Tomb Raider - 9 Years Later

if there was any character that was at the forefront of the fifth generation i wouldn't doubt that some would say laura croft a character that encompassed the badass adventures fantasy and delivered games that were received and sold well it was unfortunate then that due to being overworked through releasing a game every year from 1996 to 1999 we received one of our final major tomb raider releases angel of darkness which was received so poorly that the entire series was put on hold lara's initial run was headed by core design who showed a sentiment of wanting to move on from the character and so idose entertainment shifted crystal dynamics in place to pick up the pieces which they successfully did releasing a few new titles and remakes along the way in 2009 idos was acquired by square enix and had a team working on yet another reboot of the series this time focusing on a more grounded and gritty laura croft and how she became a tomb raider this new trilogy titled the survivor trilogy was met with critical acclaim at least for the first entry it was a lot of people's first tomb raider game including my own i had heard of croft before sure but i never really dove into the games until 2013. and man i got lucky that this is my first one something interesting to note about lara croft's time out of the spotlight during the seventh generation is how a seemingly spiritual successor took its place and gamers noted this as this particular title would be given the fan title of dude raider now let's not get too ahead of ourselves here i'm not saying that uncharted is some tomb raider ripoff and i highly doubt anyone would suggest that but i think it's important to note how significantly uncharted and nathan drake not only influenced games in the seventh generation but became the new face of the action adventure genre so even though uncharted didn't borrow too heavily from the original tomb raider games tomb raider 2013 certainly borrowed from uncharted if lara croft was going to reclaim her throne at the top of the adventure genre then she'd have to reinvent herself and she had one key advantage over nathan drake uncharted 1 2 and 3 were all released to critical acclaim and the flaws with the series were clear tomb raider had the perfect opportunity to learn from uncharted's mistakes while also reimagining its successes this is what makes tomb raider so interesting to me and that's why throughout this video i'll be looking at the game through this lens tomb raider was once dethroned by uncharted and now back with something to prove and its confidence was part of how successful it was at surpassing uncharted in some ways there were many points where it felt that tomb raider was painfully and rather humorously aware of its competition and inspirations which is why i feel it's necessary to look back on the trilogy starting with this entry this video won't focus entirely on comparisons but i will be aware of the differences and similarities here barring the obvious yes nathan drake is funnier than laura croft and yes drake goes on his adventures for greed or moral obligation while laura does it as a means of survival at least this time around when a reboot comes around it's common to compare it to its previous interpretations but taking an uncharted perspective could allow us to see the deeper differences with this game that delve below the surface level observation of one having pbus and the other having verguba i personally don't enjoy comparing games too much as i feel it's important to evaluate a product for what it is and not what it isn't and i prefer to evaluate its individual strengths rather than using its contemporary strengths as a baseline i've complained about needless comparisons in the past but in this case tomb raider for reasons i will mention throughout this video is again aware of uncharted and has attempted to further the concepts introduced into those games which to me justifies the comparison i've seen some discussion online about these games being not true tomb raider games and being too different from the original and i won't really be tackling that here i don't have the same nostalgia for the older games i don't think it's entirely fair to judge a reboot off of its predecessors a reboot is meant to reimagine and reinvent a series and i'm expecting and wanting exactly that if a reboot is just like the original then why bother rebooting it at all just make a sequel now i know that's a little contradictory because i'm going to compare this to uncharted but the difference is that tomb raider wears its influences on its sleeve and uncharted is one of them but as a reboot it's trying to differentiate itself from the original so i feel my comparisons and lack of them in some cases are still justified tomb raider's gameplay despite being reminiscent of the uncharted games is in a lot of cases more fun its stealth is more balanced and approachable and the hunting mechanics while shallow at least offer variety but the gameplay unfortunately never truly feels separated from its idol as the treasures that entice exploration seem to be pulled from one game to another the set pieces share a similar cinematic flair but the dangers and the brutality of the death scenes make them enjoyable in their own right while tomb raider took inspiration from uncharted's gameplay they also took inspiration from their poor storytelling but when laura doesn't have memorable dialogue in between the major story beats the story ends up being more forgettable than it could have been so let's take a further look back at uncharted's older sister and analyze everything from top to bottom nine years later [Music] the biggest difference between uncharted and tomb raider on the surface is with its aesthetics and fidelity almost all of this game takes place on a tropical island with jungles cliff faces and ancient structures with surprisingly few tombs these environments are all designed very well but they suffer from blending together quite a bit not to where you'd get lost but as far as scenery goes there isn't much tomb raider can do to shake things up and i'd argue it's good that they didn't this game is short so having environments that feel part of the same island allow you to really take in the progress you make through the different environments and it makes the more drastic changes in scenery more memorable and epic with a majority of the game taking place in the shrouds of leaves and caves there is unfortunately little here that i find stands out aesthetically that doesn't mean it looks bad but often with games like this the fidelity can act as a crutch and i'm sure crystal dynamics knew this as the game is still gorgeous to this day the hair specifically for laura is downright angelic and i couldn't take my eyes off of it i actually felt it was to the game's detriment at points because laura will be talking to someone like sam and the contrast between laura's luscious locks and sam's hair which looks like a cardboard wig distracted me from what was happening while we're on the subject of distracting nitpicks i have to say that i find the camera effects here to be pretty intrusive too such as when the sun shines through the water and we get these hexagons on screen that got in the way more than they immersed me the camera shake here is also comically intense during some scenes which further distracted me the only other problem i have with the presentation was that laura's injured move speed feels like she's moving in slow motion i understand that when she's injured she's not going to be running a marathon but this feels like a janky animation to use and you might have noticed that all of my criticisms thus far have been pretty minor and i don't do that to try and make a mountain out of a molehill but rather to exemplify that the game technically looks damn impressive because what i just mentioned is all i could come up with but there is one actual criticism with the game and that is that the subtitles look but ugly i understand that making subtitles readable is important but these are some of the most gag-inducing blocks of text i've ever seen you guys know i'm an ape i can't just listen to dialogue i need to read it too but this was enough for me to just not bother it's almost like a joke actually it's comically out of place as if the devs want you to keep them off so the game feels more cinematic but perhaps that's just my way of coping with the idea that someone approved this okay i'm sorry i'm done being an [ __ ] let's talk about the set pieces here where it's clear a majority of the budget went these high octane moments feel great and much like uncharted see you running away from something collapsing but something tomb raider does to separate itself is found when failing certain quick time events are scripted set pieces if failed will show a glimpse of the horrible ways laura can die getting crushed by a rock in the early hours of the game getting a sharp piece of debris through the jugular and being impaled on a tree are images that are burned into me especially as i'm conditioned with uncharted in those games when you fail you just see nathan drake ragged all around and you'd probably react with a chuckle because it looks admittedly goofy but here you go in with the same expectations and are met with oh my god what the [ __ ] but seriously these are a really nice touch and they give the game a reinforced sense of grittiness and that the things that laura is doing can have horrific consequences but the wilderness isn't the only side of mother nature laura goes toe-to-toe with as the weather also does everything it can to tear down her determination as it does her clothes running around in a tank top and an undershirt that gets exponentially more tattered and ripped paralleled by exponentially increasing confusion as to why this lady doesn't grab a jacket or something and let's not beat around the bust here the answer is boobies but my reasons for drawing your attention to her lack of clothing is for a less horny reason is because as laura continues through the game she obtains a few new tools and even a pair of gloves which show up on her character model this is done to fit in with a more thematic transformation that takes place across every part of the game but as laura sheds her innocent explorer exterior and turns into the survivor we see at the end of the game she also sheds her clothing and her appearance in general from the beginning of the game when she looks in the mirror she's clean clothing stitched perfectly and her face looking determined by the time the game ends her skin has sweat and mud near caked on top of her deep wounds her clothing is falling apart and her expression is that of hunger and lust in her new role as an apex predator these changes are subtle and i doubt most would even notice these changes until it's already complete and i like that a lot the player like lara doesn't realize what they've become until it's too late and they both enjoy their newfound limitless potential too much to go back the island seems to bring out the true face of everyone there as a majority of its cast when pushed towards desperation shows their real selves which contrasts the otherwise beautiful locations here as the fauna crowds the sky and there's abandoned world war ii bunkers only underground to let the player know that nature is crowned here and if you aren't part of the oni you aren't welcome unfortunately despite the environments looking fantastic they are also a bit unremarkable compared to its competition and really any other game at the time most aaa games can pull off a beautiful tropical destination so it isn't really special anymore but it's still worth mentioning that doesn't mean there aren't some standout moments in the presentation like the aforementioned set pieces or like the incredibly badass scene of laura hiding in a river of blood rising from the dead body staring down the camera but just that these are few and far between also while uncommon humans can void their bowels when they die meaning she's swimming in like [ __ ] and piss too these grungy scenes along with the death scenes seem to be left over from the game's early concept as tomb raider was originally going to be a survival horror game which would see laura battling supernatural demons supposedly inspired by resident evil and this aesthetic and direction are present in the opening level too moving through the cults alters effigies and sacrifices feel straight out of a horror movie but once you escape and see the light the game mostly abandons this aesthetic so while these scenes are good they're uncommon and you likely won't remember a lot of the environments sets and character designs here and that sadly goes for the music too while the music does what it has to in terms of conveying the proper emotions and injecting more adrenaline into the action sets i couldn't remember a single song from the game the sounds in the game are good too and the voice acting was solid and the sound of a shotgun really make you feel the raw power of it but it was otherwise unremarkable much like another portion of this game if you see where i'm going here while on the surface and even at a deeper level the gameplay here is similar to drake's adventures there are a few defining differences that give tomb raider a surprising amount of identity among its peers the shooting here is a near one-to-one copy but perhaps copy is a poor choice of words the uncharted shooting is about as generic as it gets mechanically so calling one a copy of another is a bit of a stretch to begin with rather tomb raider has primitive shooting that unfortunately if it was copying uncharted copied the unreliable bullet spread too which leads to frustration when shooting at anything beyond close range the close range encounters function well and the hitbox's damage and snappiness felt great across the board one weapon that ignores the criticisms i levied against the weapons is the bow as it felt near pinpoint accurate making a long-distance sniper rewarding and encouraging guns felt just as good and hearing the clashing of iron was satisfying enough but damn if the bow doesn't feel so good that i didn't want to use anything else the weapons all handle like you think they would with the bow eventually firing on its own under tension and its accuracy gets tighter the longer you draw it but mechanically the weapons offer little for you in a combat setting when completing puzzles and exploring the islands the weapons have some greater uses that feel reminiscent of a metroidvania but let's stay locked onto the combat where the aim assist feels just right something the uncharted games took a few tries to nail perfectly the cover system here is familiar and the leaning system works well enough though i found it often made little difference the enemies here are fine there's the normal gun towing enemies and then some with melee weapons that rush you but and i know deja vu there's also a handful of supernatural enemies called the oni which are these ancient japanese samurai zombies maybe it's not entirely clear what they are but it doesn't matter what does matter is that the enemies function as more of a reskin than anything else but that isn't clear when these enemies are first introduced the first few times you encounter these enemies you don't fight them and you try to avoid them and this works really well it's the only enemy that you try to in every case evade until the very end of the game where you start mowing them down by the hundreds i would have preferred if lara was never capable of fighting these enemies they're shown time and time again that they can crush a regular human like a tin can and while it shows lara's growing strength to be able to take them down it makes them far less intimidating i think not fighting them while also leaving the pseudo boss fight against the brood at the end of the game would work better for laura's growth too she couldn't fight the oni up to that point and both the player and her feel she isn't capable of doing so but when we're forced to do it for sam laura and the player can then fully realize their power it wouldn't break any realism because ultimately she only kills one oni but that's still more than mathias's entire army could have but because they go down like any other enemy they feel like any other enemy and instead the closest we get is a fight against the oni brute which sees us dodging his predictable attacks and raining fire on his exposed backplate before eventually taking him down through a quick time event it's followed up by another quick time event with matthias and while technically this was nothing to write home about neither of these encounters overstayed their welcome so i have no qualms with them aside from the aforementioned disappointment with the oni enemy class as a whole perhaps avoiding the oni instead of fighting them could have been achieved if the game had a fleshed out stealth system and that's something the uncharted games really lacked well i mean it had it but it didn't serve the traditional goals most games give you stealth as an option to take out entire rooms quietly but uncharted in the first two games didn't let you do that but rather they let you take down a handful of enemies to thin the numbers and get in a proper position to eventually open fire this was remedied a bit in uncharted 3 as there were now some rooms that could be cleared entirely through stealth but now in tomb raider i can say a large majority of them can be completed in stealth even if it is at times quite difficult you have a basic takedown in the boat which offers a constant and reliable means of quietly taking down foes at range my only real criticism here is that i wish there was more options there is one section in the mid game where you're in a forest with a bunch of enemies and it's proof that the stealth in this game is full of untapped potential you jump from tree to tree and stalk the unaware cultists picking them off one by one with your bow and this is one of the only times you can do this i would love it if in future entries lara could completely tap into her huntress side and place traps for enemies to get caught in such as a snare that trips enemies making them vulnerable air takedowns would add variety here too as would ranged alternatives like blow darts what we have here is good but it can be so much better and with a more in-depth tree climbing system it could be a predator power fantasy not unlike being a professional super smash bros player giving us the ability to hide in bushes and a crouch button would also go great lengths and giving self variety though i understand that those specific ideas wouldn't do much for giving tomb raider its own identity but i believe a trap system and a fleshed out wilderness traversal system could of course stealth options that are here aren't exclusive to human prey as animals also receive laura's cranium-seeking arrows animals are used as enemies here very scarcely with the most enjoyable being when laura's foot is caught in a bear trap and she has to shoot wolves that continue to jump from the bushes at her on top of the fun fleeting moments the animals offer a means of collecting materials and salvage which can be used to upgrade your weapons and tools adding extended clips titan chokes silencers and even underbarrels maintain a consistent level of new things for you to try with the weapons which does the combat some favors laura also gets experience from doing just about everything meaning new skills are commonplace too i found that getting materials was easy and made getting subsequent weapon upgrades quick though i didn't have all of them by the end of the game i like this system it's simple but it gives the gameplay some progression that lines up with laura's character progression in the story each upgrade which focuses on stealth combat and foraging has different tiers you can't get tier 3 until you acquire all of the tier 2 upgrades and i like this system but i would have preferred to see the restriction only applied to the specific tree only being able to access tier 3 and the stealth tree once you have a few of the tier 2 stealth skills as it could prompt players to invest in a particular tree and develop strengths and weaknesses when exploring with combat focused players having fewer stealth options but maybe that would remove player choice and make the game play boring it's just an idea i mentioned that the traversal wasn't very advanced but the traversal that is here isn't too shabby but i must admit it again just feels like uncharted it sees laura moving from handhold to handhold but it's more reminiscent of the first uncharted game as the urban exploration isn't here at all unless you count exploring tumbling monasteries i will say that the movement here despite being simplistic feels refined and tight with there only being one time where i jumped somewhere i hadn't intended but at that point i could have just had a brain fart and push the stick in the wrong direction either way it felt good and reliable laura has a very generous jump that can clear most gaps and the introduction of the climbing axe allows her to climb jagged walls and it's an interesting excuse to go back to previous locations seeing what secrets you may have missed the bow as mentioned gets some more time in the spotlight as it can be used to attach a rope to a pillar or eventually the same jagged walls the pickaxe can penetrate climbing these ropes is quite slow though as you get to a point where it becomes annoying it's as if the developers read your mind and they drop a gadget that allows you to speed across them but only in the vertical direction that doesn't initially seem like a problem as when you're on a downward line you use the pickaxe as a makeshift zipline but when you fire an arrow that is slightly downward you can't slide and because the rope ascender only works when facing upwards you'll still be forced to climb all the way over it's a minor criticism but there isn't a whole lot to really dive into with the traversal crystal dynamics knew that the climbing uncharted was only good because of what you were climbing so to keep things interesting in between the massive structures you scale they added some gadgets to keep things interesting though they also indulge in the uncharted solution of having every brick you step on break beneath your weight like donut drake before her laura seems to have every platform bridge and other climbable structure break away or have her otherwise easy climb stifled by something it got old and predictable and uncharted and the same goes here if you are climbing a rope to a location and there is a random jagged wall beneath your destination you immediately think i bet that rope is going to break and i'm going to use that to climb up instead and often you're right when you're traversing quickly it's good that it feels responsive and those cases where you're forced to make quick jumps are built and play beautifully a majority of the set pieces here are really good with some of my favorites being sliding down a stream while the scraps of a plane chase after you escaping a burning village and of course parachuting through the forest if only for the shocking death scene these larger moments are full of explosion slow motion and everything else action and in one particular moment when you just fall off a waterfall you have some choices of where to platform even if it's just as basic as two linear lines the thing that made some of the set pieces from the uncharted trilogy especially the second and the third so good was the spectacle despite being borderline on rails nobody can forget flying out of a cargo plane or being stuck in a train wreck but when you compare that to escaping a collapsing cave where laura simply scrambles up an incline you can see where one is memorable because it's wildly over the top and the other while still very good sacrifices memorability for realism laura doesn't fly out of planes here because the team wanted a more grounded take on miss croft but i start to question if these set pieces truly are held back by the team's desire to keep things realistic or if it was shackled by a lack of creativity if they didn't want lara surviving major falls or huge explosions then why did they allow her to survive a steel rod through her guts a bear trap and multiple brutal punches to the face some would also point out that most of her wounds would infect her as she covers herself in dirt and mud and piss and [ __ ] but i think that's going too far perhaps this was the developer's way of striking a middle ground between having the protagonist survive some truly life-threatening scenarios but not going too over the top but why then does her life-threatening injury just get dropped after the first 10 minutes of gameplay call it inconsistencies plot armor a mary sue whatever but the bottom line is it's something myself and gamingwinds couldn't help but notice throughout our playthroughs it feels like i come across as not liking these scenes and i want to clarify that i really really like most of them crossing a large bridge while roth is sniping from afar it was a ton of fun and honestly one of my favorite moments and the many platforming segments that see you escaping flaming and crumbling buildings was consistently exciting and of course a steel rod was memorable another major difference these opening minutes express is tomb raider's greater focus on interesting puzzles uncharted had a focus on puzzles but they were often solved by opening a book and just seeing the answer to put it bluntly they kind of sucked here while the puzzles are not going to prompt any real brain scratching was at least more engaging than it's contemporary a great tool they give you here is survivor sense which is just an eagle vision detective vision-esque way of highlighting all the interactables which made puzzles more intuitive as it became clear everything you needed to solve a puzzle every piece was laid out and it was up to you to figure out where they were meant to be placed and when tomb raider sets itself apart by having better puzzles than uncharted but that isn't a hard bar to clear and i wouldn't go any farther than saying that the puzzles are serviceable and at points good some see you lighting boxes on fire either through a torch or eventual flaming arrows and others see you using weight to your advantage but the best puzzles were always those that involved wind they typically saw you opening and closing shutters to control the direction of the wind and how it affects different objects in a room and while in concept it isn't revolutionary they were still enjoyable and i wish there was more of them in fact i wish there were more of every puzzle here as they were quite fun but some of the side puzzles often felt like i was brute forcing my way through them unsure if i was actually supposed to solve the puzzle the way i did or if i just got lucky the game is barren as far as side quests go but there are a handful of tombs for you to explore even if laura isn't a fan of them yet i hate tombs these side tombs were okay but they all felt too short for example one of the tombs is a crash plane that you have to take apart using the environment to get to a treasure not only is this not really a tomb but like every other tomb in the game it's just one room i'm not asking for the entire game to take place in caves but the game is called tomb raider and the extent of the tomb raiding here never feels like it leaves the tutorial zone on the complexity scale they end up feeling like mild distractions in the same vein as the collectibles here which don't commit any crimes except they create a rift in the plot as through audio logs and journals you can learn the secrets of the island before laura does but she should know it because she read the journal but i'm probably just nitpicking on this one the collectibles are also the exact same as uncharted except they don't offer the unique rewards i will admit finding out more about the lore is fun but a doughnut laura would have been even better especially if they're okay with just copy and pasting the collectibles like this something notable that this game has is multiplayer but unfortunately i was unable to explore it finding a lobby was possible but i was never able to populate it enough to actually start a game i explored some of the maps here and it all looks like it has some potential but i can't really see it i only bring it up because i know you guys would wonder why i left it out it's a neat idea and based on the gameplay elements we've discussed thus far i don't think it would be a stretch to say it probably functions similarly to the uncharted 3 multiplayer from what is here i can see that you play as a lot of characters from the main story on maps inspired by the environments of the game i'm sure many like myself when i first played the game didn't pay this mode much mind as the main campaign is what we're really here for seeing the innocent and well-meaning laura turn into a hardened survivor from prey to apex predator her ambition stemming from intrigue all the way to addiction the game begins with 21 year old lara on a large ship called the endurance heading towards the ancient city of yamatai but they are at a crossroads and are unsure of where to go due to her strong intuition and supporting evidence the team trusts lara's advice to journey into the dragon's triangle and are then caught up in a storm that nearly kills the crew and leaves them beached after being swept up in the waves laura finds herself on a beach in the middle of a storm but before she can get to her friends she's knocked out and wakes up in a cult-like decorated cave narrowly escaping with the goal of finding her friends and surviving her cultist pursuers but first she needs food and reluctantly kills an animal apologizing in the process sorry as laura explores her new surroundings she finds that the cave from before is not the only place full of effigies and cult-like structures she eventually finds sam and a friendly man named matthias who was supposedly a passenger of the endurance as sam tells matthias the legend of himiko the ancient ruler of yamatai laura passes on when she wakes up sam and matthias are gone she searches for the rest of the team and meets up with them before splitting up to cover more ground with laura heading with whitman the sheepish film director wanting to film and fun the endurance expedition as they explore they find out that a cult is actually worshiping himico and that the island they're on is yamatai but they're captured and in order to escape laura is forced to kill one of the cultists eventually locating lara's mentor and pseudo father figure roth who was injured though whitman is nowhere to be found laura then in attempts to make a call to the outside world climbs a radio tower and is surprisingly able to get in contact with someone when a plane tries to land on yamatai a storm comes out of nowhere and sends a plane crashing into the ground and laura after being contacted by alex and rios who explained that sam has been kidnapped by the cult after that laura attempts to save her but she is kidnapped and sent to be killed until being saved by the strange oni albeit unintentionally as laura escapes she is briefly contacted by sam who says that the cult plans to kill her through a fire ritual which will decide if the person being burned is a descendant of himiko and is capable of transferring the soul of himico into them effectively killing them as she attempts to get to sam she meets up with the endurance helmsman angus grim who sacrifices himself for laura to escape the cultists this death doesn't hit too hard because we don't see much of him before but i do like grimm's too old for the [ __ ] attitude laura is almost killed but roth intervenes to help her get into the palace housing sam when in there she's captured and watches sam pass a fire ritual meaning she'll be used as a vessel for himiko laura and sam are able to escape and roth attempts to use a helicopter to get away unaware of the supernatural storms as laura unsuccessfully tries to get the pilot to land the helicopter crashes and roth is able to revive laura but it isn't long before mathias shows up throwing a tomahawk at laura which roth jumps in front of killing him after mourning roth's death with the rest of the group they reconvene at the beach they were initially beached on and devise a plan with a convenient arrival of whitman who has been m.i.a for most of the adventure yet he seems unharmed alex decides to head back to the endurance wreck but is caught under some wreckage leaving laura to rescue him but not before the solari show up leading to alex sacrificing himself in an explosion for laura to leave lara investigates the tomb and finds an oni who committed seppuku leaving a note that describes that himiko is trapped in her body as a previous person to pass the fire ritual killed themselves so himiko wouldn't take her body with himiko's anger being the result of the storms when lara returns to the group it seems that whitman has betrayed them kidnapping sam to deliver her back to matthias laura and the remaining crew give chase and laura works her way up a mountain seeing whitman killed by the oni along the way to kill both matthias and himiko at the mountain's peak with the storm gone the crew leaves the island and is picked up by a cargo boat it's at this point that laura realizes she isn't going home yet and has more adventures ahead of her and then i can't believe i'm saying this i can't believe how cheesy this is the screen fades to white and the words a survivor is born up here on the screen the ending text just feels really out of place because we know we saw laura transform we don't need text restating that as far as the plot goes laura's transformation is actually my favorite part of the story it's shown to us in so many ways one of which being her appearance we see her stare in a mirror and see her clean and healthy face and juxtapose this with her return to the endurance which sees her muddied and beaten adapted to the rugged environment now reflected back at her it's subtle like her dialogue laura at the beginning of the game is on both knees with guilt as she kills an animal when she grabs a bow from a dead body she recoils in fear despite doing so in self-defense when she kills someone for the first time she has a full breakdown it felt very human and realistic i've obviously never killed anyone but i can't imagine it would be easy so seeing such raw emotion was great shortly after she talks with roth and explains that it was surprisingly easy and she's shocked at that thought that can't have been easy it's scary just how easy it was as the game escalates and we as a player get not only more powerful but more comfortable with the controls and subsequently killing people laura begins to threaten the mercenaries shouting at them to run run she's now aware of her power and shows signs of almost enjoying her power by the time she returns to the endurance the place where she was forced to transition into the monster she is now she begins to beg for the brute to die she revels in her power and capabilities as this transition is happening in regards to her killing abilities she continually isolates herself at first she teams up with whitman and her goals are to regroup with the crew but by the end of the game she's insisting that she does things alone because either she knows that she can or because she doesn't want the crew to see that other side of her she goes from doing things for the sake of survival to eventually doing it for the feeling even matthias in a rather cliche way asks laura just how many men she's killed in order to survive acknowledging the slaughter she's gone on laura as a character was enjoyable and felt like a badass and while she certainly had her plot armor moments she also loses quite a bit she's the reason everyone got here in the first place she gets caught by mathias's cult and they really just feed her right hooks one of the most memorable moments is when she has to cauterize her own wound and the scream alone made me feel an empathetic cringe that was just nailed after every major story beat when sitting at the next campfire laura will give her thoughts on the situation as you sift through your new upgrades and it was a good way of giving laura a non-intrusive dialogue dump to not only give the player a look into her mind but to also catch up a player if they were starting a new session another way they do this is through the audio logs which were surprisingly more intriguing than i thought they would be the most interesting was that rios who was always the most aggressive about getting off the island is justified as she has a daughter at home it's just her parental instinct you may be wondering where the father is and it turns out in the audio logs it's revealed that roth is a father and that the two have a relationship that they keep under wraps so not only is roth a father figure to lara he's an actual father i wish we learned about this kind of thing in the main plot as i'm sure most players didn't know this other side characters here were fine with grimm being especially entertaining considering his meeker screen time but there's one i want to focus on because i have a tinfoil hat theory that i cannot get over alex weiss the nerd of the group i believe is crystal dynamics way of talking major [ __ ] to naughty dog look at the concept art of him there is no shot that the baseball shirt the generic hair and the holsters were not intentional i call this tin foil hat because i haven't seen too much discussion of it online except from one game facts forum where the first reply read i felt nothing for him you barely see him and the only thing to him is you find out the last second that he wants to stuff lara like a thanksgiving turkey and [ __ ] me that is one way to put it with this nathan drake lens it's so funny seeing how much this character gets [ __ ] on throughout the game for one he's a total nerd and is often pretty useless to the group with his last stand speaking volumes as he says this line about thinking he's the star of some action movie i don't know what i was thinking coming out here to be the star of my own goddamn action movie even worse there is a scene where alex gets bricked up at the sight of rice's daughter but then it's revealed that she's 14 and it's the most awkward scene in the entire game i'm sorry i shouldn't be laughing but i love that they made the nathan drake stand in such a [ __ ] weirdo he even cracks unnecessary jokes and tries to be the funny man at every opportunity like nathan drake even before he sacrifices himself he says that he finally impressed her and god it just doesn't get old i will admit within the accompanying comic series as canon to the game it's shown that alex was meant to be a light love interest so perhaps they had a greater plans for him but the way it is now i just can't see the character as anything more than a joke at naughty dog's expense and it is funny i also think it's rather ballsy to make a character that seems so clearly to be a jab at a developer who you have done more than copy off of for the very development of this game but i digress whitman and matthias were pretty weak villains but i think they had much more potential whitman for starters has very muddied motivations this is because tomb raider thought it would be a good idea to hide his motivations behind a prequel comic not unlike mirror's edge catalyst unlike catalyst a majority of the plot can be gathered here but it makes sense that many people felt whitman's motivations didn't make a lot of sense because without the necessary context it makes him seem one-dimensional we find out in this prequel comic that whitman has a tv show the third season of which is focused on the crew of the endurance but as his ratings drop the network pulls their funding couple this with a nasty divorce and whitman is left without a bank account and assumably nothing except his house so whitman is going into this expedition with a show he has to fund with the last of his savings and nothing to return home to it makes a bit more sense than that he is as the game puts it willing to do anything for a good story you women you'll do anything for a story this isn't about getting a good story this is about surviving a divorce and reviving a career does it justify his actions no but it does further contextualize them and its necessary context when whitman works with mathias it can be further explained that sacrificing sam isn't as wrong as we were led to believe i know that sounds insane but just hear me out the island houses seemingly hundreds if not thousands of stranded people including the crew of the endurance in order to save sam one person laura kills nearly all of them matthias as he explains is doing exactly what laura is doing just trying to survive he knows from the evidence gathered that the best way to stop the storms is to give himico a new body and while putting the stake through himico's heart would also do the trick we can at least assume that he didn't know that was an option sacrificing one life to save thousands doesn't sound like such a bad idea to be fair nobody should be forced to give up their lives and the cultists here have clearly killed most of the people who wash up on shore making them not exactly paragons of morality but the point still remains one side wants to kill one person to save thousands and the other side decides to kill thousands to save one if the game wanted to they could make a solid case for matthias and if whitman supported this ideology assuming we knew his background it could further convince the player and perhaps even prompt some introspection from lara the way it is now we have a shallow villain with a shallow and obscured motivation for both whitman and matthias the plot overall felt pretty consistent throughout even if in some cases that meant consistently poor while this game shared some similarities to uncharted thematically and even the unnecessary inclusion of a supernatural force near the end it lacked the fun moments in between i'm not saying the game has to be all jokes and one-liners but the uncharted games broke up the downtime by offering funny or interesting dialogue and the dialogue here while interesting didn't have the same charm the grounded moments here did feel really good and again seeing laura's transition from the woman we start the game as so the survivor at the end was stellar though having it literally spelt out for us was a little on the nose for me tomb raider is a unique title because i had the opportunity to learn from uncharted's mistakes crystal dynamics opted to create a game that retreads uncharted territory and lives in the shadow of its spiritual predecessor it knew what its influences were and i'd argue they even mocked their influences a little bit but i'd respect that move a lot more if they didn't make the same mistakes those games did the shooting was much the same even if the bow added some great variety and the added stealth was in my eyes a genuine improvement over uncharted the movement was also the same but again the added variety is appreciated the story ended up being less memorable than uncharted as did the major set pieces because it didn't have the same over-the-top wow factor that those games did while the uncharted plots had never been high art and suffer from the same issues of having underdeveloped side characters and villains they had little moments of charm in between to at least keep things fresh but this game unlike uncharted had an arcade game tie-in and while i normally wouldn't bother mentioning it i did get a chance to track one of these down and try it out it plays a lot of cutscenes from the game and was particularly fair too most arcade games seem to love siphoning the quarters out of your pockets but this one was pretty worth the price of admission it is a shooting gallery that sees you moving through a lot of the same environments as a game and while this is a bit of a pointless aside i thought it was worth mentioning so why then is uncharted remembered far more than tomb raider the tomb raider reboot had a lot of the same things uncharted did and in some cases it did things slightly better but i think a major factor is the originality uncharted while having the same mechanically bare and cinematically rich gameplay and set pieces has the advantage of being first it was the first game to do an action adventure game with this level of polish and with this budget even though tomb raider had those same qualities because it wasn't the first or hell even the third to do it it suffers from being unoriginal in that sense and unfortunately it suffers from being compared to uncharted while i do think comparing any game to uncharted is a compliment in and of itself the comparisons here usually end with the phrase uncharted did it better that doesn't mean tomb raider isn't a good time and i hope i've conveyed that i think it is but i'd be foolish to say it completely trump's uncharted in either motion or memory ultimately what we have here while not better than uncharted still comes respectfully close and it's a great game in its own right the game got two sequels i'm beyond excited to get to because i had an awesome experience replaying this game after so long it had always confused me that the second entry in the series was called rise of the tomb raider because laura's rise into her tomb raider role already kind of happened in this game but perhaps the title has a more meta meaning perhaps a second game will do enough to let laura step outside of uncharted shadow and find a true identity separate to that of her contemporaries acting as the rise of the modern tomb raider with enough unique aspects to truly stand on its own hello everyone if you made it to the end of this thank you i appreciate it also shout out to our patrons and youtube members a beat ben conway bossian bryce stevens chiefy chris gonzo benzalis jadon mp3 mark short pyrite sean bailey the game of lorian olfhednar845719 aidenspark77 it's srtw sad amv lane daniel latao and breeze over your support means the world to me and it helps with these videos a lot and it allows me to do things like play a shitty tomb raider arcade game just for the sake of talking about it in a video i wanted to try and make this video a little more relaxed and laid back and and i'm sure you noticed that with a lot of the humor in the video um and it's just because i've realized uh over the past couple of well i guess over the past year i've tried really hard at making my videos better and i've acquitted making them better with making them more sophisticated and it's because i always feel like i'm comparing myself to like some of the better review channels that are more analytical than i am and so in attempts to achieve what they do i've sort of made my my own videos less personable like it's literally just talking about the game and it means the videos are i think good like i think they're good but they're not very fun and so i've tried to kind of make the i'm trying to make the videos more fun and enjoyable for you guys to watch and for me to edit and for sean to edit and by the way thank you so much to sean his links will be in the description he's been so much help in allowing me to actually keep up with uploading videos during school and whatnot because finals just kicked my ass and yeah so let me know what you think of the sort of different style of video where it's a little more laid back and because i think it still has the analysis there that i try to have in every video that you know that kind of deeper look at a game uh but i'm trying to make it a little more fun along the way so let me know if that worked out or if it didn't um your feedback in this case would be really helpful to me because that's why i'm doing this you guys gave me feedback and said i need to inject more personality in my videos and i'm trying to do that and hopefully it works out if you want to see more updates on videos you can follow me on twitter and i would greatly greatly appreciate that you can of course support me on patreon if you want these videos to get better and you want to just support me and that is pretty much all i got for now um i hope you are all staying safe and staying healthy and taking care of yourselves drinking water staying in school and yeah i love you guys thank you for everything you give me and take care [Music] do [Music] you

Channel: That Boy Aqua

Views: 198,100

Keywords: Tomb Raider, Tomb Raider Critique, Tomb Raider Analysis, Tomb Raider 9 Years Later, Tomb Raider Review, Tomb Raider Reboot, New Tomb Raider, Tomb Raider 2013 critique, Tomb Raider 2013, Tomb Raider 2013 Analysis, Tomb Raider Retrospective, Tomb Raider Reboot Retrospective, A Critique of Tomb Raider, Tomb Raider DLC, Tomb Raider Walkthrough, History of Tomb Raider, Tomb Raider vs Uncharted, tomb raider gameplay, Tomb Raider Years Later, That Boy Aqua

Id: 5xPPbabOLbA

Length: 40min 54sec (2454 seconds)

Published: Thu May 05 2022