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Tomb Raider: DE (2013) Review
a year ago
General
I'll be honest, this was my first Tomb Raider (TR) game I played & Beat back in 2013 so this game actually did a really good job at introducing me to the Tomb Raider series. So how does it hold up now that I have the experience of TR 1-2-3 fresh in the back of my head?
This is a reboot of the TR series where Lara Croft is more grounded and focuses on her becoming a badass. The premise is that you play as Lara Croft who's a newbie archeologist going on an expedition to find the lost island of Yamatai with a dysfunctional crew when their ship gets wrecked. Now Lara is trapped on an island surrounded by perpetual storms with multiple natural hazards and a bloodthirsty cult who wants to search for the new Sun Queen as a key to escape the Island.
The premise itself is very solid as this is the grittiest TR game thus far but maybe too much to the point where Lara survives so many fall and crashes that should have killed her. She gets captured and tortured by the cult quite a bit and the death scenes in the game are absolutely brutal and not for the faint of heart. The game really does a great job of nailing just how gritty and fucked Lara is that it kinda causes some aspects of the game to fall short.
The story itself is not very good because you're given all those characters on the ship that you're to care about but you never get enough time with all of them that it feels like they're just there for one arc and that's it. With a game as gritty as this feeling like a grindhouse flick, you already know that your companions are going to be very expendable and the plot twists are rather predictable. I will give credit to how the game handle Whitman as he nails the arrogant celeb/influencer so well that its cringe in a good way. The scavenger cultists are also rather good enemies story wise as they have their own characters but you hate them so much for being fucking monsters in human skin. There was a lot more that could have been expanded on so that your companions dont feel as expendable or just reducing the cast size so that each one of them gets more time in the spotlight. Overall, i found the story predictable but fitting for the tone of the game.
The gameplay is much more combat focused than previous Tomb Raider games and its better for it as the combat feels smooth yet challenging. Its basically Uncharted's combat but ground focused. One thing to note is that Lara goes into cover automatically which works fine but feels weird coming from games where you have to press a button to go into cover. There's only 4 weapons in the game being the Pistol, Machine Gun, Bow, & Shotgun and each weapon fills their role well. The game skirts the lack of weapon variety by making it so that your weapons can be upgraded into stronger versions for better upgrades. You get upgrades by spending salvage you collect from the world and it gets the job done. I also like how satisfying it feels to get kills but you end up fighting the same human enemies for a large portion of the game which gets boring. Plus with how detestable the cultist enemies are, its a shame you cant gib and gore them (such as blasting their legs off with a shotgun, instagibbing with GP-25 grenades, etc.) so you can show how much those fucking cultists deserve to die. You do fight supernatural and animal enemies but there are so few and far between that it would have been better if we got more combat encounters where Lara has to fight a Mêlée à Trois between the supernaturals and the cultists. The combat is rather serviceable looking at the bigger picture but there are times where you wish they put in some more interesting encounters.
Another part of the game worth looking at is the exploration sections as this game is a platformer like Uncharted complete with all the climbing and parkour sections. TR actually goes further and turns it into a metroidvania and it works so FUCKING well that I 100%'d the game. Not only are the tools you get interesting such as the rope arrow to create your own ziplines or pull objects to you but even your standard guns have a reason such as the shotgun being used to blast away wooden debris or the GP-25 being used to blow up cracked walls. It makes your arsenal feel more important and you're always wondering what upgrade you're gonna get. In addition, you can actually take a look at each and every collectible and Lara always has something to say which adds a lot to her character. You can even examine artifacts up close for additional facts and clues. I wish this was in Uncharted because those small details really made it worth going to 100% just for the lore and details. This is probably the key example that shows how a fusion of Uncharted and Metroidvania works so damn well.
However, the game is less puzzle focused as most puzzles are in optional tombs that has a simple physics based puzzle just to clear the tomb. The only mandatory puzzle is at the end of the game and that can be solved rather easily. If you're someone who liked the puzzles that TR has alongside the tomb exploration, then you'll be disappointed here. I can overlook the puzzle issue myself since I enjoyed them anyways for being pretty neat physics based puzzles but given how complex the OG TR games was with their puzzles, then the puzzles here would be disappointing. My only other nitpick was the fact that the icon for your machine gun is a H&K G3 yet the only machine guns you get is the Type 100, an AK style rifle, and the U100 so where is my G3????? I also found the mini challenges in each region to be tedious as it feels like a "Where's Waldo" puzzle where you have to find and destroy stuff hidden in the scenery with very little in the way of rewards. The game would be better off without said puzzles unless they make it more interesting and rewarding.
Overall, this is a very solid reboot of a franchise and it got me interested in the OG Tomb Raider games more than a decade after it released. I can understand that the game was trying to figure out how to make this new reboot of Tomb Raider work so there's a fair amount of early instalment weirdness here but I enjoyed my time with the game. I recommend this if you're a massive fan of Uncharted as this delivers a more gritty metroidvania.
This is a reboot of the TR series where Lara Croft is more grounded and focuses on her becoming a badass. The premise is that you play as Lara Croft who's a newbie archeologist going on an expedition to find the lost island of Yamatai with a dysfunctional crew when their ship gets wrecked. Now Lara is trapped on an island surrounded by perpetual storms with multiple natural hazards and a bloodthirsty cult who wants to search for the new Sun Queen as a key to escape the Island.
The premise itself is very solid as this is the grittiest TR game thus far but maybe too much to the point where Lara survives so many fall and crashes that should have killed her. She gets captured and tortured by the cult quite a bit and the death scenes in the game are absolutely brutal and not for the faint of heart. The game really does a great job of nailing just how gritty and fucked Lara is that it kinda causes some aspects of the game to fall short.
The story itself is not very good because you're given all those characters on the ship that you're to care about but you never get enough time with all of them that it feels like they're just there for one arc and that's it. With a game as gritty as this feeling like a grindhouse flick, you already know that your companions are going to be very expendable and the plot twists are rather predictable. I will give credit to how the game handle Whitman as he nails the arrogant celeb/influencer so well that its cringe in a good way. The scavenger cultists are also rather good enemies story wise as they have their own characters but you hate them so much for being fucking monsters in human skin. There was a lot more that could have been expanded on so that your companions dont feel as expendable or just reducing the cast size so that each one of them gets more time in the spotlight. Overall, i found the story predictable but fitting for the tone of the game.
The gameplay is much more combat focused than previous Tomb Raider games and its better for it as the combat feels smooth yet challenging. Its basically Uncharted's combat but ground focused. One thing to note is that Lara goes into cover automatically which works fine but feels weird coming from games where you have to press a button to go into cover. There's only 4 weapons in the game being the Pistol, Machine Gun, Bow, & Shotgun and each weapon fills their role well. The game skirts the lack of weapon variety by making it so that your weapons can be upgraded into stronger versions for better upgrades. You get upgrades by spending salvage you collect from the world and it gets the job done. I also like how satisfying it feels to get kills but you end up fighting the same human enemies for a large portion of the game which gets boring. Plus with how detestable the cultist enemies are, its a shame you cant gib and gore them (such as blasting their legs off with a shotgun, instagibbing with GP-25 grenades, etc.) so you can show how much those fucking cultists deserve to die. You do fight supernatural and animal enemies but there are so few and far between that it would have been better if we got more combat encounters where Lara has to fight a Mêlée à Trois between the supernaturals and the cultists. The combat is rather serviceable looking at the bigger picture but there are times where you wish they put in some more interesting encounters.
Another part of the game worth looking at is the exploration sections as this game is a platformer like Uncharted complete with all the climbing and parkour sections. TR actually goes further and turns it into a metroidvania and it works so FUCKING well that I 100%'d the game. Not only are the tools you get interesting such as the rope arrow to create your own ziplines or pull objects to you but even your standard guns have a reason such as the shotgun being used to blast away wooden debris or the GP-25 being used to blow up cracked walls. It makes your arsenal feel more important and you're always wondering what upgrade you're gonna get. In addition, you can actually take a look at each and every collectible and Lara always has something to say which adds a lot to her character. You can even examine artifacts up close for additional facts and clues. I wish this was in Uncharted because those small details really made it worth going to 100% just for the lore and details. This is probably the key example that shows how a fusion of Uncharted and Metroidvania works so damn well.
However, the game is less puzzle focused as most puzzles are in optional tombs that has a simple physics based puzzle just to clear the tomb. The only mandatory puzzle is at the end of the game and that can be solved rather easily. If you're someone who liked the puzzles that TR has alongside the tomb exploration, then you'll be disappointed here. I can overlook the puzzle issue myself since I enjoyed them anyways for being pretty neat physics based puzzles but given how complex the OG TR games was with their puzzles, then the puzzles here would be disappointing. My only other nitpick was the fact that the icon for your machine gun is a H&K G3 yet the only machine guns you get is the Type 100, an AK style rifle, and the U100 so where is my G3????? I also found the mini challenges in each region to be tedious as it feels like a "Where's Waldo" puzzle where you have to find and destroy stuff hidden in the scenery with very little in the way of rewards. The game would be better off without said puzzles unless they make it more interesting and rewarding.
Overall, this is a very solid reboot of a franchise and it got me interested in the OG Tomb Raider games more than a decade after it released. I can understand that the game was trying to figure out how to make this new reboot of Tomb Raider work so there's a fair amount of early instalment weirdness here but I enjoyed my time with the game. I recommend this if you're a massive fan of Uncharted as this delivers a more gritty metroidvania.
