Tomb Raider 2012 Review

Overview

Tomb Raider is an action-adventure game developed by Crystal Dynamics. The game is being developed by 80% of the team that worked on previous Lara Croft games and features a brand new engine (The Crystal Engine).

The game is scheduled for a Fall 2012 release date.

Game Plot

The game will tell an swap tale of Lara Croft’s first adventure, where she is young (21 years old) and inexperienced. When traveling on the ship Endurance towards an island off the coast of Japan, single-minded to make a name for herself in the world, a brutal storm destroys the ship and washes Lara ashore on a beach of an unknown island. Alone, scared and wounded, she has to learn to stay alive and eventually become the daring voyager she is destined to become.

The game focuses on Lara’s character arc from inexperienced adventurer to veteran explorer. The developers want the player to feel for Lara which explains why they redesigned the character to make her look more human being and less top replica. Her abilities have also been condensed. She no longer knows aerobics and maneuvers the environments with less assurance

Tomb Raider is the first Tomb Raider game to have an M rating. This is due to excessive blood (Lara often has to heal herself by manually putting bones back in place) but also due to the fact that Lara can die in brutal ways. Lara is not alone on the island and the indigenous population enjoys torture and execution people upside down to have them burn to death.

Gameplay

Like in other Croft games, Lara Croft is a mix of puzzle solving, platforming and combat in an open world environment. Lara has a reduced set of skills compared to other games in the series. She no longer has her double pistols or her aerobics abilities, meaning that somersaults over rocks or diving in slow motion while maintain pin point accuracy with a gun is out of the question. A large portion of the combat is done via quick-time events. There is said to be a larger prominence on combat, so instead of

using a lock-on aiming system like in the previous games, there is a free aim mechanic. The game is also based around survival, meaning that you will have to find food and water while making spears to defend yourself.

Despite this reduce in skills, Lara still has one or two actions up her sleeve. You can now change the direction in which Lara jumps at the last second (even while she is jumping) and you can also do what the developers call a “Wall Scramble” which lets her climb higher.