So, the game has been out for a few days and while I have never really played any of the older games, this new reboot seems interesting.

So, has anyone on DLP been playing it and can tell me their impressions? Worth buying? Game has been getting generally good reviews but we all know how misleading that can be and if I look at discussions, more often than not it becomes a bitchfest among Uncharted and Tombraider cultists.

 

It's a little too easy in places, a little too hard in others and I really do wish it was longer, but it's a very good game. Sure, it takes cues from Uncharted, but who even gives a fuck? It's a lot of fun and it looks absolutely gorgeous.

The end boss is a massive disappointment though. You should never beat the end boss of a video game with a fucking QTE.

 

Far Cry 3 meets Arkham Asylum. Get it.

 

It's pretty awesome, and while Lara Croft /has/ been at the whole semi-mythological adventuring at least a decade longer than Nathan Drake, what ElDee is referring to is that climbable objects in the environment are either somehow highlighted or obvious. For example, the vast majority of the climbable objects have some sort of fading white paint on them.

I will, however, say that the sandbox part of Tomb Raider is what really drew me to the game, because I love both the original Tomb Raider games as well as the Uncharted series, and everybody loves a good sandbox.

I will, however, have to argue this point. You could make the argument that the QTE itself

Spoiler

ended the moment she got the second pistol off Matthias and started shooting him with both guns.

However, this is under the assumption that you aren't looking at it like, for example, one of the many Nemesis fights in RE3 where you just pump bullets in him until he collapses, or one of the rather disappointing Uncharted boss fights that are at least half QTE (looking at you, U3).

 

Well...

Spoiler

Once you get that second pistol, isn't that just another QTE? It plays just like the first area of the game when you're scrambling up the hill, all you're doing is mashing the left and right triggers. But I suppose the waves of bad guys you were fighting to actually reach Sam and Mathias counted as the boss fight. The QTE is just there to cap things off with a cinematic bang. I'm less offended with it now than I was when first playing through it, but... it's still kinda bullshit.

As for Uncharted, redshell has it right. I spent hours dicking around with config.sys and autoexec.bat so I could play the original release of Tomb Raider, so I know that Lara's been doing this longer than Nathan Drake (and she learned a lot from the Prince of Persia). I just meant that this reboot absolutely takes inspiration from Uncharted and I don't get why that's a big deal. Tomb Raider is an extremely good game and the design elements it used fit in perfectly, but you can't deny that Uncharted was a source of inspiration any more than you can say Sonic & Sega All-Stars Racing didn't take design elements from Super Mario Kart.

It's not bad, it's just what happens with design. People take the best elements of what came before and work them into new things.

 

Just beat it.

I haven't played a whole lot of Tomb Raider in the past: the very first game, or at least a few select portions of it; Angel of Darkness, which I quit real soon in due to horrible bugs and a godawful save system that had me perpetually stuck in a wall with no way out but to start over, which I wasn't about to do; and the first game of the last reboot, Legend, which is the only other one I've actually beaten. That one was pretty fun and I was hoping to get Anniversary and Underworld too, but I haven't gotten around to it.

I loved the visuals, and basically the presentation of the game. The island in general was gorgeous looking, with a great creepy/threatening atmosphere, especially in those areas where the corpses were literally piled on top of one another. That very first segment of the game after you get stranded was particularly intense. Gameplay was solid. I liked the way they handled cover and weapons in this game, it all felt very fluid. Though I think the enemy AI could have been better. It wasn't the most difficult game, but I always play on Normal the first time through any game so I don't really have much to go on there. Surprisingly the jumping and platforming didn't ever really piss me off, as it has in the past with Tomb Raider. Actually it was pretty fun.

The story was pretty decent too, for what it was. I saw a lot of the twists coming, but that didn't kill the enjoyment for me. One thing's for sure, this version of Lara feels a lot more human and dynamic than her previous incarnations. I'm sure purists don't appreciate how she's made more vulnerable and such here as compared to how Lara was before, but I'll take this any day. Besides, in the inevitable sequel she'll definitely be a lot more confident and capable. The characters besides Lara didn't feel nearly as well developed though. They weren't bad, and they at least rose above being basic cookie-cutter archetypes I feel, but they didn't really stand out much either. I think Roth was the only one that rose above the rest.

Some parts of the game could be worked on for future installments. I think there was a bit too much gameplay/story segregation when it came to how Lara views killing. She doesn't like it, understandably, but the game forces you to slaughter dozens, maybe even hundreds of people. And you don't just shoot people, you bash their brains out with a climbing pick. I think they either need to tone it down a bit, or there needs to be more leeway in how you progress through the next game. More stealth or nonlethal options namely.

The skill progression tree felt really sparse. A lot of the skills seem kind of useless, like the ones that just give different variants of stealth kills, and particularly the ones that just help you get more salvage. By the end of the game I had filled out the entire skill tree and still had points leftover. Same goes for weapons upgrades -- I had several hundred salvage left over that I couldn't do anything with. They need to make everything on that tree actually worthwhile in the future.

I liked how you could actually see the bow and the handgun on Lara all the time, but the inclusion of the assault rifle and the shotgun kind of ruined that. Frankly I think they were both unnecessary. I mostly stuck to using the bow and pistol anyway. And sure, you need the shotgun and grenade launcher attachment to blast through parts of the environment, but if they gave Lara the dynamite arrows earlier you could just use that instead. Also I think weapon customization should be more dynamic. More like Battlefield or Ghost Recon, putting on and removing attachments as you see fit rather than just slapping a bunch of stuff on. That rifle by the end looked like Frankenstein's monster.

I give no fucks about the multiplayer. Games like this don't need it. Cut that shit.

Quicktime events were okay at times, kind of drawn out in others. There was one with a wolf towards the beginning that felt too long for what you were actually doing. You kill plenty of wolves in the game, why's that one need to be stabbed a dozen times?

And finally, I think the sheer amount of beatings Lara took over the course of the game were a bit excessive, to the point of unbelievability. I mean, yeah, being made of iron is par the course for this sort of game, but sometimes I just sort of shook my head in bewilderment. Admittedly, part of that is probably because Lara's a young, inexperienced woman who's crying out in pain all the time rather than a big manly man who grunts and groans. Still, they could do a couple things about that: either tone it down in general, give her more time to rest between huge action segments, or at the very least give her more protection. I see there's a DLC costume that gives her a leather jacket; make that the default and I'd buy her shrugging off some of those injuries more.

TL;DR, it's overall a very good game. I'd give it around an 8/10.

 

Just a note for anyone looking to buy this, It's on sale on Amazon currently. Probably has another 6 hours left on the sale.

 

Does anyone else think it's kind of messed up how Tomb Raider sold like 3.4 million copies yet is being considered a failure by Square Enix?

Sauce

 

Verdict: Buy

Just finished first playthrough with 100% completion, and it only took a hair over 18 hours. I know most modern games are shorter, but I was honestly a bit surprised about how little time it took to accomplish everything and feel a sense of completion. Just a note- don't freak out about salvage and having enough; I easily ended the game with 1400 left over after maxing out every weapon- if you just do the upgrades you want on the weapons you use, you will be more than fine. Several points to put out there:

First, it's very, very easy to sweep up most of the (single player) achievements without too much trouble and get everything (if you plan, nearly everything if you don't like me) in one play through. There are two hidden ones that I didn't bother (didn't realize they were there, and one would require another full play through) with and two regular ones I didn't feel like putting in the effort for at the time, but might go back to one of my 50% save games for. That said, I ended up with most of the PvE achievements (31/50) without too much extra effort. The only thing that threw me off were a couple of collectibles that I had to youtube after about 20-30 minutes of frustration (fucking mines in the water below the waterline). None of the puzzles were hard enough, optional tombs included, that I really felt the need to seek outside help - it was oddly reminiscent of the first portal game's puzzles (though not nearly as extravagant or enrapturing, more of you have X parts in front of you with your survival instincts, keep trying different stuff with them until something works).

That said, kind of like in Batman, the Survival Instincts are overkill, but you are given the choice not to use them, so I guess to each their own.

Some of the QTEs were frustrating until I got the hang of them what the game was asking, and by about four hours into the game I stopped running into problems. It was surprisingly easy to fail them at first, as I've never really liked them or gotten the hang of them in games past, but they seemed to flow pretty well without taking you out of the flow of combat. By the end of the game I hardly noticed they were there, which means that Tomb Raider was doing something right.

Speaking of the flow of combat, the cover system is much, much more natural in this than just about anything else on market that I've played. It deviates from the Gears-style cover system into something a bit more natural; getting in and out of cover doesn't seem jarring, and doesn't require anything more than laying off the trigger and moving or diving towards a crate, doorway, or wall. If you stand up and start firing, you become a target, and enemies do try to take advantage of you reloading.

The story itself was very good, but unlike Half-Life or other such quality of games, where I'd be willing to go back again and again, it seems to resolve itself in such a way that I don't feel like I need to go replay. There aren't any moral choices or storyline branches to really drag me into the storyline again, and it felt ... complete (take THAT ME3!). Seeing Laura get the shit kicked out of her once was a character building experience, but I'm not sure about going back to it unless I feel a drive for achievement points or unless some good single player DLC comes out.

Speaking of that, it looks like for the near future, it's going to be multiplayer only DLC, which is good and bad. Good - I'm not going to waste my money on it (competitive multiplayer in TR? That's what TF2 is for...), but Bad in that they aren't releasing new tombs in the near future. The game was shipped as a complete storyline (EA, you listening? We like it when there isn't fucking Day 1 DLC, and the end actually makes sense), but that means that it'd take a really good expansion-sized tomb complex for me to want to pay for it and pick up the game later.

There are a lot of good things that other people have covered so far in the thread that I agree with, so I'll just touch briefly on the bad:

Due to the constant checkpoints, you get the feeling very quickly that there is no real danger of failure. The biggest thing that kept me from screwing around too much in battle was that the death scenes (which were pretty gory but awesome) made me sympathize with Laura, and I didn't want to put her through another arrow in the throat or machete in the cranium. Sad, isn't it?

Enemy AI didn't seem to be the smartest. I never really worried too much about getting flanked or attacked in unexpected manners. You kill the berserkers rushing you, then snipe off the snipers until the 'battle music' fades. Rinse and repeat for every.bloody.encounter. If you're unlucky, dodge counter the bastards that get up next to you and plant a climbing axe in their face. I had one portion where I was sneaking up behind two guys for a stealth takedown; I did the takedown on the guy on the left, and the idiot facing away at a 90 degree angle not three feet from him calmly ignored the blood spurting, his gurgle, the grunt from Laura burying the axe in his chest cavity, and the thump of his body hitting the floor. I actually stopped at this point in disbelief over how retarded the AI was before doing the exact same thing to the other soldier, who was still staring straight ahead through his counterpart's ordeal.

If you have an nVidia card, TressFX blows big ass donky balls. Even with the 314.22 beta drivers installed on my GTX 580, it was acting really, really weird. Neat tech, and I look forward to it in the future, but driver support isn't quite where it needs to be yet. The game is beautiful, don't get me wrong, but I would have rather had four or five extra tombs instead of individual strands of hair having their own physics setup.

I have no idea why they put mulitplayer on my Tomb Raider. Seriously, co-op was weird but fine in Guardian of Light, but ranked, competitive multiplayer? WTF?

Overall, these are very minor nitpicks on what is otherwise a very good game, well worth 40 or 50 bucks, depending on how much of a fan of this type of platformer you are. The reboot doesn't require lore knowledge, and is a pretty damn good game overall, but isn't another Skyrim, Half-Life, or Bioshock. A solid 8/10 in my books - if nothing else, wait for it to go on Steam sale and make sure you pick it up then.

 

To me this says two things, the first is that development costs for the game (including marketing, taxes, time for development, and all the other stuff) were an arm, a leg, and perhaps the genitals of the majority of the staff. The other is that the expectations Square currently has for their big titles of the year was so beyond the realm of rationality its kind of shocking. The fact that the 3.4 million sales was only physical retail just adds to the stupidity of this situation in which a game that sells more than 3 million copies in under a month is considered a failure.

 

Yeah I hear that. I mean, Square's posting serious loses this quarter. I'd be interested in how many copies need to be sold for a successful launch. Five million? Seven? Seems a bit crazy honestly. Hope that we still see a follow up this reboot though. Certainly seems like it deserves a sequel.

 

Next step is they either quietly kill it off or they reboot it again and casualize it even further in a desperate attempt to fish for Blops sales figures. Someone needs to press a pillow against AAA gaming's face until it stops kicking, because there's no saving it at this point.

 

Lara croft will never be as likable as nate drake, which is probably why I'll always like uncharted games more.

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