Tomb Raider (micro-review)

Genre: action-adventure;

Release date: 04-Mar-2013 ;

Game progression: finished (2014) ;

Difficulty played: Hard ;

Overview:

Tomb Raider explores the intense and gritty origin story of Lara Croft and her ascent from a frightened young woman to a hardened survivor. Armed only with raw instincts and the ability to push beyond the limits of human endurance, Lara must fight to unravel the dark history of a forgotten island to escape its relentless hold.

At the beginning of the story, we experience Lara embarking on her first job after graduating from University. She shows fear in the face of danger, initially lacking confidence in her own abilities and judgment. Still, we can see the seeds of what Lara will eventually become. She possesses a powerful sense of moral courage. She is clever, resourceful and determined.

Features:

Hunt or Be Hunted: Evade, outsmart, trick and kill the mysterious enemies that hunt you as prey.

Survival Action: Brutally attack and defend yourself as you fight to survive through visceral one-on-one melee combat.

Strategic Weapons: Gain an advantage in combat by finding an array of different melee and ranged weapons including a variety of guns, and the hunter's ultimate weapon, the bow.

Creative Survival: React and adapt to the island by using only that which you can salvage from the environment like climbing axes, rope, and machetes that can be used to unlock new traversal and combat game play options.

Free Movement: Scramble up a vertical cliff wall, sprint and leap across a huge chasm, steer mid-air to land a misdirected jump: There is no one right way to traverse, survive, and explore the harsh environment of the island.

One Cohesive World: The diverse multi-region island is an open playground alive with creatures, weather, and natural events.

Origin Story: The new Tomb Raider concept reboots the franchise by exploring Lara Croft's transformation into a hardened adventurer as you unravel the story behind the island's mysterious past.

Story:

The game is set on Yamatai, a fictional lost island in the Dragon's Triangle off the coast of Japan. The island, and the kingdom that once existed there, is shrouded in mystery, given its reputation for fearsome storms and shipwrecks that litter its coastline. Yamatai was once ruled by a queen named Himiko, known by her honorific title of "Sun Queen", who according to legend was blessed with shamanistic powers that enabled her to control the weather. Very little is known about Yamatai's history in the time since Himiko's death, other than that the island's infamy was established shortly thereafter. In exploring the island, the player may find evidence that, among others, Portuguese traders, United States Marines and a Japanese military project were all stranded on Yamatai at various points throughout history. At the start of the game, the island is populated exclusively by the Solarii Brotherhood, a violent cult of criminals, mercenaries and shipwreck survivors. The Solarii Brotherhood has established its own society based on the worship of Himiko, complete with a social structure and laws, with their exact purpose and intentions being explored over the course of the story.

The player takes on the role of Lara, who is a young and ambitious archaeology graduate whose theories on the location of the lost kingdom of Yamatai have convinced the Nishimura family, descendants from the people of Yamatai themselves, to fund an expedition in search of the kingdom. The expedition is led by Dr. James Whitman, a celebrity archaeologist who has fallen on hard times and is desperate to avoid bankruptcy, and is accompanied by Conrad Roth, a Royal Marine turned adventurer and close friend of the Croft family who serves as mentor to Lara; Samantha "Sam" Nishimura, Lara's friend and a representative of the Nishimura family who films the expedition for a documentary; Joslyn Reyes, a skeptical and temperamental mechanic and single mother; Jonah Maiava, an imposing and placid fisherman who is willing to believe in the existence of the paranormal and esoteric; Angus "Grim" Grimaldi, the gruff Glaswegian helmsman of the Endurance; and Alex Weiss, a goofy and bespectacled electronics specialist.

Tomb Raider reboots with an origin story which turns out to be a nice action-adventure game with some light RPG elements, and weapons upgrading. The PC version runs really well and it's very friendly to multi-monitor setups. I don't recommend the hard difficulty as you'll get into some fights that seem difficult for the sake of difficulty.

This game resembles a cinematic story because you don't have real choices for your actions and path, puzzles are not that hard, and there are a lot of (cool) Quick Time Events and cinematics. The action high points are often QTE or QTE-like, which on one hand it's a good thing because in this case they are done pretty well, on the other you could say that they subtract from the gameplay.