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Rise of the Tomb Raider - Watch Lara's bum in NextGen fidelity

Tehdagah

Arcane
Joined
Feb 27, 2012
Messages
9,338
More Lara ass to watch. This time in Syria:


I hope this is the beginning of the game, because it (kinda) looks like a tutorial.
 

Machocruz

Arcane
Joined
Jul 7, 2011
Messages
4,372
Location
Hyperborea
Challenging jumping setups? Fucking hipsters and your rose colored glasses. They only had those because of technical limitations. Auto-corrected jumps is what they envisioned all along.
 

toro

Arcane
Vatnik
Joined
Apr 14, 2009
Messages
14,089
Find the Prophet's Tomb. That will certainly going to end well.

Also shouldn't this shit be called Rise of the ISIS?
 

sexbad?

Arcane
Patron
Joined
Apr 7, 2013
Messages
2,812
Location
sexbad
Codex USB, 2014
Find the Prophet's Tomb. That will certainly going to end well.

Also shouldn't this shit be called Rise of the ISIS?
It seems to be a character that the developers have just made up. Writing appears to be in Greek and depictions are similar to Eastern Orthodox icons, but they aren't Christian either (?). They just needed to find some dull, politically correct made-up fairy tale to put in this game where a grunting and screaming boobie girl gets something shoved in her skull in every other death scene.
 

pippin

Guest
Well, Himiko was very real https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Himiko but most of the mythology of the reboot seemd to be somewhat vague. They got the Hannya mask's origin and meaning wrong, which made me mad. (The game claims it's the spirit of a hateful woman, while it's meant to represent the soul of a woman driven to insanity due to her own jealousy. Not the same).

It's a shame. These kind of scenarios could help people learn a thing or two about history, but the effort is missed through the sjw filter.
 

circ

Arcane
Joined
Jun 4, 2009
Messages
11,470
Location
Great Pacific Garbage Patch
It's so sad. Some kids are growing up with this horrible voice, thinking that's how Lara Croft is supposed to sound like. No. Keeley Hawes, that's your Lara Croft.
 

Morkar Left

Guest
Since it was on sale I tried to play the first Tomb Raider reboot game. Holy shit, I thought early 3D games had shitty controls. Really, these are the most horrible controls I have ever experienced in a game like this. Neither kb+m nor gamepad are usable. In fact the kb+m is slighty less worse.
Are all modern games like this or are Tomb Raiders extremely bad controls an exception and not the rule?
 

JarlFrank

I like Thief THIS much
Patron
Joined
Jan 4, 2007
Messages
33,146
Location
KA.DINGIR.RA.KI
Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
Were the Daddy issues ever that important for the games? When I played the older TR games I was too focused on the puzzles to care about the story. I clearly remember the first movie because of its daddy drama though.

The original 5 games had nothing of the sort, they were just fun adventure romps where you play a big-breasted archaeologist who explores ancient tombs in order to retrieve artifacts for her private collection.

When the IP went to Crystal Dynamics, they started adding character drama to make Lara more "interesting", which basically boiled down to daddy/mommy issues that became a driving factor of the story.
 
Self-Ejected

Excidium II

Self-Ejected
Joined
Jun 21, 2015
Messages
1,866,227
Location
Third World
Since it was on sale I tried to play the first Tomb Raider reboot game. Holy shit, I thought early 3D games had shitty controls. Really, these are the most horrible controls I have ever experienced in a game like this. Neither kb+m nor gamepad are usable. In fact the kb+m is slighty less worse.
Are all modern games like this or are Tomb Raiders extremely bad controls an exception and not the rule?
I didn't have problems with the KBM controls. But I didn't play it very far, didn't even get to shoop guns.
 
Joined
Jan 12, 2012
Messages
4,065
Find the Prophet's Tomb. That will certainly going to end well.

Also shouldn't this shit be called Rise of the ISIS?

At the end it turns out that the terrorists aren't *REAL* muslims! They are actual Isis worshippers, the end boss being the goddess herself (just like Seth in TR:IV).
 

bloodlover

Arcane
Joined
Sep 5, 2010
Messages
2,039
Since it was on sale I tried to play the first Tomb Raider reboot game. Holy shit, I thought early 3D games had shitty controls. Really, these are the most horrible controls I have ever experienced in a game like this. Neither kb+m nor gamepad are usable. In fact the kb+m is slighty less worse.
Are all modern games like this or are Tomb Raiders extremely bad controls an exception and not the rule?

Are you talking about Anniversary? I never had problems with the controls, finishing the game with kb+m. I have not played the new games (everything except Underworld seems shit and even that one was meh) but I played the first five games on PS1 many years ago and the controls were good. Coming from playing TR on a console I thought keyboard controls would be crappy but it was not the case. Usually the camera brings more problems than the controls.
 

Kutulu

Arcane
Patron
Joined
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Messages
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Location
ger
PC RPG Website of the Year, 2015 Codex 2016 - The Age of Grimoire Make the Codex Great Again! Grab the Codex by the pussy Insert Title Here RPG Wokedex
So people actually played these games?

I was 14 in 1996 and aroused by anything, including side-boob on a shampoo bottle or these games, never actually played them...
 

Morkar Left

Guest
I didn't have problems with the KBM controls. But I didn't play it very far, didn't even get to shoop guns.

Are you talking about Anniversary? I never had problems with the controls, finishing the game with kb+m. I have not played the new games (everything except Underworld seems shit and even that one was meh) but I played the first five games on PS1 many years ago and the controls were good. Coming from playing TR on a console I thought keyboard controls would be crappy but it was not the case. Usually the camera brings more problems than the controls.

I'm talking about that one

I tried again with kb+m and after some tweaking it kinda works while controller is horrible. But I think bloodlover is right in this case: the camera is actually horrible. I hate that "cinematic" style instead of the cam switching and rotating tightly with your movements. An annoyance are the quicktime events. It's like playing Summer Games with all that button mashing.

Maybe I will try it again because the first puzzle was actually decent and the whole story gave me a Lost vibe. Maybe, maybe not.
 

Astral Rag

Arcane
Joined
Feb 1, 2012
Messages
7,771
So people actually played these games?

I was 14 in 1996 and aroused by anything, including side-boob on a shampoo bottle or these games, never actually played them...

Have you already heard about the new Nude Raider Patch? This software is capable of rendering Lara completely nude during gameplay ;)
dsftopud.gif

This CrazyBytes pirate cd-rom I have here contains a full rip of the game and the patch, I can sell you a copy for $18.
 
Last edited:

catfood

AGAIN
Joined
Aug 28, 2008
Messages
9,345
Location
Nirvana for mice
I'm talking about that one

I tried again with kb+m and after some tweaking it kinda works while controller is horrible. But I think bloodlover is right in this case: the camera is actually horrible. I hate that "cinematic" style instead of the cam switching and rotating tightly with your movements. An annoyance are the quicktime events. It's like playing Summer Games with all that button mashing.

Maybe I will try it again because the first puzzle was actually decent and the whole story gave me a Lost vibe. Maybe, maybe not.
Just ignore that crap and play the first 5 games. They're the best the series has to offer.
 

Infinitron

I post news
Staff Member
Joined
Jan 28, 2011
Messages
97,478
Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
What, coming out already? Review: http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2015-11-09-rise-of-the-tomb-raider-review_3

Rise of the Tomb Raider review
Plunder the influence.

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The new Lara Croft works out some kinks in a second act that, while slick and enjoyable, doesn't resolve Tomb Raider's identity crisis.

It is, if nothing else, a hell of a title. Rise of the Tomb Raider: it's got that hint of pulp-magazine shlock, of the lurid, post-colonial adventures of the class of fictional explorers and action-archeologists to whom Lara Croft owes so much.

It works on other levels, too. Her last game, 2013's Tomb Raider, reset the clock and cast Lara as a vulnerable ingenue learning the strength and resourcefulness - and ruthlessness - that she would need to become a hero. It was a jarring gearshift for a character whose previous incarnation was a remote, ice-cool badass, and her personal struggle clashed with the violence of the gameplay. But, as a narrative device on its own terms, it worked. And now that title promises the pay-off: the rise and rise of New Lara as the finished article, the Tomb Raider, the swan-diving, rock-climbing, gun-toting woman of our dreams.

It only half-delivers. Even as Rise of the Tomb Raider's lightweight but sturdy framework for character development propels Lara to a capability her former self would have envied - survivalist, commando, craftswoman, fluent in ancient Mongolian and able to lethally overpower warriors twice her size - its storyline arrests her development. Developer Crystal Dynamics serves a preposterous yarn about a lost civilisation in the Siberian wilderness with a sombre straight face, saddling our heroine with obsessive daddy issues to work through. It's a game with a bad case of second-act syndrome. The Tomb Raider's rise might have to wait until after therapy.

The set-up is straight from any previous Tomb Raider or, for that matter, any Uncharted: Lara's on the trail of an ancient artifact of mystical power, said to bestow eternal life and reside in a legendary lost city. (Traditions are all well and good, but this genre could probably use a narrative shake-up.) The trail was laid by her father, whose claims about the artifact, a deathless prophet, and a centuries-old evil secret society called Trinity earned him public ridicule and might have caused his death. Spoilers: they're all true. Lara is thus furnished with a MacGuffin to chase, an army of sinister goons to murder, an extremely unconvincing lost tribe to ally with, and a motivation to privately brood over.

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Microsoft bought a period of Xbox exclusivity for Rise of the Tomb Raider, expecting a headline-grabbing fight with Uncharted 4 - which was promptly delayed into 2016. The unpopular deal doesn't look likely to pay off for either party.

It's pretty silly stuff, but the real trouble is the excess of gravitas and lack of zest in Rhianna Pratchett's script and in Camilla Luddington's performance as Lara. Luddington delivers her lines in a breathy, reverent drawl, with a laboured seriousness, rarely allowing an edge of humour or steel into her voice. (I recently played all three Uncharted games and, though their plots are just as flimsy and their gameplay more basic, I found myself missing their levity and sense of romance.) Whether or not you agree with the direction Crystal Dynamics and Pratchett took Lara in three years ago, it at least moved her toward a three-dimensional humanity. Rise of the Tomb Raider keeps the tone but skimps on the character work, rendering her flat: a cut-price Katniss Everdeen, bow over one shoulder, chip on the other. If the imperious, almost callous James Bond vibe of the old Lara is ever to make a comeback, it won't be this time. The cut-glass accent is about the only thing that's left.

In action, though, this Lara means business. Crystal Dynamics' artists give her a compact frame, well shod and practically dressed, and lavish detail on the tools of her trade: the customised pistol hanging from her belt, the hand-crafted quiver, the reinforced climbing axes. The animators give her determination, smooth precision and power, and humanity too in the way she wrings out her ponytail when she climbs out of water. This is a woman of ability and purpose. Aggression, too - she attacks with a bloodthirsty ferocity that's off-putting, if perhaps necessary to sell the idea of a slender five-footer taking down an armoured hulk with a single blow. This incarnation of Tomb Raider still seems more violent than it needs to be.

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As great as the skill tree is, I refuse to unlock the perk that allows you to rig slain enemies with explosives. She's a tomb raider, not a corpse bomber.

The gameplay mix will be familiar from the 2013 game, though it's better blended and balanced. The main thrust of the action borrows (or perhaps, collects a debt) from Uncharted, moving between climbing, combat, light puzzle-solving and set-piece spectacle with smooth sweeps of a cinematic camera, but toning down Naughty Dog's taste for the outrageous. This linear rush is then set within something broader and a bit more substantial: along the route, a handful of large areas open up, garnished with the side missions, checkbox challenges, collectables and secrets of an open-world game. There's a lite role-playing game in here, too. Everything grants XP towards unlocking skills, and the stunted crafting system of the last game finds full expression, allowing Lara to craft useful items on the run as well as improve her equipment at camp.

It's an unchallenging pot-pourri of virtually every current mainstream gaming fashion, bearing the clear imprimatur of design by committee. But Crystal Dynamics is too experienced and talented a studio to let it get incoherent or unfocused. Whether serving up stealth combat or skill trees, the game is never less than cleanly competent, and often enough it's compelling. Lara's advancement path is very satisfying, with skills that offer more tangible and useful perks than many a full-blooded RPG (I'm looking at you, Geralt), mated to Zelda's equipment unlocks and The Last of Us' weapon modification. It's in the quick strides Lara takes towards her final form as an intoxicating Swiss army knife of an action hero that Rise of the Tomb Raider earns its title.

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The game has a tendency to slip into the lifeless language of design documents: you get an achievement for collecting 'narrative assets'.

Nevertheless - and as fans will surely have predicted - it's when the game simply remembers to be Tomb Raider that it's at its best. In nine optional Challenge Tombs and at a couple of junctures in the story, Lara finds herself gingerly exploring lonely ruins, gorgeous in their centuries-old decay. Here she solves cleverly assembled, if relatively simple, physics puzzles to gain access to a treasure trove. (In this game, the treasures are new skills - the designers clearly knew what they were getting right.) Quiet descends, all the firefights and resource nodes and progress tickers recede, and the game drinks from a well too few contemporaries bother to seek out. Just a woman and her wit, unlocking the secrets of the distant past.

It's not the lip-service the 2013 game paid to the tomb-raiding concept, but it's still barely more than a sideline for nouveau Tomb Raider. Given the tombs' strong flavour and Crystal Dynamics' comfortable command of the form, why couldn't there have been more of them, with harder puzzles, and why couldn't they have occupied some of the space filled with empty battles and vacant scrambles in the storyline? Was it a lack of corporate confidence or a surfeit of bitter experience that led to tomb raiding taking a back seat? I'm not sure I want to know the answer.

Either way, it's emblematic of a series that's suffering an identity crisis - trying too hard to be all things to all men, and not hard enough to be itself. Perhaps you can extend that identity crisis to the whole genre of action-adventure. Once the primary form of blockbuster game, these mass-market single-player capers are now judged too narrow in scope, insufficiently social and connected and customisable, to bereally big. Hence Rise of the Tomb Raider's faux-open-world feature creep - and hence Expeditions.

Expeditions replace the last game's aimless multiplayer mode, and on paper, they're a better fit. A variety of game modes allow you to replay chapters or revisit areas from the main game, with additional challenge goals and online score leaderboards. The kicker? Expedition cards. These come in blind packs, bought either with credits earned in-game or with real money. They modify the gameplay or Lara's loadout for each run, with appropriate penalties or bonuses to your credit rewards from the mission.

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Later on, Lara meets a race of Siberian mountain folk called the Remnants whose mid-Atlantic accents and music-festival haircuts wouldn't pass muster in the cheapest series on Syfy.

There's the potential for a fun afterlife for the game in Expeditions. The Score Attack mode - a time-attack variant which adds score combo chains and custom challenges to every chapter of the game - can be an enjoyable test once you've picked your way through the confusing maze of variables and figured out which ones best fit the level in question. Chapter Replay Elite allows you to to carry your skills and equipment from the campaign into any level, and will have to do in lieu of the New Game Plus mode that Rise of the Tomb Raider is begging for. Remnant Resistance, which allows you to share custom missions with other players, is rather slapdash. All of them could have worked just as well - arguably better - without those modish card packs. Over-egged and undercooked, running in some desperation after the FIFA Ultimate Team and Hearthstone bandwagons, Expeditions is a blatant play for YouTube relevance and micro-transaction revenue. It has no pressing reason of its own to exist.

Can Tomb Raider, and by extension any modern action-adventure game, really not survive without some extraneous lunge for life after the credits roll? Is it too old-fashioned? Just too expensive to make? Rise of the Tomb Raider is a well-made game. It's a handsome and solidly entertaining, if seldom inspired, way to while away a dozen hours. It has a famous name and an avatar of real dynamic power at its centre. It has tombs to raid. That ought to be enough. It shouldn't have to reach. But reach it does - for an emotional hook it doesn't have, and for trendy gimmicks it doesn't need.
 

IHaveHugeNick

Arcane
Joined
Apr 5, 2015
Messages
1,870,182
Great reviews, can't wait till this hits PC.
 

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