She singlehandedly slaughtered at least 10,000 mercenaries by the end of the first one, not to mention fought some demon things, and ran through exploding buildings for like 20 minutes straight. It was so fucking silly, but I loved it for some reason. Which surprised me as I've never really loved open-world AssCreed rip offs, nor did I especially love the Tomb Raider series beyond the first couple.
Tomb Raider '13 is unique in the realm of video games for its complete bat-shit melding of "gritty realism" with "over the top action fantasy" and silly gamey stuff. Which tons of games have tried to do in the past, but for some reason TR'13 just nailed the grittier elements to a point that I'm not sure its creators even intended, as it ends up giving the game a really weird, uncanny valley, surrealistic horror aspect. Like, you would be jumping along doing some random, super gamey shit, that makes no sense in context like collecting suitcases or dog tags (or whatever), only to take a misstep and suddenly be met by an excruciatingly gorey, NC-17 level, death scene, which actually made you cringe (as opposed to just giggling like most gore).
Plus, the voice-work. Lara was doing silly action game shit, but she grunted and panted and cried out in pain in a way that really sold her for me as a character. And all the animations made every battle seem like a desperate scrabble.....even for the 1,000th time you are murdering some random cult dude in hand to hand combat. It was so delightfully tonally bizarre that I found the whole game compelling from start to finish just to see how long they could carry on the weird dissonances between the gameplay and atmosphere (turns out, right up to the end, with a totally straight face the whole time).
Not sure how they can sell Lara as an underdog survivalist grad student in this one, though. She single handedly murdered more people than the Iraq war in the first game. Which I'm pretty sure most dissertation committees in archaeology would frown on. But I can't wait to see how they will keep up that same cognitive dissonance the first game did so well.
I demand scenes where:
-She pauses to wistfully contemplate the nature of life, death, and morality after killing a mid level boss......just 10 minutes after she firebombs an entire village with seemingly no remorse.
-After being nearly raped, she decides to run around the island for the next 20 minutes collecting random artifacts which she narrates descriptions of in the overly excited tones of a school girl reading Tiger Beat.
-She rips 3 toe nails off (shown in bloody close up) and then walks across broken glass barefoot because you didn't push q and e fast enough.
-Despite having a bunch of guns at her disposal, she straight lights a dude on fire, just to watch him burn, all while gasping and panting like she is the one that's in danger here.