Let me start by stating the fact that the game got really poor initial reception due to its QTE-heavy beginning - but after an hour or so, QTEs become a fairly rare occurence.

So anyway, Tomb Raider. What you get with this game is more or less the standard Tomb Raider experience, for better or worse - you do a lot of platforming, you get a lot of puzzles to solve, you murderize a lot of men. But the way this game handles all of the above is absolutely phenomenal.

The game doesn't actually bring any innovation to the genre, but what it does it just does exceptionally well. The amount of care put into it is obvious from every inch - thanks to amazing animation quality, I've felt like I'm controlling a living, breathing human being (Lara keeps looking around, she organically reacts to her surroundings, to what happens to her like falling etc.) Amazing music and breathtaking vistas help the game's world come to life, and if you take your time to explore and look for diaries, there's a lot of background story to be discovered.

However, what I liked by far the most about it was the game's main character, Lara Croft. So far, she was a fairly one-dimensional british murder-cheologist with oversized breasts. In the new Tomb Raider, however, she actually gets a proper character, and a very well-written one at that. The story is a story of Lara Croft and her transformation from a young girl into the woman we know from the previous games as much as it is a story of a mystical island - and both work oh so very well. I would even go as far as calling her one of the best protagonists I have ever seen in a videogame.

There were some things which were bugging me about the game, mainly the fact that you get from 'Oh got I have killed him' to mowing enemies by dozens in a few hours, but eh, that's what most people expect from Tomb Raider I guess - at least there's an optional stealth element.

I really liked this new tomb raider (to be honest i like all of the tomb raider except for chronicles) so I agree with almost everything but the last point. I disagree strongly with this negative because this is still a game. People take narrative (and racism or sexism for that matter) too serious in games these days and forget that gameplay is still more important. I like that she was so human during and after her first kill but if she would have continued so sob and cry it would make for a terrible character and a terrible game...

I liked it too, but all the collectible side crap in games has got to go.

why?? it's optional and if it's handled well (as in Tomb Raider) i really like it. I hate it when you need the internet or 100s of hours though (the pidgeons in GTA4)

I'm not asking for decreased quality of gameplay, really, what I'm asking for is for the narrative to actually fit the gameplay itself. I would have really liked if the stealth elements were more prominent, and if you could genuinely pass most enemies using stealth approach (or stealthy takedowns) and if you do manage to get yourself in a fight, I'd like less enemies with better AI - after all, it's far more believable for her to kill 5 guys per encounter than 20. It would just make Lara's character even more believable in my eyes. I'm most definitely not asking for her to whine more about killing - I actually liked the diary where she has admitted how frighteningly easy it was.

As for taking narrative too seriously, well, story can make a game for me - make of that what you will. Yup. I really liked that all tombs were easy to find, and completing the puzzle in a tomb displayed all collectibles on the map. And most collectibles actually have a simple jumping puzzle associated with them, which is a plus in a game about platforming.

Overall I liked it, but it would be much better with less shooting and more tomb exploring imo.
And I hope they will go more in that direction with next one :)

Oh, and I also liked new Lara very much, the sad thing was that other characters were not written that good.

Na keep the over the top violence. It was great fun, some of the mean things you could do to those poor sods was fun however... balancing it off with more tomb raiding I do agree with. Keep the violence but more exploration!

I'll probably buy this game during the next Steam summer sale :D Hopefully my backlog went down a bit by then xD

You have to pad the content out somehow ;)

I agree with this. Better AI and less enemies would have done wonders to the already established realism for this game. That was a very nice touch, it felt like a genuine thought. The realization that we're quite frail when it comes down to it and you just got to fight as hard as you can to survive in a situation like that. I didn't like that the tombs were more or less the same, it felt repetitive and in vain for some amazing tomb raiding which the game is about but it was okay, at least they actually put some thought into the background collectibles that I managed to amass to about 88% completion without even trying too hard yet felt challenged enough for this kind of game.

Same opinion as you, Fenix. It had a blast with the game. It was basically Uncharted with worse side characters, better gameplay and open world. I adored the sense of blending in the nature when Lara started moving more confidently and by moving forward in the story, she was expanding her "safe zone".

As for killing hordes, I got an impression that it took some time to get out of the island, so it was a gradual progress. Yeah, it wasn't exactly realistic but I didn't mind.

I'm happy that the sequel was indirectly announced. I look forward to see what Crystal Dynamics plans to do.

I loved it. One of the few games where I wanted to play it again immediately after completing it. The only thing that bugged me wasn't the 180 she pulled on kiling people, but the amount of dead bodies littered all over the island. Seriously, its got to be over half a million.

Same here.

This was my favorite game of the year.

Characterization was top notch. And I loved diving off a platform and then hitting X at just the right time to snag a mountain with my pick-axe with a dozen bullets whizzing past me.

The Quick-Time Events were miserable. They were a big mis-step. Besides the QTE, it was probably the best action game I've ever played.

I haven't played it for this reason or another, though I wasn't sure how the game was going to turn out.

For example, the death scenes. I've nosed around the death sequences out of curiosity, and there's one that pops up quite a bit. Now, it springs up during the river sequence, fine. It shows up during zipline sequences? Okay, did the people who built these WANT to kill themselves? (What exactly are those supposed to be anyway??) Slightly same gripe with the parachute scenes, where the iron spikes are replaced with the world's most immortal tree branches where in a normal world the tiny little thing would have bounced, snapped apart, or so forth, at the very least consider that instead of (Death Scene Ommitted), she slams her head so hard that one wouldn't have to question how real this death actually is, and every immortal death branch happens to be pointing in Laura's direction at just the right height to kill her the same way every time.

Another thing, like you mentioned, is the writing. Laura kind of sweeps and blows through the murder part without much thought, though part of that may just be how the game was directed. It wants to give you control, jumping on ziplines, climbing cliffs, racing an avalanche of debris down a river, parachuting through a death branch filled forest. But this is a woman who was supposedly sheltered for her whole life up to this point. I work out myself, and I couldn't do half the stuff she does in this game as naturally as she does. This one is more an issue with this simply being a game, but it does bother me, and there needed to be some limitation set as opposed to being the world's best at hat drop. Make her aim wary, show her struggling at first with actually climbing or limit how long she can hold on to a rock face at first, treat her like a struggling, worn, tired and scared human being than a mythical super-human wearing a face of disparity.

I'm probably going to try this game eventually simply by curiosity sake, though I honestly have no real interest in the character in her modern or older form, so it may be lost on me. I may also be in the nit-picky realm, but it is something that does bug me quite a bit, losing the believable aspect of the game in what is supposed to be a real world scenario for the sake of getting the player moving along as quickly as possible as a combination of the world's best parkour expert, mountain climber, archer, pistol shooter, acrobat, ect. ect. ect.

They actually are doing that, she's quite sloppy at the beginning. At least that's the impression the game left on me. And she's progressively getting better at everything she does, and not just by percentage - for instance, at the beginning, she was struggling with every stealth takedown, choking enemies using rope of her bow. But later on, she just learns to slam her climbing axe into the right spot. That applies to everything, really - she learns to climb faster, she learns to fight better etc. Also, the story makes it quite clear that she was adventurous even before, and does actually have extensive survival training. Just not the murderize men training, which is what was bugging me.

Really, the character progression is quite excellent - definitely the best one I've seen in a videogame so far. You don't just get told by the story that she's improving, you get to see and feel it.

edit: To be fair I wouldn't say she sweeps trough the murder without a though neiher, I mean in the beginning she is quite freaked out and frequently calls out on her opponents, telling them she doesn't want to fight. It's the sheer amount of encounters and enemies which is just weird.

As for the death animations, that's just nitpicking. They might have just as well thrown a red screen at you when you die and nobody would really mind.