50 Games in 50* Days

The concept of this series of blog posts is 3 fold:

1. Play 50 games that I’ve never played before over (roughly) 50 days.

2. Write reviews of the games.

3. Select games on the basis that they’re cheap and offer an alternative to the cost of going out.

I thought this would be pretty cool as I’ve built up kind of a backlog of games and I wanted to play them as well as build up my review base.

*In all honesty, work is going to get in the way of hitting 50 games in 50 days but hey, it’s something to aim for!

13 – Tomb Raider

Tomb Raider is available across Xbox, PC and PS3 for a very reasonable 20 quid.

Lara Croft is a hard bastard.

Seriously, this woman can take an insane amount of punishment before she gives up the ghost (I was going to write ‘goes down’ there but I don’t want this intro getting all smutty) and dies. Over the course of this game she is subjected to the kind of punishment we usually reserve for imaginative tortures we’d wish on our worst enemies. How many times is this girl going to get strung up in a charnel house anyway? I can pause here if you like whilst you go and look up ‘charnel house’. It’s fine, my spell-checker doesn’t recognise it either. She’s brutal too – Lara starts off a little perturbed by the act of killing another human being but once she cottons on to how easy it is – and it is remarkably easy in this game – she soon manages to leave her inhibitions at the cave entrance and get on with some conscience-free bloody murder and mayhem. This woman cauterizes her own leg wounds with arrowheads heated up with the lighter she looted from a corpse and seconds later she’s out bounding around like a satanic gazelle looking for her next victim. That Croft woman, she don’t give a fuck. She’ll shoot an arrow into your brain from 60 yards away or ram a climbing axe through your skull before you can say, “Wait, I’m not with these guys!” or whatever. Yeah, look out for Lara on the next season of Britain’s Hardest Gangsters because she’s a shoo-in to be there.

I think if you have any familiarity with the Tomb Raider series before you approach this reboot, the thing that’s going to surprise you the most is the violence. Someone seems to really have enjoyed killing off Lara Croft, be it with metal work piercing her jaw, crushing death beneath boulders or impaling the poor girl on broken tree branches, the camera does like to linger. These moments are not an easy watch, especially for someone like me who has a shred of human decency still left and doesn’t necessarily enjoy watching people’s (even computer generated ones) last, twitching, frantic grasps at life. I guess it would sort of make sense if there was more of the ‘survival’ element to the game that it seems to suggest early on. If there was a real punishment for dying and that death didn’t come so often at the hands of yawnsome QTE* moments then perhaps that impact would be greater. As it is, the scenes are just a bit gross and then you’re straight back to the action.

Lara’s main weapon and tool in the game is the bow and arrow. I don’t understand why this has become de rigueur lately, with bows popping up in many action games (Far Cry 3 and Crysis 3 to name a couple) as the go-to means for the stealth kill. Surely it’s time for a blowpipe renaissance or something. Anyway, the bow is pretty fun and when you get the ability to shoot arrows and rope around the place the world opens up somewhat and there are some decent puzzles that use this skill. You also get to employ some higher calibre stuff too, and the weapons you find are upgradeable through bits and pieces scavenged on the island.

Graphically, Tomb Raider is utterly stunning. It’s one of those games that can seriously take your breath away and if you can remember what Lara looked like 17 years ago you, like me, will probably be wondering where the hell graphics are going to be in 2030. Actually, hopefully by then we’ll just be plugging game experiences directly into our brains and there’ll be no need for ‘graphics’ as such. Oh man, the future is going to be awesome!

In many respects, Tomb Raider hasn’t changed much in 17 years. It’s still about exploration, jumping about the place, shooting people and animals and yes, raiding tombs (even though at one point she professes to hate tombs – LOL! IKR?!). The platforming is more forgiving than in the olden days, although perhaps that is due to the easier way in which we control Lara and the baddies are easier to dispatch. There is still that great sense of exploration however and the island that provides the setting for this new Tomb Raider game has varied enough locales to keep up with the globe hopping Lara of the earlier titles.

Tomb Raider is an ‘event game’ for this generation of consoles. I strongly suggest that you play it now whilst it still looks at its’ peak. It’s not going to be a game you go back to year after year but as a spectacle for today it’s worth the time and money investment. Think of it in terms of summer popcorn movie – spectacular and shallow at the same time. Fun while it lasts and it will certainly give you a few talking points after the credits have rolled.

Oh yeah, there’s multiplayer too but I couldn’t be arsed with it.

Jargon Buster

QTE – Quick Time Event – Involves pressing buttons when they flash up on screen, usually used in set-piece moments of gameplay in order for your character to achieve something they couldn’t normally with the regular controls. Failure often results in instant death.