videogameblog

1996 was the year the 3D platformer was born - Crash Bandicoot, Super Mario 64 and Tomb Raider all released within months of eachother. Because the genre had virtually just materialised, each of these games took a largely different approach to how they'd utilise this new 3D space. Crash Bandicoot had it's levels running along fixed tracks, while Super Mario 64 allowed more freedom of movement. Tomb Raider, however, stands out from the others in a different way. Crash and Mario both had fluid movement systems, focused on allowing the player to navigate through environments at a quick pace. Tomb Raider's movement system is much more focused on taking it slow and being precise.

It's defined by a certain sense of gameplay-centric player agency. To successfully make a jump, you need to align Lara in the correct position, jump at the right time, and grab at the right time. It's a challenging but basic system. Lara can backflip, sideflip, standing jump and running jump. Despite it's simplicity, there's a breadth of variety within it because it's excellently paired with another system - Tomb Raider's puzzle-coded environments. You can't flow through an area like you would in other platformers. You need to analyse your surroundings, ponder on potential climbing paths and execute them accordingly. It's an extremely rewarding system that masterfully pairs movement with puzzle solving in a way that I haven't seen another game do.

There's also a certain indifference to the way you move around. There's absolutely no guard rails in Tomb Raider - if you make the wrong input, you're going to fall. It's something that takes practice and patience to get through. It's one of the only aspects that actually remained in the various sequels that followed.

As the Tomb Raider sequels began to release, it was clear that CORE Design was struggling to find a way to make the systems feel revitalised in each release. Small additions are made in each one - rope swinging, pole swinging and balance beams were nice additions, but never actually revolutionised the movement system in a way that was meaningful. Level design gradually declined in quality as CORE was crunched more and more, ultimately ending in their closure. The franchise was then handed off to Crystal Dynamics, who then released Tomb Raider: Legend.

Legend combines all the additions from the old games into one, and pairs them with a much more fluid system. As a trade-off for fluidity, it cut alot of the tight control that made the platforming feel so precise. For me it felt like a downgrade from the original system; a streamlined yet stripped back version of the original movement.

Then came Tomb Raider: Underworld, the sequel to Legend and probably one of the most tragic games of all time. It's a true crescendo of movement systems; pole climbing, pole swinging, chimney jumping, rope swinging, wall-scrambling, balance beams, safety dropping and rock climbing all come together to form what's probably the most engaging movement system Tomb Raider has ever had. There's such a variety of tools at your disposal within an environment that decoding a route through feels great. There's one slight caveat, though. The game is broken as FUCK! You're constantly clipping through platforms, jumping in the wrong direction and getting the camera stuck. It's so painful to observe the perfect combination of puzzle platforming that's buried under the glitches in Underworld, but it demonstrates that Crystal Dynamics have a solid understanding of what made the original Tomb Raider games so fun to play. So you'd expect the next game they developed to be an improvement on this system they so clearly understand right? right???

Tomb Raider (2013) has no rope swinging. It has no pole climbing, no chimney jumping and no wall scrambling. it doesn't even have fucking balance beams!! Instead of improving upon the excellent foundation they'd laid with Underworld, Crystal Dynamics decided to do a complete 180 on Tomb Raider's movement and push the puzzles and climbing - the things Tomb Raider has always been about - to the sidelines. Instead, shitty combat and collectible gathering takes the spotlight. The gunplay feels like shit, and the stealth is so bare-bones that I'd just run in shooting instead of bothering to engage with it. The most fun thing you can do in a fight is throw sand in your enemy's face (by pressing Y) and then meleeing them over and over again while they're stunned (also Y) and then doing a finisher with your ice pick (also by pressing Y). If pressing Y 5 times is the most fun thing I can do in your game then something has gone extremely wrong.

Combat has always been a component of Tomb Raider's identity, but it was so unimportant that the guns were still using an auto-lock system in 2008. It's a backdrop - an element of conflict to keep things slightly more engaging. Deciding to make it the main focus of gameplay is truly baffling. It's clear that whoever was in charge of the overall vision for Tomb Raider (2013) wanted to make it as safe, accessible and appealing to as many people as possible. Anything that resembled uniqueness or was remotely interesting about the original games was tossed away, to be replaced with focus-tested, derivative action slop.

The climbing systems that were stamped over the old ones clearly took their inspiration from the worst possible place - Uncharted. The climbing in Uncharted is so fucking boring I had to take a year break inbetween each game to beat them all. After 8 hours of watching Nathan Drake slowly crawl up a wall while I repeatedly press X I'd literally need to detox before I could stomach anymore. Taking one of the most interesting navigational systems in a platformer and replacing it with fucking uncharted climbing should be a cardinal sin and this game should be pulled from all storefronts.

The gaping hole left behind after the removal of the climbing systems is poorly filled in with a random assortment of the most 2013 gameplay systems you can think of. Skill trees for collecting resources, weapon modifiers to increase fire rate and random fucking collectibles are all desperately packed in to make it feel like an actual whole game. The only optional content I engaged with were.. the tombs. The tombs are optional!! in tomb raider!! and they fucking suck!! each one of them is a small room with a puzzle that resembles something you'd see a chimp solving in one of those videos showing how smart they are. They're all insanely easy and you can parse the solution pretty much as soon as you see it.

The gameplay in this game is so simplified, so watered-down and so disengaging compared to it's predecessors that it doesn't remotely feel like the same franchise. I understand that it was an attempt to revitalise the series (which clearly worked since there's two more of these and another on the way) but it feels so soulless and derivative. When compared to the original from 1996, which was literally unable to be derivative as it was at the forefront of the genre, it's night and day. Kane and Lynch 2 has better gameplay systems than this game.

I hate to keep continously complaining about how dogshit this game is but I haven't even touched on the extremely weird, borderline fetish-coded presentation of Lara yet. Lara Croft as a character is hard to seperate from her representation in the advertising for the original games. Her identity in advertising is so distinctly seperate from her identity within the games that it led to the original creator of Lara Croft, Toby Gard, leaving the CORE Design after the first game released. He said that it was never his intention for Lara to be a 'Page 3 girl' and she was intended to be viewed as a heroine, who's 'cool, collected and in control.' In the games developed under CORE Design, I'd say this describes Lara perfectly. She's always kicking ass, and she never shows any signs of weakness. She's not exactly a multifaceted character, but she doesn't need to be. She's independent, never shows any romantic interest in anyone, only really seems to care about herself and is actually kind of evil if you think about it.

The new take on Lara that Crystal Dynamics cooked up for Tomb Raider (2013) is as far from 'cool, collected and in control' as a character could possibly be. She might be the least 'in control' character in any video game ever. Playing through the (extremely uninspired) narrative is just watching Lara suffer a constant barrage of injustices. She's constantly getting injured in the most gratuitous ways imaginable. She gets impaled by a piece of rebar, punched in the face repeatedly as two men hold her down and falls down around 30 - 40 different chasms as the narrative plays out. It feels extremely needless and out of place, especially in a game that's so scared to take risks in any other department. Because everything else in here is so bland and forgettable, I'm confident the only thing I'll remember about this game in a few years is how relentlessly Lara gets beaten by everything around her. There's a part of me that suspects that this was actually done as an attempt to show that she's, like, tough? Because she keeps getting fucked up and injured? It's an extremely strange angle to take if that's the case and ultimately comes off as weird and fetishised. I'll never understand why stuff like this needed to be in the game.

Tomb Raider (2013) is easily my least favorite Tomb Raider game, and somehow manages to stumble at every hurdle. Everything that made the original games interesting has been erased in a desperate pursuit to milk as much money out of the franchise as possible. Quality doesn't matter, innovation doesn't matter, it just needed to look enough like uncharted and NOT like tomb raider in the trailers to convince people that this one is different and they don't have to jump around anymore. don't worry everyone the jumping is just pressing X over and over again now please buy this game please please please

(I'm still gonna play the next two)