Or Tomb Raider: The Rise of, whichever you prefer. The second gives it more of a “movie style” feel to it doesn’t it?
Moving on…our Lara is back and she’s almost all grown up. Out to redeem her father’s name, she goes an expedition to find proof that what he was searching for in his last years was real: something that is the key to never ending life.
Classic Croft…
Don’t worry, no major spoilers here, you find this out in the first 5-10 minutes of the game so don’t hold your breath. That and this is the PC version of the game, so if you really wanted this game, you probably already seen YouTube of people playing on Xbox since it came out last year. But still don’t worry in case you were waiting for it and haven’t spoiled yourself, NO MAJOR SPOILERS HERE!
Like Tomb Raider before it, Rise keeps the good and takes out some of the bad. For you bow and arrow lovers of the first game (raises hand), it’s still here. And now instead of just getting a bow that “upgrades” to better and better bow and then just becoming a compound bow, you get MULTIPLE BOWS! In fact, you get multiple guns of every type, all offering advantages and disadvantages. Revolver is quick to fire but slow to reload, pistol is fast to reload but fires slowly, you get the idea.
And just like the previous game you get upgrades throughout game play, the main story and side missions and tombs no longer give you gun parts or related “modern” stuff like the previous game. “Goes into 1000 year old tomb, finds pistol part.” Now tombs give you skills such as being able to fire bows faster or an edge on hunting or stealth kills. Crypts give you ancient bow parts for unique weapons.
And speaking of stealth, wow has it changed from the first one. No longer will you kill one man and have the others walk over his body not caring and just going “eh he’s just taking a nap with an arrow in his head, I should keep patrolling like nothing is happening.” Now the AI is very smart, if they see a dead body, they alert everyone around them and they all start looking for you, beating the bushes to find you…yes you can hide in bushes now…but classic human/game design, they never look up in the trees/roofs unless something up there makes a noise. And yes you can climb certain trees and do a stealth take town, it’s very satisfying. Taking on a group of enemies isn’t just sitting behind cover and slowly picking them off. You can use stealth, distracting some, taking them out slowly, but of course if you wish it, you can go in guns blazing, you can too.
The quick-time events from the first game are gone but not entirely. No longer will you have to mash the wrong buttons again and again to watch Lara get crushed to death by a rock because you didn’t press the right button again and again. But quick-time is still there for combat, you can dodge and timing it right you can attack as they miss you.
On a related note, the “Dead Space” scenes…the scenes where you get to see Lara die because you missed a jump or didn’t run in time…are still there. It’s satisfyingly sad, cool to see you actually have a “death scene” but sad to see Lara die of course. I found this out early on…I got eaten by a bear. You don’t watch the bear spend hours eating her body but yes, an animation to see you get mauled to death.
Just like before, the story is fantastic. Lara has become tougher, she knows what she can do. One moment in the game as she gets ambushed by baddies, the enemy can be heard “she’s here, we have her surrounded.” Which she confidently answers “you’re damn right, come and get me.” Not in a badass “Rambo” sort of shouting way, just quietly to herself knowing she can handle the situation no problem. That made me smile and feel good that the untried Lara from the previous game has grown up and knows what she’s capable of.
And on a related note to this, plenty of new game play options have been added. Arrows you can shoot into walls and use to get up said wall. Jumping across far crevices by using your climbing gear attached by rope to swing across. Crafting grenades, smoke bombs, Molotov Cocktails, on the fly to use against the enemy. Still no grenades you can bring with you other than the rifles grenade launcher. Setting traps on dead bodies or mines when the other enemies came near it. Being able to heal in combat without having to wait in cover. Outfits that don’t just look different but give you some kind of bonus such as auto-healing activating faster or not scaring non-predatory animals as easily.
On a related note to that related note: you can craft using animal skins, wood, feathers, etc. as you go along. Making a quiver bigger to hold more arrows or a pouch to hold more ammo for guns, etc. You do have to hunt for skins from animals. Making more bows on the fly instead of just find them around the world which is also still possible but rarer. Making special ammunition for weapons, once you learn how to make it. It’s quite an interesting mechanic, I really like it.
Now onto the slightly negative stuff. Because my rig is not the high-end of the highest end, I did have to run the game on medium to high settings instead of max but that’s my fault not theirs. And I don’t know if I was the only one experiencing this in the previous game but the AMDs Tress-hair, whenever it was turned on, would cause the game to “chug” as in it would be running (at max settings) at 60 or above then randomly drop down to really low like 30 or less, and this would especially show in cut scenes and it was extremely annoying. And that would only happen with their “special hair” on no matter the settings I had the game at, had to turn it off all together. While the Nvidia’s “Pure Hair” for Rise isn’t perfect, it doesn’t cause that problem of chugging.
Speaking of chugging, the frame rate most the time is good, with some cut scenes randomly dropping for a second or two, the majority of game play had no problem.
I had two weird things happen while playing. Quarter way through the game it randomly crashed saying something about textures. Just before it did it was acting like high ping multiplayer: walking forward only to jump back about 10 feet to re-walk it again. Then just before writing this, I tried to start the game only for it to say some texture file or something related to textures was corrupt, causing the game to crash again. Then upon validating it with Steam, it found one corrupt file…which turns out to be 2GBs in size which has to be re-downloaded.
Back to the good: the graphics are very, very good. I honestly thought the pictures on Steam were showing per-rendered still from a trailer or something but honestly, the game looks that good, even turned town a bit it looks fantastic along with the animations. She puts her hands up to warm them when next to a campsite, she puts up her a hand when close to a wall for balance, she even fixes her pony tail when coming out of water. Nice little things that make you feel like they spent just a bit more time then normal to add that little thing.
The audio is great but I have a personal beef with the rifle sounds. Rifles (sub-machine gun is in the same category) All the guns but the rifles sound correct, the rifles however sound like old, library files from the late 90’s/00’s games. Putting silencers on it just makes it worse. The music however is just as great even with a different composer at the helm. “Lara’s” piano theme still pops up throughout the game, including when you sit down to use a campsite.
Just one question though, why is it that normal and special arrows…special arrows being grenade or fire arrows, etc…use ammunition but arrows you use to pull things, arrows to climb on, make zip lines, etc…don’t? I’m not complaining it’s just, you get so much resources to make basic arrows constantly that having unlimited arrows to climb on, might as well use ammo right?
Overall this game is the sequel I was hoping for to Tomb Raider. I never played the classic ones, I never entirely had an interest in them but when they rebooted it I wanted to give it a try and I loved it. I was dearly hoping for a sequel to be a classic sequel in terms of refinement from the previous game, adding new stuff, taking out stuff that didn’t work, but keeping the stuff that worked and this game delivered.
The story is good, Lara still feels like a real person that’s growing and evolving. The main baddies, not the foot soldiers, feel like realistic bad guys. Not the evil, mustache twirling, bad guys that tie women to railroad track. They feel like real baddies, as in their human with their evil wants, not just “I want to control the world” simpleton. The underlying baddie, hopefully, will show itself in the third game and/or beyond.
This is game is great. Like the previous Tomb Raider, if you’re just looking to go in and kill everything sight like a Call of Duty campaign, stay away. If you want to have a good story, with good character development and finding out more about gaming’s favorite kick-ass girl past and her developing story with another great game in the story and no multiplayer added with a minimum of at least 15hrs of story (took me 21 hours to finish the story, I was sidetracked by side stuff and still haven’t finished everything completely) then you might as well get Rise of the Tomb Raider. Lara is back and better than ever with her kickass-ness and toughness.
