PC
PC
PlayStation 3
XBox 360
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Product Features

Genre
Adventure
Publisher
Square Enix
Release Date
October 03, 2013
Available Platforms
PC, PC, PlayStation 3, XBox 360

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Tomb Raider

This action-packed game is a more realistic re-boot of well-known daredevil, 21 year old Lara Croft's, first heroic adventure. The story follows Lara, an enthusiastic but naive archaeologist who has joined a team aboard a ship setting out on an expedition to find the ancient Yamatai kingdom. When a violent storm savagely destroys the vessel, she becomes shipwrecked, washed ashore onto a remote unknown island beach, clinging desperately to life; frightened, disorientated and alone.

In this, her first quest, she soon discovers just how much intense physical and emotional pain she has to endure simply to stay alive. She has to put her athletic abilities and her problem solving adeptness to good use straight away and very quickly begins to learn a range of survival skills that she will need in her future role as Tomb Raider.

This newest version boasts stronger storylines and stunning visuals, set in an open-world environment. It features optional on-line interactive gameplay, a diverse set of gameplay genres (survival, melee, stealth etc), a variety of weapons (ice axe, pistol, bow and arrow, long bow) plus more.

Available for XBox 360, PS3 and PC.

  • George Orton March 11, 2013 360
    ****

    I'm old enough to remember quite clearly the era in which the Tomb Raider franchise first got started. Exploding onto the gaming scene back in 1996, the first Tomb Raider game was a revelation, mixing one of the earliest 3D game-engines with some impressive graphics, a cool Indiana-Jones-esque action-adventure storyline, and some solid third-person shooter/platformer mechanics. Yes, the game had its faults (I remember spending many hours climbing up to high ledges time and again so that I could repeat jumps that you needed to get pixel-perfect if you wanted to progress in the game), but it still stands as one of the most significant and best-loved games of that era, and a great example of the first Playstation's capabilities.

    However, like so many other once-great icons of that bygone age of gaming, Lara Croft has experienced mixed fortunes in recent years. After a few pretty-good sequels to the original game, the franchise got mired in a sequence of progressively-worse games that failed to capitalise on what made the Tomb Raider brand so successful, and ended up repeating past glories and retreading increasingly tired-feeling plots and puzzles until the series ran out of steam altogether. And it didn't help that several similar - but frankly superior - competitors were winning over gamers' hearts at the same time as Lara's star was on the wane, with the likes of the PS3's Uncharted series or the multi-platform Assassin's Creed franchise clearly drawing inspiration from the groundwork laid by their predecessor.

    The time is therefore ripe for a reinvention of Tomb Raider and a return to glory for the series - and pleasingly, that's exactly what developers Crystal Dynamics and publishers Square Enix have pulled off here.

    One of the first things that strikes you about this game is the quality of the graphics, and the way they've been used to create a realistic environment filled with real-feeling characters. Lara herself is a prime example: despite being an icon of videogaming, Lara Croft has always been somewhat mocked by the mainstream for her unrealistically-proportioned physique, which seems to have been designed solely to appeal to adolescent males. Here, however, her appearance has been toned-down to a more regular (although still conventionally-attractive) body type, which is clothed more respectably and which suffers far more wear-and-tear over the course of this one adventure than the old plastic-feeling Lara ever did. Equally, the environments feel more detailed and real than they ever have in the past, with the game's mystical and supernatural elements feeling as though they're integrated more subtly with the real-world environments (which benefit immensely from cutting-edge physics and textures). This is a game that looks great, first and foremost.

    But this more realistic, more serious redesign extends past the visuals to the game's story, too. Whilst the game eventually takes Lara to the same tomb-raiding, crypt-cracking places that we know so well from the earlier games, it starts off in a far more stark and scary way, feeling more like a survival-horror story than an action-adventure romp. A stormy shipwreck leaves a young Lara (who's just starting out on her career as an explorer) marooned on a mysterious island, searching for her shipmates at the same time as she's pursued by the island's savage inhabitants. This leads to the first truly serious and 'adult' part of the story, as a frankly disturbing encounter with one of her would-be attackers forces Lara to take a life in self-defence for the first time.

    And it's at this point that the game really started to win me over. Because whilst this tense and violent scene would usually be an excuse for the programmers to throw in all sorts of cheap shocks and scares, Tomb Raider instead treats the moment with a certain gravitas and seriousness that attempts to actually consider the psychological ramifications of killing somebody. Lara is shown to be disturbed by her own actions - as necessary as they may be - and as the game goes on, we realise that this early scene has been used as a springboard to begin turning her into the more hardened and world-weary older Lara that we know from the earlier games in the series.

    In an era in which most games are happy to let their heroes rack up an extensive bodycount with apparently no concern for the moral implications of what essentially amounts to mass-murder, Tomb Raider's more sensitive and considered treatment of the subject feels like an incredibly bold and fresh approach to take, and one that really helps to establish both the realistic nature of the game and the heroic, human qualities of its heroine. And that feeling extends to the rest of the game, too: clearly, the programmers are using this game to reboot the Tomb Raider franchise, and to do it in a way that brings it up to date not only with the more modern graphics and game options of current-generation consoles, but also with the more sophisticated and mature expectations of its adult audience when it comes to story and character, too.

    That said, there is a slightly uncomfortable sense that some of the deaths suffered by Lara over the course of the game (if you're as bad at it as I am, anyway) tend to revel in the gruesomeness and goriness of her demise. It makes for an odd contrast with the more restrained approach of the rest of the game, and sits uneasily with Lara's otherwise sensitive portrayal.

    Still, for the most part, this is a game that makes the most of its unusually thoughtful approach to violence, encouraging the player to really feel the weight of his or her actions as Lara fights her way through the game. And as things progress, it's impossible not to feel drawn into the complex and mysterious plot that weaves together supernatural demons with an all-too-human evil, whilst also fleshing out Lara's backstory and firmly establishing her as the kick-ass heroine that we know she eventually must grow up to be. And it doesn't hurt that the game seems to have eliminated the more frustrating elements of the puzzles and platforming that used to make Lara's adventures as frustrating as they were fun. Instead, there's more of an emphasis on story-driven action that flows smoothly from scene to scene - although that doesn't mean that there aren't challenges along the way, with the game's learning curve pitched at just about the right level for someone like me.

    With the latest Tomb Raider game, Crystal Dynamics and Square Enix have put Lara Croft back where she belongs: at the top of the tree when it comes to action-adventure and 3D platforming fun. If you'd have asked me a year ago whether I thought the franchise had any life in it, I would have responded in the negative; but now, I can't wait to see where it goes next.