But lo and behold, developer Crystal Dynamics may just have pulled Lara by her ponytail through the mists of time into the 21st century with their franchise reboot Tomb Raider. This fresh new approach to the franchise is a prologue to the Lara Croft we have become familiar with, telling the story of how she became a tomb-exploring femme fatale in the first place.
The opening video introduces us to a fresh-faced Lara in her early 20s listening to music on her iPhone. I mean what better way is there to translate the game to 2013 than to give her an iPhone? She is aboard a ship, which begins to sink with little warning. Landing on the beach of a nearby island, Lara attempts to meet up with her friends when she is attacked by an unknown assailant, and wakes up hanging from the ceiling in a cave that looks like it came straight from the mind of Ted Bundy. That’s all I’ll reveal of the story, but if that doesn’t have you intrigued you must have the soul of a robot.
On top of a stellar story, Crystal Dynamics have combined the essence of Tomb Raider with some new-age gameplay plus some clever new innovations. The gameplay is broken up into sections of exploration that have the player searching the stunning pacific island for remnants of the past and present, including WWII bunkers and planes and ancient Asian tombs as well as GPS markers which point the way to more modern treasure. This exploration is mingled with confrontation by local wildlife and other imminent threats. Other areas of the game are more linear – however, areas of story development have Lara sneaking through enemy territory or facing full-on assault, while exploring tombs introduces some very clever and challenging puzzle solving.
The graphics are stunning and when combined with the island and character design as well as the excellent voice acting the whole game has a visceral sense of reality. Crystal Dynamics really wanted players to feel as Lara feels and this sense of reality in conjunction with the script make this very easy to do. Moments such as Lara’s first kill are actually quite emotionally stirring, which we all know is not a particularly easy thing to do in games.
Now I can’t talk about a Tomb Raider game without taking a moment to talk about sex. It can be argued that the success of the Tomb Raider games in the 90s was not because they were great games, but because Lara had big old boobies. For a decade Lara has been the icon for the sexualisation of women in video games. Crystal Dynamics have done their part in reversing this; there’s no doubt the Lara of the new game is well-endowed and disturbingly beautiful, but she is also a real character who feels and bleeds and as such her beauty becomes secondary to her personality.
Well done Crystal Dynamics, you’ve done the impossible and made Lara Croft cool again. So suck that Angelina Jolie.
9/10
