With a partner who is a very big fan of Tomb Raider, this was always going to be a game we ended up getting. And indeed, not only did we get the PS3 version, but the PS4 update too - with graphics at least like 10% better than the old version, to paraphrase South Park. Indeed, quite a lot of work obviously went on making this version look that little bit nicer - and certainly Lara's face was reworked, a fact that actually warranted some articles on online gaming news sites - but largely the game stayed more or less the same in all but the cosmetic sense.
I liked Tomb Raider, even if I'm not a big fan of the series, which I played back when there was only the first game out on the original Playstation but found clunky and frustrating even by the standards of the day. This reboot has a much more likeable, young, vulnerable and believable Lara, a young archaeologist with a hunch rather than some ultra-rich dominatrix type. Contentious as scenes of her narrowly avoiding sexual assault were when the game was in development, this game does well at having a strong female lead by not really paying much attention to the fact that she's a strong female. She simply destroys everyone in her path, going from confused and helpless beginner to bullet-soaking badass much in the same way any other video game protagonist does, and ends up extremely powerful.
At the same time, though, the game somehow doesn't quite feel like an AAA title, to use the parlance of the day. While I had major problems with Assassin's Creed IV, the only other game I've played in-depth on my PS4 (80 minutes to play through a Metal Gear Solid demo doesn't count), it simply felt on a far greater scale than Tomb Raider - the graphics were more impressive, the variety of actions the character could take, the length of the story and the amount of diversions it was possible to take simply made Tomb Raider seem a bit too light on content. Sure, Lara sometimes ended up sliding down things or having to press buttons with semi-strict timing, but it wasn't like having a variety of mini-games or side-missions.
The game was also not very satisfying in terms of difficulty. I played it on hard mode, and the difficulty was either extremely easy or very briefly ridiculously difficult. There was no sense of the game gradually getting tougher - in fact, the new skills you gained meant that it felt like you far outscaled your enemies and that the later onslaughts of vast amounts of enemies were actually easier than the ones you had faced earlier in the game. Thus the final encounters in particular had no sense of accomplishment or challenge to them, which is problematic on hard mode.
So it falls to the story to really carry the piece. And while it's a decent attempt, unfortunately it's not quite there. This was never going to be quite the Game-of-the-Year epic Last-Of-Us rollercoaster of emotions, nor would there be a big Bioshock twist. But again, while this was certainly better than a lot of plots, including everything I've seen for an Uncharted game, it still fell a little short of what I expected. Lara and her team are searching for Yamatai, which Lara hypothesises is actually in the Dragon's Triangle. This hunch turns out to be correct as the crew get wrecked on a small island filled with shrines to the goddess Himiko, which is a neat bit of real-life archaeological mystery for the game to begin with. Himiko's shaman powers have allowed her to live on in a way, her soul transferred between vessels, and her mastery of weather resulting in every vessel in the area being marooned on the island with no way to escape. The Japanese seem to have lived on only as the 'Storm Guard', protecting Himiko and her shrine in masked armour that rather dehumanises them, while the rest of the island is mostly populated by Westerners, who have a strange tribal community, hoping to somehow appease the queen so that they can return home. Rather pleasingly and providing some of the best visuals in the game, there are vessels from hundreds of years of transportation history wrecked about the island, to be explored, climbed on or destroyed. Rather less convincingly, there are thousands and thousands of dead bodies everywhere, be they bones or bits of chopped-up flesh, with Lara at one point surrounded by mountains of bodies, which really strains credulity.
Lara is hesitant to become a killer at first, but luckily everyone but her small circle of friends is trying to kill her, and she has the uncanny ability to be shot over and over again but get better in a few seconds of hiding, so it's perfectly reasonable for her to protect herself by gunning down a huge number of people. Most of her friends also don't make it home, either giving their lives heroically to save Lara's or betraying her and getting their just deserts, and there is a poorly-developed leader of the local tribal militia called Mathias who finds out that Lara's friend Sam is by pure coincidence (and, I suppose, sheer numbers on a family tree) a descendant of Himiko who can be used for the mumbo-jumbo supernatural rites.
I am being quite hard on the game - as a matter of fact, it is pretty fun. The combat is somewhat unbalanced, with the assault rifle far outweighing all other weapons for power, but it is also good fun and the way Lara can scramble and roll about is a lot of fun. Some of the setpieces are inventive and extremely fun to get through, and some of the little puzzle-tombs are fiendish but never utterly baffling. Tomb Raider was a fun game that I am glad I got to play through - but it didn't quite satisfy, I'm afraid. It was a decent steak, well-cooked and very tasty - but to really be enjoyable it needed some side-dishes.
