Tomb Raider

Tomb Raider has been a long standing franchise in the gaming industry. Lara Croft first graced our screens with her oversized cone boobs on the Playstation which is now three generations ago (not including the XboxOne). Longevity. This latest edition takes us through her early years, hence the slogan, ‘A Survivor is Born.’

This latest instalment is dark and gritty, removing much of the female chauvinism from the series and showing Lara’s frail yet strong character develop through a series of ordeals as she tries to save her friends and colleagues... after she directed them to an island and got everyone trapped by the evil wind goddess, Yamatai. She also refers to everyone evil as ‘bastard’ is a rather stereotypical British accent.

I have to say that this aspect - the frailty, not the accent - is really well done.  Crystal Dynamics and Square Enix have teamed up and done to Tomb Raider what Christopher Nolan did to the Batman franchise. Without casting Christian Bale.

The single player campaign is one of the most enjoyable gaming experiences I’ve had in a while. The platforming element is really well done and was challenging but not stupid. The developers had obviously put a lot of work into it because it was completely glitch free.

Weapons were also great. The shooting system was not overly complex and there was no auto-aim, which meant I was free to determine the biggest threat to my survival and not the game. All weapons could be upgraded as well and I love this kind of stuff. It actually feels like you are building your own custom arsenal rather than scavenging enemy guns.

Aesthetically, the game is beautiful and not detrimental to the game environment. As mentioned above, the platforming is really good and this, in part, due to the amount of effort put in to the environmental development as the scenery doesn’t get in the way of the platforming sections. This has been a major frustration in past games where you try to jump to a ‘ledge’ that is actually just background scenery.

General annoyances, however, come in the form of Lara’s dialogue. She has an insanely bad British accent that makes her more upper class than David Cameron and she is full to bursting with self encouragement one liners, the most common being, ‘You can do this.’ It seems a bit hollow for her to be saying these things after you’ve already done them five hundred times.

To really ram home this point, the first time she kills someone on the island is the first time she kills anyone, so for her to notch up one kill and then not have a problem annihilating any other twat stupid enough to get her way is unbalanced character development, especially when she is saying ‘you can do this’ to herself when faced with a mediocre hill clime.

Achievements – 1,000 Points- 50 Achievements

Right, so how much bollocks is there to do? Fuck loads being the best answer. Aside from completing the story, there are achievements for collectibles, getting a certain amount of kills with various weapons, killing people in various different ways, doing random things, playing online and secret achievements which are missable.

I’m not going to go on another rant about missable achievements but one of these really fucked me off. You have to have every conversation with members of the crew of your ship and this means if you don’t do this as and when they come up, you won’t get the achievement and you will have to play the whole game again. Yes, of course this happened to me, I didn’t know it was a fucking achievement did I?!

Multiplayer

I can’t get enough of multiplayer these days. There are two types of multiplayer achievement. Ones you need to play with people to get and ones you don’t. That’s right, online required, but you don’t need to play with anyone in order to get them.

I thought I was ahead with this at release but it was still challenging to get a game in every game mode when I played it so I joined a boosting session, my first ever in fact! As a group, we worked our way through the achievements that require actual multiplayer in less than two hours.

Now, you don’t need to play online to get the two big ones of unlocking everything and getting to level sixty. You can do this alone by playing Rescue mode. Alternatively you get a friend and blow each other up but I wasn’t willing to subject anyone else to mindless bollocks (despite one offer) so I did it myself, and what a thankless task it was. I actually felt depressed once I’d completed it.

Downloadable Content – N/A

I enjoyed the single player very much but for me, Tomb Raider has no place going into the online arena. It works really well as a single player but the multiplayer element is poorly done, undeveloped and not a lot of fun, even in the legitimate matches I managed to find. The whole experience has detracted from me buying the Definitive Edition version of the game. Oh yeah, and the fact it is completely the same game is not a good selling point either.