Probably my game of the year. There was a huge world of exploration in that game that lots of people didnt bother to look into. Its the second best 3d platformer ive played this generation.
Ahhh, modern gaming. Where "exploration" means "hunting down empty collectibles that do nothing just so you can see XP+5 pop on your screen". Also, you can even find neat little maps that
tell you where each of these empty collectibles are, because let's face it, searching for those pixels yourself is frankly fucking boring.
Even the treasure hunting in Uncharted was better and more rewarding "exploration" than this farce.
THIS so much. Bought the PC version on sale and am playing through it now. I'm kind of shocked at how little traditional Tomb Raider gameplay there is. Typical situation:
Roth: Lara, you have to climb that radio tower.
Lara: (looking up at tower reaching high into the sky) Oh, I hate climbing.
Me: Yes! Finally a platforming challenge!
Game: Now shoot a bunch of guys in the face, please.
Me: Alright, fine, whatever.
Game: Now climb this ladder that goes straight to the top of the radio tower.
Me: Wait, really...?
Game: Oh no, the ladder's starting to fall!! Quick, hit X!!!!
Me: (T_T)
LOL, so true.
I think a lot of people missed the growth and development of Lara's character in the reboot. The significance of the first time she says 'I hate tombs', for example. And then as the game wears on her curiosity and wonder sort of take over. There's no need for the player to be reminded 'You're a Croft', it happens organically.
No it doesn't, and I'm fairly certain that Lara is told "You're a Croft!" more than once in the game by an NPC anyway. -_-
The traversal of the environment - Whilst it still had coloured ledges, there were also sections of rope climbs via bow and arrow. Lara also required more than bare hands to climb across an island;
So? Those bow-rope sections were still very coloured so that you never needed to figure out where to use it. Same shit, different flavour is all.
Salvage/Upgrades - A very neat mechanic that provided more depth to 'Oh, a gun on the floor', which was also consistent with the environment.
You must be joking. There was
zero depth to the salvage and upgrade systems. None. Not only it was painfully easy to max out everything, which means there isn't any "build" or specialization you could focus on (in fact, to access higher "tiers" of upgrades you pretty much had to nearly max out the first tier anyway, so you didn't even have real choices in how to spend your points), you could beat the entire game without them. They were the very definition of "tacked on".
The game was not a real open-world game because there was zero incentive to revisit old areas. Oh, you missed a collectible in that previous area? Who the hell cares, since it doesn't even do anything interesting? It's a linear game at its core, and there isn't anything wrong with that per se, but when it pretends to be otherwise and brags about its "open world" island and how much better that is than the "linear Uncharted", well, fuck off.
I know I used the word "decent" but I'm not saying it was good. Just more acceptable as a reason to keep playing than Tomb Raider's awful story.
I would say the whole cast of Tomb Raider is awful. Roth didn't need to be there. He was supposed to be a father-figure to guide Lara, but Lara's character development is handled so poorly that a guiding figure is unnecessary. Roth is there to reassure Lara as she has doubts about her abilities between massacres and superhuman physical feats. He's also there to always cast a second vote for whatever Lara wants to do.
The island would have been a lot more interesting without the cult. The shanty buildings and gunfights got old. It would have been cool to explore ruins of various structures built on the island over time (ancient temples, tombs, military bases, wrecked ships) while dealing with the natives and wildlife. Shipwreck beach was totally squandered in how little you explore shipwrecks. Most of the game is shanty towns and a couple of military bases. They could have done so much more with the concept. So disappointing.
Yeah, same. I was never a fan of the old Tomb Raider games because the controls were so clunky. An old-school style Tomb Raider with fluid controls and modern graphics could have been absolutely awesome. Instead it's an Uncharted clone without any of its charm.
It's just people being butt hurt that it isn't a poorly controlling empty level design of a game like the previous games.
lol, what complete bullshit. No one wanted a tank-controlled Tomb Raider with ugly graphics. They wanted a tomb raiding experience with puzzle solving and survival elements with tight and responsive controls and modern production values, and instead they got a generic shooter with a terrible story and bland mechanics and
that is why they're "butthurt".
I'll never understand it myself, and it just makes me think that they all remember the old Tomb Raider games differently than they actually were. The new Tomb Raider has less platforming, and a bit less in the puzzle department,
"a bit less"? xD
a great leveling/upgrading system
Someone please explain to me why it was great because this line is ludicrous to me. How was it great? The skills or upgrades on which to spend points are not particularly useful. There isn't a choice of skill to focus over another. There isn't a possibility of a build. The skills or upgrades do not significantly affect the gameplay or the combat tactics. It has zero depth.
Please, do tell, what makes it "great"?
If people missed Lara's character development it's probably because it all happened in one second. She goes from scared young woman to Rambo in the snap of a finger. This is not her first expedition. Documents in the game talk about Lara going on previous trips and Sam had to drag her to hang out with cute boys instead of immersing herself in archeological digs. You don't need to be reminded "You're a Croft" but you are multiple times in scenes that run counter to what's actually happening in the game. The game attempts to be an origin for Lara, but she instantly becomes a super-human combat expert. There's no development of skills shown. It's laughable that the game keeps saying she is a "survivor" when she completely dominates the island.
For the rest, here's something I wrote in another thread with some edits:
The game is insultingly dumb. It has detective mode, but if you ever have to use it outside of hunting optional pixels hanging from trees for 5XP you might want to reconsider your hobbies. The game features beautiful environments, a couple of which appear to be open but are actually just crossroads for linear paths marked with glowing white paint. Traversal never requires skill. There are no tricky jumps or points where you have to figure out where to go or how to get there. You just follow the white paint. The posts where you use the bow ropes are wrapped in glowing white ropes and there's nothing to figure out about them. You find one, grab your bow, aim for the other post, and then you crawl up the most linear paths in the game. Using the pickaxe to climb is just a nice visual flare, it adds nothing of value mechanically. Lara can no longer jump in multiple directions and there's no challenge in traversal.
You can wander off the obvious linear trails in these couple of areas but there is nothing of interest to find. The only somewhat worthwhile collectibles are the documents and relics, and those are all along the linear paths. The other collectibles are excessive bs that are not fun to find.
Most of the gameplay is just shooting dudes. You kill hundreds of dudes. Almost all battles are against very dumb AI who just rush at you and throw bombs at you to flush you out of cover. There is very little variety in enemies throughout the game. The worst is when the game just throws waves of them at you. It's just tedious and boring taking them down. The only time the combat shines is when you can stealth kill everyone. There are only a couple of these sequences in the game, and if you alert anyone at all every AI in the area suddenly knows exactly where you are and you can't go back to stealth. The automatic cover system is neat, but the game has too much combat and the combat isn't anything special.
There are very few puzzles required to beat the game and all of them are simple and take a couple of minutes at most. The half-dozen so called "hidden tombs" that are hidden in very obvious places with glowing white paint arrows pointing you in their direction, cause controller vibrations, and cause "hidden tomb nearby" to pop up on the screen are also extremely easy.
The RPG systems are poorly shoehorned into the game. Most of your collecting and killing will net you salvage and XP. Salvage lets you upgrade weapons, but enemies are very dumb and a lot of the time the game will randomly decide that a guy is immune to your napalm arrows anyway. The XP system let's you upgrade your skills, none of which are useful except for the skill that lets you instantly kill enemies once they are stunned because it makes the boring shooting galleries go faster.
The story is painfully awful. All of the characters are 1 dimensional and poorly written.
They didn't nail the exploration. Finding collectibles requires no skills other than the ability to see extremely small glowing objects. They aren't well hidden in smart ways and take no effort to get to. The regenerating health, abundance of ammo, and lack of non-story-critical weapons means that rewards aren't very rewarding. Getting medipacks and weapons by finding secrets that took skill to find and reach were much more rewarding. Calling the level design "sandbox" is a grave misuse of the term. They made it impossible to backtrack in many areas not because it would be physically impossible to do it but because they wanted to tell a linear story with cinematic uses of the time of day. One spot that really stood out to me was when a vent you used to get into a building suddenly filled with steam to prevent backtracking because they changed the time of day to sunset. Almost all paths are pretty much one way.
People want the spirit of Tomb Raider translated into a modern game. Exploring ruins, skillful challenging platforming, puzzles, traps to a void, some shooting. This game is almost all shooting and the other parts have been dumbed down to insulting levels and take up very little of the game. The old games were a bit clunky, a new game doesn't have to be. Becoming a modern game does not mean becoming another run of the mill shooter. The level design was pretty but awful in terms of engaging the player intellectually.
Reposting this because every single sentence in that is 100% true.
Ironically, Tomb Raider can still be a somewhat enjoyable experience, if you play it as yet-another-mindless-shooters. I got it for my birthday (so I didn't spend money on it XD) and it was a sorta fun, shallow little romp with very beautiful environments. But for all the above reasons, I have zero reason to a) ever replay it and b) recommend it to anyone. If it's free on PS+ and you want a relaxing little ride that requires zero skill or challenge and don't mind a terrible, terrible story, then sure, try it. Otherwise stick with the Uncharted games for a similar but much better experience, at least these ones (the first two anyway) have some charm, or, if you want a more authentic Tomb Raiding experience, just get Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light.
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