Lara engages in nearly as much combat as she does exploration, and the traversal aspect of the adventure feels greatly stripped down. But the balance is skewed, and the game's elements exist in very different proportions. On its surface, the new Tomb Raider seems much the same. The challenge of traversing these impressive-looking spaces is somewhat diminished when it's a step removed from Assassin's Creed's automated grappling. The original Tomb Raider saw players navigating complex labyrinths, navigating ancient traps and puzzles, and picking her way though a vast underground space in search of answers to an ancient mystery. They existed to liven up Lara's journey, whose essence was about exploration, not combat. Those encounters, whether with humans or wildlife encountered along the way, acted as punctuation. It had shooting, yes, but that didn't define the game. Yet no sensible person would ever call Tomb Raider '96 a shooter. (Even Lara's nemesis, Jacqueline Natla, turned out not to be truly human herself.) Lara collected quite a number of weapons during her adventure, and players found plenty of opportunities to put them to use. Lara took on any number of creatures both mundane and mystical throughout her journey, from bats and wolves to the bizarre skinless humanoid monstrosities of Atlantis, and of course the infamous earth-shaking T-rex. Each encounter with human characters in 1996's Tomb Raider proved to be memorable and significant, and every one represented a key moment in Lara's adventure.ĭespite this paucity of human targets, Tomb Raider '96 wasn't short on combat. There were no faceless mooks to kill in waves, and whenever you had to deal with several henchmen at once it made for a difficult and harrowing challenge. Not only that, each had a name: Larson, Jerome, the Kid, Pierre, and the Cowboy. Think back to the original Tomb Raider and, if the cobwebs of your memory haven't obscured the details, you'll recall that Lara Croft's debut outing saw her enter armed conflict with a total of five humans. In the course of surviving that single ambush beneath the spotlight glare, Lara guns down more people than she killed in the entirety of the 1996 game that launched the Tomb Raider series. But it feels bizarre in the context of a Tomb Raider game, even one coming after Crystal Dynamics' previous attempts to reboot Tomb Raider, Legend and Underworld. That's par for the course in contemporary games, especially those gunning (literally) to take a bite from Uncharted's format. Like most archaeology grad students, Lara Croft is effectively bulletproof as well as proficient in archery, small arms, heavy explosives, and brutal melee kills. Like her new inspiration Nathan Drake, Lara is forced into racking up a disproportionately enormous body count over the course of her adventure, wiping out entire hit squads of goons at a time. This style of shootout - one young woman against half a dozen gun-toting thugs (or more) - is repeated over and over again throughout the entirety of Tomb Raider. Lara survives, of course, or else it wouldn't be a very long game she clears the entire room with deadly force. "Light her up!" screams an unseen antagonist, blinding her with a flood lamp as six or seven men take aim and open fire. Some content, such as this article, has been migrated to VG247 for posterity after USgamer's closure - but it has not been edited or further vetted by the VG247 team.Ībout an hour and a half into Tomb Raider, not long after young protagonist Lara Croft is forced to kill a man for the first time in a desperate act of self-defense, she stumbles into an ambush. This article first appeared on USgamer, a partner publication of VG247.
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