Tomb Raider (2013)

Release: 2013

Platform: PC
Developer: Crystal Dynamics, Square Enix
Genre: Third person, Adventure
Gameplay Stats: 16 hours, 100% collectibles, 30/50 Steam achievements

This is the reboot of the classic PS1 era series! No doubt inspired by the contemporary popularity of the Uncharted series. Unfortunately for this game, I've played Uncharted but not any other Tomb Raider games.

Visuals: I was going to rail on these at first, but then I found out that the PC version doesn't auto-detect your hardware to pick the best options. I was defaulted to Minimum, but after turning everything up to High, it was less jarring. The game looks dated, but that's to expect from a 4 year old game. It looks alright! The characters are better than the environments for sure, but I think that's normal for games to this day. It seems like there was a lot of detail put into Lara's movements which is always awesome to see. The enemies also looked pretty good for the most part. The HUD and menu were a bit clunky, but they definitely gave enough information that after a learning curve they were very functional.

Audio: The voices in this game are pretty good! They fell a little flat some places, but the game wasn't terribly well written, so it's hard to say whose fault this is. There isn't much music but what's there is lovely. All of the sound effects in the game do work to the game's credit as does the sound design in general. I play on a 2.1 set-up and I was able to tell where the relevant sounds were coming from. It sounds like I'm gushing a bit in this section, but really I just didn't find anything wrong. Everything sounds the way it should and that's pretty excellent.

Plot: Man, this plot is thin. It felt like there was a lot more planned here, but then they decided to cut it down a bit too much. There are lots of things happening to characters that aren't every really built up. There was no relationship with the majority of the characters so there was no attachment to them when events concerning them happened. Lara is thrown through all kinds of obstacles (read set pieces) and should've been dead several times over not counting any enemies that the player has to encounter.

Gameplay: The gameplay here is a pretty basic cover shooter. You hide to let your health automatically refill and then pop out to kill your enemies. There is a lot of climbing and exploration outside of combat. The climbing is pretty ridiculous and there's no stamina or anything similar. You can fling yourself up to heights and across walls as long as you please. Since I climb this bugs me in games, but I understand that it's probably just a pet peeve of mine. The exploration kind of shoots itself in the foot because all you have to do is hold a button and everything that's relevant in the environment is highlighted. Using this method I was never lost and missed next to nothing in the whole game. I should have probably played on a harder difficulty.

Overall: This game is serviceable! I wouldn't say that it's great and I don't know that I'd go out of my way to recommend it, but it works for what it sets out to be. I wish they had done the plot better, and I definitely have some criticisms of it, but overall it was fine. [7/10]