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Darmonde

Tomb Raider (2013)

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Played through this, and in general, my thoughts match most others here.

The game is good. Played through once, 100%. I enjoyed exploring and picking up things. Most of the level design is very good. Like others have said, if you play through this again, you're doing it for no reason but you want to go through it again. Not necessarily a bad thing, but its against the norm these days.

Story is kind of pathetic. The NPCs are pretty generic and obvious. It didn't bug me too much, it was fun complaining about it when I played.

The gameplay was over the top 'video game'. I think a lot of games these days try to make things semi-realistic, but this game either didn't try, or tried and failed hard. Its a bit at odds with the realistic character dialog and actions. There are 3 different game modes here: TR1 exploring mode, Uncharted killing mens mode, and RE quick-timey mode.

The items in this game are super, super easy to find. There are like 5 different, effective ways to find items that are not just walking around and looking. Probably a good thing in the end, but there's almost NO way to miss an 'optional' tomb. The puzzles in these tombs are really freaking easy too.

Combat started out really really easy, and ended at pretty easy. Again, they give you tons of really effective ways to kill humans because Lara is a sadistic murderer. I actually feel like the no-health-meter in this game doesn't really work. But the game is really easy in any case, so I don't have a good idea on how to fix that. I will probably try hard mode to see what the difference is, but I'm not optimistic.

Overall, the one feeling that nagged at me while I was playing is that the game felt unfinished. There is this cast of characters that they probably wanted to be important, but their stories end up just getting barfed out quickly in journals. I remember talk about hunting to stay alive- its nothing but quick achievements and a tiny (pointless) XP grind. There are 'food' boxes throughout the game that give you 20 xp each- right until the end of the game, where 20 xp is pathetic (my guess is you were supposed to not regen health, and food was meant to heal you). I am pretty sure developers had some bigger plans for these things that just didn't happen. Plus there are some relatively complex puzzles to burn down those hanging boxes. And there is nothing there can couldn't be gotten in a box lying on the ground? There are probably a bunch of other examples, but if you're looking, I think you can see a lot of things that were started that got chopped.

In general, I feel like the devs of this game, probably across many different teams, had tons of ideas of what they wanted in this game, but in the end, they ONLY had 10 years of development time so they cut out EVERYTHING extra and made the base game incredibly nice to look at. I can just imagine level designers saying 'yeah, they told just to add this into the level for feature XYZ, but it got cut. So now its a box with 15 salvage it.'

I had fun with the game. It doesn't seem like they used their time and resources well though.

There's probably more I wanted to say, but this was a post I decided was too long, so cut and paste it here. Maybe I'll add more later.

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