Tomb Raider (Definitive Edition) video game review (2018)

Here's what you need to know; while on the hunt for the fabled lost kingdom of Yamatai in the Pacific, the Endurance is wrecked in a violent storm. Among the survivors is young archaeologist and adventurer Lara Croft, who now finds herself stranded on a secluded, inhospitable island, one that becomes a living hell for Lara and her friends when they encounter its cultish and murderous inhabitants. But the island is not what it appears, and with escape not being an option, Lara must unravel the mystery of the island and defeat the evil that calls it home.
This is another one of those things I've already done, I reviewed this game back in 2015 before the release of Rise of the Tomb Raider, which I never reviewed because I'm inexcusably lazy, but a handful of factors have brought us back to this point. Probably the stupidest is that I'm not all that proud of my older posts, as I've alluded to many, many times, I wasn't a particularly good, or even decent writer then, and it shows because they read like the work of a high schooler. The more pressing reason however is that Shadow of the Tomb Raider hit shelves just the other week, and I've been binging Tomb Raider ever since, having beat Rise of the Tomb Raider in the week, Shadow of the Tomb Raider on Saturday, and fired up Tomb Raider Definitive Edition and blasted through that in the same day. So let's return to chapter one of what could be one of my favourite video game trilogies as of late, Tomb Raider.

Unlike the movie it inspired, Tomb Raider doesn't have any sort of prologue to set the scene, the game instead throws Lara in at the deep end with the Endurance being torn in half and Lara being dragged away by an unseen assailant. What happens next sets the tone rather aptly; with the dark, claustrophobic environment of the cave, the hellish, oppressive nature of the island with the strung-up bodies and Lara tied up on the ceiling, and the violence and brutality as Lara falls and is impaled on a metal spike. Are you not a fan of graphic imagery, Tomb Raider probably isn't for you, are you a feminist with a stick up their arse about muh representation and muh violence against wahmen, Tomb Raider definitely isn't for you, because Lara Croft is put through some seriously grim shit over the course of the game's campaign, stuff that would make even someone as desensitised as me wince. And that's just the shit she survives, some of the death animations look like they were the work of John Kramer.

This is necessary at first as Lara doesn't start out as a tomb raiding, baddie killing hero, rather she's quite the opposite; she's whiney, scared and completely useless. Lara doesn't land on Yamatai with a small army's worth of firepower and the inner strength to use it, it's the island that forces that out of her, making the horrors she endures necessary for her growth and for her growing on the player, as her transition from frightened, defenceless girl to the most dangerous thing on the island feels earned rather than forced. This sense of earning turns Lara into a genuinely likable character as she starts making decisions and said decisions start having real consequences. But to get there the game goes into some downright uncomfortable territory, which is something I alluded to in my review of the movie; the game deserves its 18 rating, not just in its violence, but in the graphic and disturbing nature of some of its scenes; the metal spike, an attempted rape and the incident with the flaming arrow to name a few. These horrors don't exist simply to be horrific, they're there to build Lara's internal armour, to turn her into a survivor. The horror does start to become a bit much though, sure, scenes like Lara's first kill are disturbing, but by the umpteenth river of dead bodies or mass grave, it does lose its impact. But the horror works when it needs to, and Lara becomes more genuine and compelling as a result.

Tomb Raider nails its lead hero then, which is good, because it falters with its line-up of side characters; let's start with Mathias, the Solarii's insane and zealous leader, who's motivations are compelling enough but are squandered by him simply not being at good a character, his motivation to get off the island and obsession with Himiko are the bedrock for a good villain, but he's not in the game much, and when he is, he's just villainous for the sake of villainy, wasting that potential. Then there's Lara's friends; Roth stands out among them through his love for Lara and through Lara seeing him as a father figure, his role in Lara's ark is crucial, and the game does a good job with that, making his eventual sacrifice an impactful moment in the story. Meanwhile the rest of the crew is mostly one note and uninspired; you have Sam, who is basically a glorified McGuffin, Jonah, the gentle giant who gets better in the sequels, and they're the names I remember. A quick trip to the Tomb Raider wiki later and we have Grim, the rugged Scottish bastard, Reyes, the confrontational black woman, Alex, the nerd forever trapped in the friendzone with a girl way out of his league, and Whitman, the slimy, incompetent obstruction. All of them fit a mould and none of them break it, and their role in the story is disappointingly passive, even Jonah, who becomes Lara's sidekick in the sequels doesn't really do anything here.

The sequels shrinking their supporting line-up and focusing more on Jonah and the people Lara meets on her adventures was a smart move, but going back to the first game, it shows just how smart a move it was, because even when they started dying, usually horrifically and tragically, I didn't have much reason to care. But you could easily overlook how weak Lara's friends are because the story isn't about them, it's about Lara, and they get Lara so right that it falls into the background, like them, incidentally. The story Tomb Raider tells is also gripping and has a fantastic sense of escalation; starting small with a focus on Lara and her learning to survive on Yamatai, before swelling in scope as Lara starts to understand the mystery of the island and becomes aware of the apocalyptic threat living on it. I'm not going to go into the details, because why would I spoil that shit, but Tomb Raider's story is very well told and blends its dark and disturbing reality with the magical in a surprisingly effective way. The line between truth and myth becomes a core aspect of the series' storytelling, and it's very well established in this game, as creepy as that truth is once Lara learns it, again, no spoilers, but the concepts at play in this game's magical aspects have a habit of playing on the mind, it's unnerving.

Tomb Raider's gameplay is considerably different to the games that came before it; taking a far more involved and cinematic approach to its combat and puzzle solving, as opposed to the good old adventuring of a game like Legend or Underworld. In fact, as someone who grew up playing Tomb Raider Anniversary on his PSP, this doesn't feel like Tomb Raider at all, or at least it didn't in 2013, the comparison has been made many times, a few times by me even, but it feels a lot like Uncharted, which is only a bad thing if you dislike Uncharted, and fortunately, I'm not in that boat. Its combat has removed the acrobatics of the older games and replaced them with cover objects which are necessary because even in the later stages of the game after a good amount of levelling up, Lara's still about as resistant to gunfire as a sheet of tin foil. This has its obvious downsides, even playing on normal difficulty I would sometimes drop dead from enemy gunfire after popping out of cover for a second, literally a second, which feels cheap, especially when it happens repeatedly. The gunplay on offer is decent however, especially when you get enough salvage and start unlocking some of the available weapon upgrades, getting things like special ammo types and alt fire modes, as well as the usual increased damage, reload speed, etc.

But the best weapon in the game by far is the bow, since this game came out around the time that every shooter on the market needed to have a bow. The bow also allows for a bit of sneaking, but only a bit as the stealth system is very rudimentary, not as intricate and in depth as a stealth game like Splinter Cell or even something like Far Cry. For example, there is no indication of your visibility, just an "Enemy Spotted!" followed by a hail of bullets. But while you light up like a road flare once spotted, you can sneak up on a pair of enemies standing right next to each other and stealth kill one of them without the other even noticing, the game is inconsistent like that, with half of the game's enemies apparently having hawk eyes and the other half apparently being blind, it makes the stealth feel broken at times. The game also can't seem to make up its mind about how distraction works, try to distract an enemy or group of enemies and they can respond in up to three ways; ignore it, fall for it, or instantly know where you are and attack, so while it's nice that the option is there, it usually ends in a gunfight simply because shooting the shit out of them in a battle of attrition is almost always the more palatable option.

In addition to having the bow, Tomb Raider also hopped on the wagon of incorporating basic RPG elements, with killing enemies and finding secrets netting you experience that you can spend on skills to improve your character. The skills are nothing special; the usual stuff like more health, better looting, greater weapon proficiency etc. Probably the most useful skills in the game are a chain of skills that let you counter attack melee enemies, a set of skills that make Lara practically unstoppable at close range as she can instantly kill anyone that takes a swing at her. Skills that let you reuse arrows and loot more ammo from enemies seem useful at first, but ammo is in such abundance for the entire game that it's never really an issue, and the same is true of salvage, though the better upgrades on offer are usually crazy expensive, so that one's more useful. Some of the most rewarding things you can do in the game include the hidden tombs scattered around Yamatai, tiny self-contained puzzles that yield rewards of experience and salvage upon being solved. These little puzzles are a lot of fun to do as they break up the game's nonstop pace and let you solve them in your own time, and most of them are deviously engineered, making solving them very gratifying.

These tombs are a nice addition as puzzle solving clearly wasn't the focus of this game's development, though some puzzles in the game aren't optional; navigating the game's massive levels and progressing at certain points in the story do require a bit of problem solving to pass. But the puzzles are no harder than any of the tombs and navigating simply becomes a matter of recognising features of the environment for Lara to climb up or shoot rope arrows at. Both tasks are also made ridiculously easy by the game's survival instincts which turn the world black and white and turn interactive objects and surfaces an obnoxious yellow, though you could simply not use it. An issue I had on a handful of occasions with the climbing was moments of inconsistency; Lara not grabbing a ledge for instance or jumping left or right when she's supposed to go up, an issue that happened a few too many times for me to think it's just user error, though it entirely could have been, there's no way of knowing, either way it's infrequent enough that it doesn't ruin the game. Those massive levels are also crammed full of stuff; the optional tombs and challenges as well as hidden documents left behind by the islands previous residents, all of which voice acted of course. The levels are also dotted with camp fires that Lara can use to purchase skills and weapon upgrades as well as fast travel to over camp fires, an almost pointless feature if you ask me.

Then there's the game epic sequences, you know the kind; when you have to run for your life as the world literally falls apart around you, as the ground heaves and the walls crumble and shit's exploding for no real reason. There as several of these set pieces throughout the game, including the plane scene that ended up being adapted into the film but is significantly better in the game, unsurprisingly. These moments aren't as special as they really should be however because of this game's competition; Uncharted's been doing these epic set pieces long before Tomb Raider adopted them, and while the games are very different in tone, its these sequences that feel the most like Uncharted. Don't get me wrong, it's cool when Lara's tumbling uncontrollably down a muddy slope as the flaming wreckage of a crashed plane tails dangerously close behind, these sequences are very epic and exciting, a misunderstanding here would be that just because Uncharted did it first means it's not good here which isn't the case. The comparison has merit for sure, but that doesn't negate or delegitimise this game's positive attributes, nor does it consider that while they're similar from a gameplay standpoint, their respective tones couldn't be more different; one is an adventure about killing baddies and hunting treasure with a wise cracking action hero, the other is a story of survival, self-discovery and sacrifice.

What these sequences, and the whole game for that matter have on their side is presentation which is top notch across the board; the Island's maps are stunning, character models and animations look good, music, sound and voice acting is all on point, and little things like the game's stellar particle effects, little things that you wouldn't otherwise notice, really add a sense of grit to the world of the game, one that draws you in and makes you immersed, the game is beautiful, even at its ugliest, which is both the biggest strength of the rerelease and my personal biggest issue with it. My biggest issue with the presentation is that I prefer the way Lara looks in the original release, it's probably the smallest thing I've ever taken issue with in anything ever, I imagine most people probably wouldn't even notice, but it honestly is my biggest issue with the game's presentation and with the rerelease. But going back to what matters, probably the most important thing that Tomb Raider and Uncharted have in common is their epicness; both games feel less like games and more like summer blockbusters, which really casts a shadow on the recent Tomb Raider movie as despite literally being a movie, the game it was based on feels more cinematic and epic, and obviously, as good as Alicia Vikander is as Lara Croft, it'll never beat the game, the game just does it better, does it all better.

There are no heroes here, only survivors
Tomb Raider's transformation from adventure-platformer to epic, intense, frightening blockbuster turned out far better than it had any right to, and the result, ignoring the sequels for a second, is my favourite in the series without a doubt. The game's puzzle solving and combat are a lot of fun and it's a beauty to behold from a visual, audio and design standpoint, but what stands out to me the most is its excellent storytelling and unforgettable hero, Lara's journey in this game is its strongest aspect, she's weak and scared and has to become the hero, has to find it within herself, and its gripping. It never stops moving, but still balances the breakneck action with quieter moments of character growth, discovery and the occasional brain teaser. My biggest issues include its weak side characters, the odd cheap death or ignored button press, and minor things like tweaks made to the definitive Edition's presentation, but I can overlook them for everything the game gets right. Tomb Raider is part one in one of my favourite video game trilogies to date, and it starts it off with a beautiful bang, I couldn't recommend it enough and it's definitely worth playing.