![]() She manages to come off as human and real even as she achieves feats of climbing and combat that would make her a superhero in any other universe, and the world’s top athlete and soldier in our own. ![]() And chief among them is Lara, voiced again by Camilla Luddington, who carries the game and is reason enough to work all the way through it. The game sports an engaging script from writer Rhianna Pratchett that manages to take action movie clichés and spin them into strong characters, both heroes and villains. ![]() ![]() The main plot might have you rushing along, but the side tombs are some of the best things Rise of the Tomb Raider has to offer. They’re all worth it, sporting a range of cool locales like an abandoned Soviet uranium mine and a wrecked and frozen Byzantine ship, and packed with smart puzzles that are just involved enough to keep the pace. There are also many more tombs this time out, although most of them are optional “challenge tombs” that you’ll have to seek out as you run around some of the larger, explorable “open world”-like regions of the game. Much of the game is about climbing puzzles, and by the end you’ll have no shortage of gear for hammering into weak walls and ice, swinging over gaps, and even creating climbable handholds where none previously existed. Navigating the world and discovering what’s in it is first and foremost what Rise is all about, and you’ll spend most of the experience not shooting it out with random soldiers, but trying to reach a cliffside cave entrance, or working out how to open the way into a burial chamber. Like its predecessor, Rise of the Tomb Raider mixes together open-world elements with environmental puzzles and third-person shooting, and probably the best thing about the game is how often it gets those ratios right. Rise understands it’s not just that Lara is a badass, but that she’s at her most interesting when she’s nerding out. Now she’s converted what feelings of survivor’s guilt might have been at play into an obsession with proving right her father’s apparently harebrained archaeological theories. Lara’s moved on from her experiences on Yamatai, the weird supernatural island where she had to shoot a lot of bad men in the head and several of her friends were killed. This isn’t quite the post-traumatic stress disorder story Rise of the Tomb Raider’s early marketing would have had players believe. The fun and excitement Rise of the Tomb Raider expertly delivers make it easy to overlook its faults. And Rise of the Tomb Raider excels in one department above all others: it is a quintessential blockbuster, well-paced, overwrought and intense in all the right ways. Lara Croft has gone beyond being just a relatable, fascinating and well-rounded protagonist to becoming one of the best lead characters triple-A gaming has seen in a long time. Rise of the Tomb Raider returns to that Lara and that world, and like its predecessor, it does many things very well. In Tomb Raider, she finally became a real character, with the game’s full focus on her personality and humanity. For her entire existence, Lara Croft had trouble not being viewed as a 12-year-old boy’s polygonal fantasy object first, and a badass archaeologist second. While Tomb Raider fell down on elements like challenging puzzles and a dearth of actual tombs to raid, it succeeded in humanizing one of gaming’s great misused protagonists. The 2012 reboot of the Tomb Raider franchise was one of the best things to happen to a game series in a long time, even if at times the new version of Tomb Raider wasn’t quite what the old one had been. “Survival vision” strips much of the challenge out of puzzles Retreads familiar ground from previous title Lara’s ridiculous survival skills break immersion
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |