Tomb Raider: Definitive Edition

Epic gave away the trilogy for free years ago. I decided to play it.

The only downside for me is the "hollywood-esque" script writing with heroic deaths and the falls from great heights that are completely impossible in real life. Everything else is great, excellent. The environment art, the level design, the soundtrack, the voices, the character development. They nailed the stealth, progression, upgrades, skills, difficulty. The game captured the survivor experience just about right.

The Tomb Raider that I knew was from the PS1 era. I've never played the PS2 era editions and I can't draw comparisons to them. I suspect that thanks to Uncharted and the failure of Angel of Darkness, this reboot happened. The old mechanic of health packs and a health bar doesn't make sense in modern times. Back in 1996 the level design had to account for health, with the designer having to "calculate" whether the player had enough health to progress or not. Auto regen doesn't make the game easy because the player would die if hit by multiple gunshots either way. In the old design era a health pack would be placed in between enemy encounters. With checkpoints you don't have to restart the level every time you die.

They hid the loading screens in those narrow passages that slow down Lara. They did a good job in creating the illusion of a much larger world. This game is great in exploring the vertical action, making the player traverse the environment in all possible directions. They adopted the same strategy of Prince of Persia Warrior Within. The same environments are reused. Because the weather changes and there is some scripted destruction you don't get bored because there is some freshness in revisiting an old area. I believe they reused content due to costs and hardware limits. I became tired with Warrior Within due to the long journeys traversing the same levels back and forth and the repetition of the enemies. Tomb Raider got me hooked in because it manages to offer something new every time you revisit places.

The puzzles are easy to understand. You take some minutes in trial and error until you see the solution. It seems that they have applied some rule of "Every tomb must be solved in two steps". Every puzzle in the game follows this principle of having to understand two parts to solve it. To compare, Warrior Within and Sands of Time had much more complicated giant structures for the player to traverse.

I dropped PoP The Two Thrones because I got tired of excessive QTE to finish off every enemy. In TR there is QTE, but you can skip it. Only in boss fights the QTE are mandatory. Placing icons on screen also make QTEs easier to land. In PoP TTT they relied on a screen filter and it was much easier to miss them.

In between Remedy games and Tomb Raider I prefer the latter. The thing with Remedy is that they fill their games with TVs and documents or papers to read everywhere. It's rather disruptive to the game's flow. In TR all relics are limited to 3 lines of text at most, while the diary logs never scroll down more than one page and there is the voice narrating it. In Alan Wake I couldn't be bothered to find all the thermos. On the other hand, in TR I wanted to explore everything. The fact that TR rewards with XP and points also makes exploration much more rewarding than in Alan Wake.

The part where Lara escapes a burning down castle was much better executed than what was done in Max Payne 3 during the building in flames part for me. However, I couldn't believe that the same mistake from MP3 happened in TR. In MP3 there is a scene where the camera shifts to another angle and Max is walking upstairs. Many players were left confused about why was Max dying there. It's because the shift in the camera angle makes the player think that it's a cutscene and you don't have control over the character. In TR the same thing happens when the camera shifts to an angle facing Lara's face and she is running on a collapsing bridge. The camera angle gives the player the impression that they are watching a cutscene and it does begin as one, but without any warnings you are given back the control over the character.

Hollywood cliche:

• Lara falls down numerous times and never breaks a single bone. She should be completely scarred after so many falls from incredible heights

• Heroic deaths. NPCs that sacrifice themselves. But all that to give the player a wrench? In hindsight, Gears of War trilogy had better reasons for an NPC to sacrifice themselves.

Bugs:

• The 2D map is deceptive in some occasions. Without the Z axis you don't know if the collectible that you are looking for is above or under where you currently are.

• Some terrible collision bug in the Tomb of the Lost Adventurer. Something goes wrong with the collision in the airplane.

• Sometimes Lara walks two more steps and falls off the chasm. I don't know why modern games have issues like this.

• Some collision bug with the camera. When I went to the mission to recover an item to the right side of the beach. On my way back the camera got stuck, while Lara continued back to the beach.

Goofs:

• TressFX and yet, the hair is "glued" to Lara's head when she is held upside down

• Skulls floating on water. Are they made of plastic?

• After you escape from the burning down castle there is a turret. For some odd reason walls of wood are bullet proof, while other things made of wood are completely destroyed by the incoming fire.

• Bonfire under heavy rain?