The game just raises enemy hit points, lowers yours, or throws a greater number of enemies at you.
This also means that the difficulty scaling is simplistic.
The AI is fairly mindless, charging in for melee or hiding behind cover and popping up at predictable intervals. Sadly, for everything done right in the controls, there’s something done wrong in the AI. All movement felt fluid and natural and I enjoyed jumping and climbing around the environment without yelling at my PS3. I’m delighted to say that there was no problem here. I had visions of Lara jumping up and down against a wall because I wasn’t standing at exactly the right place. The franchise developed its movement system in the early Playstation games and improved very little over the years. This was, by far, my least favorite part of previous tomb raider games. In particular, I felt like the Shanty town forced the gameplay into a linear set of shooting galleries in a region that could have been very open. There were a few boards, however, that were very linear. Many of the environments were open enough to let you tackle problems in whatever way you saw fit, funneling enemies through choke points or slowly moving around the area for stealth kills. The visuals are beautiful, on par with any other adventure game and the sounds are robust enough to be immersive. Some people didn’t like the lack of tombs, but I enjoyed the variety of environments ranging from the beach to shanty towns to ancient palaces. The different areas also offer a wide variety of terrain ranging from forest to military bunkers to ancient Japanese temples. It’s big enough that the fast-travel mechanic is absolutely necessary, but it is not ungainly. I was pleasantly surprised though at the size of it. This game keeps you locked onto an island and at first I thought that would be limiting because I’m used to much bigger games like the Uncharted series. The developers did put forth effort to add some back-story to the characters, but they all felt pretty stereotypical and their primary purpose was definitely to be plot devices for Lara’s story. Unfortunately, as much as I got pulled into Lara’s story, other characters were very two-dimensional. I recall a point where I caught myself shooting cultists through the head with a bow and arrow while they are just trying to pull their friends out of burning buildings and I thought “Oh man, when did I get so angry at these guys?!” I found myself transitioning from desperately trying to survive to vengeful fury right along with the character. Lara’s character is well-developed and the player is drawn into her development. The story is engaging and keeps you moving from place to place without feeling like you’re on a track. Nothing makes you grow up like stabbing someone with a climbing axe. As the plot progresses, we find that you are definitely not the first crew stranded and many of the island’s occupants have formed a cult around the supernatural events on the island that conspire to keep people from leaving. In a freak storm, your ship crashes and the whole crew is stranded. We start with Lara as part of an archaeological expedition sailing into the Dragon’s Triangle (read “Bermuda Triangle”). Rather than reboot the series, this game seems to simply be a prequel that shows us how Lara came to be the tomb-raiding bad-ass she is in other games. On the other hand, if you’d like a game with solid mechanics that effectively tells a compelling back story for the Lara Croft we’ve all grown to love, read on.Īs I said, the purpose of this game is to delve into Lara’s back story. If staying in underground tombs, backflips off of ledges, and poor combat mechanics are vital requirements for you, you can stop reading now – you will not like this game. This game was clearly not made to fit the same mold as its predecessors. I’ve read a number of other reviews online about Tomb Raider and I feel that it’s necessary to get something out of the way before a good review can be made. Crystal Dynamics has done an elegant job of connecting us to Lara Croft in a origin story told through beautiful environments, moving character performances, and top-notch game mechanics.
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