Best Of

"Ho. Lee. Crap." These three words (and yes, they must be pronounced as three) comprised the only thought I could process as I started Tomb Raider. _Ho. Lee. Crap. That is some pretty rendering. Oh, wait, that's a cinematic..._ _...Ho. Lee. Crap. The game is still gorgeous outside of cinematics._ These three words rattled around in my brain for long enough during the beginning that I stopped paying attention. "I'll come back later," I said to my brain, "and see if you've got any other opinions." An hour or two (or three... or who knows, I sure don't) later, I checked in. "Ho. Lee. Crap," my brain replied. _...Ho. Lee. Crap. I don't know where I want to look - the action or the backdrops._ Huh. Well, alright. I guess we'll try again later, brain. _You might not be able to tell, but this tooltip is not just painted onto the viewport - it's an object in the game that moves (with parallax and everything) as the camera moves. Squaresoft used to be famous for this sort of thing - programmatic events that only ever happened once throughout the game. Think the submarine mission from Final Fantasy VII, or the swordfight from the beginning of Final Fantasy IX._ _Ho. Lee. Crap._ As you can probably surmise, the story goes on like this for some time - I very quickly lost the ability to consciously process anything (including remembering to take more screenshots), due to my absorption into the story behind Tomb Raider... and the graphics behind Tomb Raider... and the character development behind Tomb Raider... and... and... See, I'm doing it again. Let's take a step back. Tomb Raider bears the Square-Enix name - both as a publisher, and as the owner of the developer, Crystal Dynamics. Now, "Square-Enix" is a name that conjures up mixed feelings in my heart - before they were Square, the better part of Square-Enix was known as Squaresoft. Squaresoft was responsible for some of the best story-based video games to grace my childhood. However, after a massive loss of money due to an entirely-CGI movie made well before its time, Squaresoft merged with another "RPG titan" and the resulting partnership immediately began cranking out some of the biggest letdowns of my gaming career (wtf was Final Fantasy Tactics Advance? How DARE you sully that name with a spiritual sequel so poor!). S-E's hallmark, however, is the story-based game. My favorite kind. And so, with a sort of optimistic fear in my heart, I loaded up Tomb Raider. Ho. Lee. Crap. You're introduced to Lara Croft through a cinematic. _Hmm,_ I thought. _Sam's voice acting is a little forced._ This marks what might have been the last negative thought I had throughout the game (okay, some of Matthias's lines were a little sketchy, too, and yeah, you gotta do a little suspension of disbelief for things like the 'rope arrow,' but these are pretty minor). Okay, seems good. We're meeting Lara Croft. We're watching Lara Croft interact with people. The thing is... this isn't Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, this is Lara Croft: Green Adventurer. This is Lara Croft before she was Lara Croft... and you are about to witness the transformation. _...Ho. Lee. Crap. That is some dark shit._ You play and watch Lara as she goes from "oh my god oh my god completely fucking terrified" to "mildly terrified but mostly just angry and vengeful," and the whole thing plays out like a symphony. Thing is, you're not the conductor of this symphony - you are a player. In the beginning, you're as scared of everything as Lara is - the game starts you off by forcing you to set yourself on fire, pull out a rusty spike from your abdomen, and limp-and-scramble your way out of a collapsing cave. Everything - EVERYTHING seems like it's about to kill you, and you only barely escape. Not once does Lara feel like she's overqualified for the job - for the first few hours, every single event is a harrowing, petrifying ordeal. You, as the player, feel a massive empathy in every situation - and let's talk about one of the major reasons why: The voice acting. Her voice acting is perfectly executed - PERFECTLY. Camilla Luddington hit the nail on the head SO HARD with this one. The various screams and cries Lara makes throughout the game mimic the intensity of the scene and events so well that I COMPLETELY forgot that I was listening to an actor - and this is usually one of the major, major, MAJOR complaints I have of most voice acting. Bravo, Camilla. What an incredible performance. Lara talks to herself, but it never feels forced - her monologues are the most natural thoughts you'd imagine. Her voice quakes in fear when faced with an awful surprise. She nearly has a meltdown after killing her first opponent. Expletives and exclamations are used when you would naturally use them - a huge triumph of writing. Even her breathing changes when she's scared. No line is ever extreme for the sake of being extreme (except maybe "Guard her with your life." Real cliche, Matthias). The supporting dialogue is another shining beacon in this already shiny masterpiece - guards talk back and forth to one another, shout at Lara, and do it all without succumbing to the usual 'GET BEHIND COVER' 'SHE'S OVER THERE' monotony of most modern voice writing. My favorite: after finding a rifle - a tremendous upgrade in weaponry - you feel like you MIGHT be strong enough to handle more than one bad guy at once without the frantic heart-racing terror that comes with facing armed bad guys down with a bow. Sure enough, you get a chance to do so... and when you gleefully whip out and unload with that lovely rifle in the middle of combat, you hear the most natural and outraged response: "WHERE THE FUCK DID SHE GET A FUCKING MACHINE GUN?!" You the real MVP, supporting voice actor. By the end of the game, Lara DOES become the Tomb Raider (or, to use the title the devs would prefer, a Survivor). As the game progresses, you become more and more a 'survivor.' Your clothes get tattered. You acquire more slices and bandages. You get covered in mud, blood, and rainwater. Lara stops relying on you for quick-time events for the more mundane mechanics (which is wonderful, because at some point you want to watch the action and not the buttons appearing on-screen). Screams and whimpers of fright fade, to make room for the silence of a hardened adventurer, or vengeful trash talk (oh man, when she found the grenade launcher - what a scene! "THAT'S RIGHT! RUN, YOU BASTARDS! I'M COMING FOR YOU ALL!"). Ho. Lee. Crap. One thing I was afraid of was the hide-and-seek aspect that many adventure games seem to have - you know the one. Assassin's Creed's 'collect all this useless bullshit for imaginary internet points.' Tomb Raider, however, does not disappoint. Other than the GPS caches, all the 'collection' stuff has a carrot to make you want to find it - _content._ Each random thing you find helps to paint a picture of the island that is now your prison. Lost diaries from Matthias or WWII soldiers, relics from 100AD, priceless fans and daggers or cheap knockoffs with "Made In China" stamped on the back - all of it gives you a reason to periodically pause the storyline and go in for a quick bout of sidequesting. This is one of the very, very few games where I pushed myself to collect damn near 100% of everything... which is really saying something, coming from a story addict. The thing that gets me is that somehow, Crystal Dynamics did a sequel. But... I mean... how? The major draw of this game for me was the character development - I've never SEEN development done this well, but... I mean, once Lara is the Tomb Raider, where do you take her from there? How do they build on that? The last quarter of the game was great and all - fair puzzles, beautiful landscapes, enjoyable firefights - but it didn't have the major development that the first three quarters did. How do you make a sequel based on the Lara from the last quarter of the game? A Lara who is already the absolute baddest of asses? What could she possibly grow into? One thing is certain - I will DEFINITELY be getting ahold of that sequel to see the attempt. With a first entry this good, Crystal Dynamics deserves my money for their second shot. Cause, I mean... Tomb Raider. Ho. Lee. Crap. _"We have worked our hardest to bring you the best game we could possibly make." It absolutely shows, and you should be proud._