Lara Proves She’s That Kind of Croft: A Tomb Raider (2013) Review

Some Background

Before 2003’s Prince of Persia reimagining and 2007’s Uncharted, Tomb Raider captured the late 1990s with a difficult 3D platforming adventure based around caves, treasure, and the supernatural. Exploration, gunfights, and the fear of imminently falling to a bone-shattering death pulled players onward in hopes that British archaeologist Lara Croft would uncover what she was looking for. Instead, players uncovered a tale of ancient artifacts, Atlantis, mutants, and, ultimately, greed. And in many ways Uncharted is the snarky male version of Tomb Raider, and Tomb Raider is the female version of the snarky Indiana Jones.

Being the female Indiana Jones aimed at teenage boys who played video games, Tomb Raider as a series began with a toned, busty, Barbie-esque archaeologist in short shorts who wielded dual pistols. She killed wolves and armed men in self-defense as she explored ruins that were filled with ambivalent paths and potentially life-ending falls. But Lara Croft onlyslightly evolved (and slowly) over the course of many games, many years, and many people chanting “sexism”, and while the gameplay, puzzles, and stories evolved, Lara was still a lean, busty woman in short shorts and a tank top—even if her world knowledge and British accent attempted to show her intelligence.

Lara Today

But Crystal Dynamics’s 2013 prequel and reimagining turns Lara into a real person. She retains her signature tank top and ponytail, but now she looks like a person you might actually meet. She’s a realistic weight, her chest size matches her proportions, and she’s wearing pants.

The game doesn’t stop there with its push to separate itself from the sexist content and issues of the series’ past games and of games in general: the entire adventure is about men being mean or horrible toward women, and the women rising above it. Lara’s archaeological theories are not taken seriously by her male superiors, men capture her and try to kill or, in one case, briefly attempts to rape her (though if you’re quick you can have Lara kick the attacker in the nuts before killing him), and men attempt to sacrifice another woman from Lara’s team. Furthermore, the group of men opposing Lara and her team are trying to resurrect the powerful queen believed to once rule their island for the sake of gaining power.

Tomb Raider & The Legend of Zelda

Two-thirds through the game, I realized why it appealed to me so much: at its core it’s a next-gen Zelda game. There’s a wind temple (literally a temple surrounded by wind), a fire temple (literally a temple on fire), and various traversing through water and ice. Lara acquires weapons and tools as needed and must retread the map to get access to previously inaccessible places, and she has to save a girl who has royal blood—who was captured by an ugly, power-hungry man.

What Worked, & What Could Have Been Better

But there are other games mixed in. Any current-gen gamer will see Uncharted in there, and it’s easy to forget that Tomb Raider was one of Uncharted’s influences. But Tomb Raider in turn borrowed from it, working in over-the-shoulder third-person shooting and action-movie-style scenarios. And because the game has so many cutscenes, quick-time events were included so the player is rarely just watching. The button-pressing mostly works, melding God of War-style button pressing with a watered down Heavy Rain contextual system (alternate between the shoulder buttons to crawl; wiggle the left stick to shake free).

The game does a good job of showing Lara’s transformation from a meek woman who struggles to be taken seriously to a scorned woman with a fiery vengeance. The game’s tag line is “A Survivor is Born”, but it’s clear from the start that she already was one. Lara is kidnapped, trapped, wounded in various different ways, and forced to wade through sludge and tiptoe over dead bodies. And yet, she still avoids harming anyone until it comes down to life or death, even though she is armed with a bow. Lara feels the weight of her first kill, mumbling in disbelief to herself, and telling her crewmate over the radio that it’s surprising just how easy it was. She has the instincts of a survivor. She knows then that if she doesn’t continue to fight—doesn’t kill—that the only end to the horrid experience would be hers.

The game doesn’t have you murdering masses all at once (I’m looking at you, Uncharted), but instead eases you into it by having Lara sneak around for a while and only attack when there’s no other option. She’ll yell out things like, “You don’t have to do this!” and other similar pleas. There’s a very human experience here. Lara grips walls as you walk near them, automatically ducks when enemies are in sight or earshot, and dictates diary entries at specific campfire rest points. You as the player feel Lara’s emotion and growth. When she suffers a horrible accident, you feel the weight of her wound; she even shivers from the cold (but for some reason never takes a coat off of the many corpses). And her combat skills are filled gradually, too. Lara cannot get up close and melee attack an enemy until she’s well into her adventure, and gun-based finishers come even later. It was confusing at first, as I tried to figure out which button was for a melee attack, but once the ability opened up I realized how much sense it made: that someone fighting to survive would not be brave enough to take someone on head-on until they’ve become more used to the situation and more experienced. Lara is stuck on the mystical island for days—plenty of time to get desperate, get angry, and get brave. When a crewmate compares her to her daring, adventurer father, she tells him that she’s “not that kind of Croft,” but she proves that she most certainly is. Lara wades through fire, water, wind, and ice, and by the end of the game she’s charging after her friend and yelling threats, her body full of scars and her clothing battle worn. You would not want to cross her.

While the game is very solid as a whole, there are some bits that could have made the game even stronger had the developers followed the paths they had introduced. Early on, Lara becomes hungry, which leads to a hunting tutorial. However, the only survival that is highlighted going forward is Lara’s need to not get killed by the natives or the environment. Hunting and berry collecting exists solely for the collection of experience points and salvage points (salvage is the currency you use to upgrade weapons at campfires). There’s no endurance meter, no sense of fatigue except for her heavy breathing (which does not seem to effect her battle performance), and no sense of hunger. I went most of the game without killing any animals besides wolves (it was self-defense with them). And while there is a fair amount of exploring, the optional tombs are very small, prompting you to solve a one-room puzzle to get to the treasure. Those wanting the elaborate tombs of the Assassin’s Creed series will be disappointed (but we can always cross our fingers for larger tombs as DLC, right?). Puzzles in general are not plentiful or difficult (straying from the series’ roots), though more puzzles may have gotten in the way of the plot’s fast pace, as Lara is not exploring, she’s fighting for her survival and the survival of friends who are in imminent danger. The balance of exploring, climbing, ledge-grabbing, and rope-climbing is mostly balanced with the heavy amount of shooting. The pacing (for the most part) works.  

This reboot series begins with a Lara who is grounded in the real world and doesn’t believe her father’s myths, so the game does a good job of hinting at the supernatural and leaving it as a question up until the very end. Cinematically and thematically, Tomb Raider is one part LOST, one part Arrow, but it works. And while the end-battle was not as difficult or epic as games in the original series, as my wife said, “at least it was no fist-fight with the Pope—worst battle ever.”

PC Graphics

I played the game on a homemade gaming PC with an overclocked Intel i5 2500k processor, 8gb of RAM in Windows 8, and an AMD Radeon 7850 graphics card with 2gb memory on a 50” 1080p TV through Steam’s Big Picture mode. It ran beautifully on “Ultimate” settings, running between 30 and 45 FPS (according to the in-game benchmark option). I had the TressFX hair engine on, and having seen how fantastic Lara’s hair looked, I would never want it off, though the frame rate dipped during some close-ups of her head because of it. The only glitch I encountered was an occasional hair-flickering glitch, but it never lasted long. I was constantly in awe of the art design and graphics. I was very satisfied to have gone with the Steam version over a console.