Ah, 1996. Software rendering. Unaffordable 3dfx cards (funny how that holds true for GPUs even today). And then there was Tomb Raider that raced to the top of the 3rd person action adventure mountain. Only to follow a gradual decline the other side.
I played the new trilogy in 2023, a decade after the Tomb Raider 2013 release and it was a rather enjoyable play through. There were some sections where hope and guesswork more than gameplay mechanics did the job (the parachute sequence, don't know how I got past that because there were no visual cues) but it was a solid Tomb Raider game.
Game over, start Rise of the Tomb Raider. Same format with minor changes here and there. Thankfully, a lot less annoying QTEs.
Lastly, Shadow of the Tomb Raider, the least fun of the three. There seems to be some cosmic scale with a tendency to go downhill in every trilogy regardless of the medium.
This could be, and very probably is, entirely subjective but why does the scope of the first one always seem so big, the world so much richer, the characters far more interesting, the mechanics so engaging.
Tomb Raider 2013 takes place on one island. You go nowhere else. But it feels huge. I am not the type of player who goes for 100% in every game. In fact, I actively avoid it. Side missions, collectibles, what have you, just don't care. I stick to the main campaign and when that's done it's done. Game uninstall, move to the next.
TR 2013 (except for the QTEs) held me the way any good game should. It is not easy to get a gamer into a state of curiosity, not suspense, that is a different thing, just simple curiosity. Why is all this happening? That feeling carried me through the game, even the frustrating bits. Above all the story needs to make you believe that the villain's motivations come out of conviction and not just bullying meanness.
That was the biggest letdown from TR 2015 and 2018. The bad guy motivation was "just because." Maybe your expectations differ but when I am experiencing a story I have this need to know the reason why the bad guy is the bad guy. Just having a character do bad stuff, say bad stuff, act bad stuff. Not enough.
The brother-sister dynamic in TR 2015 was basically: If they don't care why should I? And they really did not seem all that invested in it. Always Trinity this or Trinity that. Just pretend it is all Trinity and ignore the rest. Makes no difference. And all those Daddy sequences. Put a Skip option on backstories for goodness sake.
TR 2018 was the most confined experience of the three. I spent some time thinking about how to describe it but there are no words. It felt small. Worse, it was mostly boring. The bad guys and the allies are equally uninteresting. One quirk simply has to be mentioned. The outfits come equipped with attributes like enhanced stealth. Now, if a game gives the choice, I always go for stealth and avoid open combat. You reach Paititi and you cannot choose outfits. Uh, what? For some reason, the Paititi outfit made me want to not see it the more I saw it but nothing to be done. If there is logic in giving a player a choice and then denying that choice throughout most of the game, I missed it. This time around there are no QTEs but long "rail" sections with enough freedom of movement to make sure you die repeatedly. Why are these sections Frankenstein-ed into the main game flow only the developers know.
Those are the main er issues I had with the new trilogy but otherwise it was a good gaming experience.
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