.\u00a0 First she finds a bow and kills a deer for sustenance.\u00a0 Then, when the time comes, she kills a man in self defence.\u00a0 “It was scary,” she later tells her mentor Roth, “just how easy it was.”<\/p>\n

No kidding.\u00a0 The irksome thing about Tomb Raider<\/em> is that, in an otherwise excellent game, it has the same gaping ludo-narrative disonnance that plagues Uncharted<\/em>, Grand Theft Auto IV<\/em> and about a dozen other high profile games from the last five years.\u00a0 In other words, the Lara Croft in the cutscenes is portrayed as a pragmatic humanist who is looking to get off the island with her friends as quickly and painlessly as possible.\u00a0 The Lara Croft in the game is a blood-lusting monster who shifts quickly from self defence to pro-actively butchering people in spectacularly gruesome fashion – setting people on fire, thrusting a pick axe into their skull, stabbing their thorax with an arrow.\u00a0 For all our technological progress in gaming as a medium, its depressing to think that the number of humans Lara kills in the original Tomb Raider is five.\u00a0 In the reboot, she desimates a mind numbing four hundred people.\u00a0 I’m not naive enough to think that this game could get by without an increase in enemies to fight but the tonal shift between Lara’s reluctant first kill and the ‘style points’ awarded for unnecessarily killing a guy with an axe to the face is jarring to say the least.<\/p>\n

Having said that, if the game is to follow Uncharted<\/em>, Max Payne<\/em> and Gears of War<\/em> down the path of mass destruction, it at least does so in a punchy and empowering fashion that feels more satisfying than most of its contemporaries.\u00a0 Unlike Uncharted<\/em>, there are very few enemies in Tomb Raider<\/em> that feel like cheap bullet sponges.\u00a0 Usually, a single well placed shot from the bow will do the trick.\u00a0 Therefore its quite easy to have a satisfying jaunt through the game’s many shanty towns and temples, barrel rolling Lara from cover point to cover point, taking out enemies with finesse.\u00a0 The bow in Tomb Raider<\/em> is one of gaming’s most satisfying weapons.\u00a0 I swear they made the rifle purposefully cumbersome by comparison.<\/p>\n

Although Tomb Raider<\/em> is indebted to Uncharted<\/em> with its action adventure set pieces and cover-shooting mechanic, it expands upon the scope of Naughty Dog’s franchise by adding open world gameplay that allows for a much greater sense of exploration and an RPG-lite mechanic where players can gradually make their armoury more sophisticated and unlock more moves in combat.\u00a0 These are great additions and give the game some added heft.<\/p>\n

Most importantly though, the core storyline here is surprisingly engaging.\u00a0 Tomb Raider<\/em> rather unexpectedly cribs from Lost<\/em> and makes the island a supernatural and possibly sentient landscape.\u00a0 The narrative is helped immensely by the decent voice acting performances delivered by the cast, particularly from Camilla Luddington as Lara.<\/p>\n

In short, Tomb Raider<\/em> is a fantastic reboot.\u00a0 Purists will be disappointed in the emphasis on combat but I found it to be well executed and great fun.\u00a0 I do feel that the game could still offer a lot more puzzle solving like its predecessors but I think it nails the sense of exploration by delivering an open world environment with a broad range of challenges and treasure hunts.\u00a0 Best of all, the game offers us a 21st Century Lara Croft who has an honest-to-God personality and ditches the ridiculous pnumatic breasts that largely defined her popularity in the Nineties.\u00a0 There is so much to build on with this reboot and the positive word of mouth and great reviews suggest that Lara and the Tomb Raider<\/em> franchise could yet have a bright future ahead.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Take a bow, Lara<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":10856,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[1593,407,1594,1592,9],"class_list":["post-10855","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-gaming","tag-crystal-dynamics","tag-eidos","tag-lara-croft","tag-tomb-raider","tag-xbox360"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10855","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10855"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10855\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19088,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10855\/revisions\/19088"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/10856"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10855"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10855"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10855"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}