Poll: Lara Croft / Tomb Raider is 21 years old

[BFG10K]

I picked up Lara Croft Go during the Steam sale and just finished it. It’s a delightful game with lovely aesthetics:

Spoiler

It’s a turn-based, grid based, isometric platformer but it still feels like a Tomb Raider game, complete with handstand and rolling animations. Even the sound effects for finding secrets are the same.

My only gripe is that in the last two chapters, some of the levels were too hard and required excessively complex steps to solve. I had to use the hint system to get through some of them.

But it’s definitely a solid game overall.

 

[BFG10K]

I replayed Tomb Raider Anniversary a little while ago but it didn’t hold up as well as I remembered. Many checkpoints were unfair and it was very easy to lose a lot progress if you made a single mistake. This especially applied to certain Egyptian levels.

I’ve also just finished replaying Tomb Raider 2013 and I still really enjoyed it. The checkpoints are much fairer and the navigation acrobatics are a lot more straightforward. I collected all of the items on the maps and fully upgraded Lara and her guns. The graphics look nice too:

Spoiler

Going forward, I’ve deleted all the other Tomb Raider games but kept 2013 installed. I'll look at picking up Rise of Tomb Raider if/when they remove Denuvo from it.

 

[calyco]

I loved Anniversary and 2013 when they came out, 2013 one of the few games I 100%. Then Rise came out bigger and badder than ever, combat Lara is frigging awesome.

 

[shortylickens]

I prefer someone with a much better brain-to-boob ratio, but sadly there just arent that many in the video-game world.

In fact I sometimes wonder if she'd have been as popular without that massive programming error so many years ago.

 

[mindless1]

I prefer someone with a much better brain-to-boob ratio, but sadly there just arent that many in the video-game world.

In fact I sometimes wonder if she'd have been as popular without that massive programming error so many years ago.

Absolutely! The gamer is the brain, so character boobs should shrink in real time if the gamer makes bad decisions, to maintain a good brain-to-boob ratio. Unintelligent women characters should have correspondingly smaller boobs to maintain the ratio, but to be fair to the winning gamers, their character should have bigger boobs based on the same ratio.
You'd spot a winner a mile away because of the big boobs.

 

[cmdrdredd]

Thinking about it, I don't believe I played more than a demo for the original titles that released on the PS1

 

[shortylickens]

Thinking about it, I don't believe I played more than a demo for the original titles that released on the PS1

You arent missing out. Its a mediocre 3D platformer that only improved so far as its titties are concerned. The jumping in Far Cry and Just Cause are better and they also have guns and cool stuff.

 

[cmdrdredd]

You arent missing out. Its a mediocre 3D platformer that only improved so far as its titties are concerned. The jumping in Far Cry and Just Cause are better and they also have guns and cool stuff.

Yeah I remember the tank controls. I think by the time I did play the demo I had played Metal Gear Solid and Syphon Filter which had better control.

 

[BFG10K]

The games are currently on sale on GOG and Steam.

 

[mikeymikec]

I completed Tomb Raider 2 recently (the 1997 version). While it is chock-full of puzzles (good, though unfortunately I remember many of them), IMO it suffers from not enough plot; you can go for hours without a cut scene or anything about the plot coming up. Back in 1997 this wasn't so bad because it was the first fully 3D game I played, and it was essentially a new genre (puzzle-solving platform game in 3D) so back then I would have been in awe of the graphics (I still remember watching the opening 3D scene for the first time), but these days the graphics are obviously very basic relatively speaking and the genre is AFAIK completely dead. The 'Temple of Xian' level is absolutely relentless for platform work and puzzles

I'm now trying to complete Tomb Raider Legend for the second time since I bought it. Its control system sucks: If Lara is scaling a wall sideways from right to left across the screen, the keys work in directions relative to the camera angle, then the game forces a camera angle change and the controls change. This is so much freaking fun when you have to do something time-sensitive. Then there are the painfully annoying interactive cutscenes. The dialogue is also painful to listen to, especially when you're re-doing a particular section after dying and you keep hearing the same "joke" over and over and over again. This time around, my system is easily capable of handling the "next generation content", which includes... 2D rope textures. I expected that in a 1997 game. The game has also crashed about 20 times so far and I'm halfway through it; sometimes disabling "next-gen content" is the only way to progress through a level. I also find the game developers' apparent complete lack of knowledge of how electricity works to be amusing... I'm pretty sure there are ten year olds out there who could point out the mistakes they made.

I don't understand how some people here criticise the older TR games for their control system yet think Legend/Underworld has a good control system. On the PC, very, very occasionally does the auto camera angle in TR1-5 come unstuck and do something unhelpful, and the controls remain consistent. Legend/Underworld gives a manual camera angle yet still screws it up and the control system to boot. On TR1-5, the camera is facing in the direction that Lara is facing, so if you hold down forward and press jump, she will jump *forward*, the gamer can see in the direction that they want her to jump, and the camera stays on point even if the gamer changes the direction of the jump even in mid flight. I'm wondering what is "clunky" about this.

One thing I found amusing about Legend was summed up perfectly in the Deadpool game:

 

[BFG10K]

The dialogue is also painful to listen to, especially when you're re-doing a particular section after dying and you keep hearing the same "joke" over and over and over again. This time around, my system is easily capable of handling the "next generation content", which includes... 2D rope textures. I expected that in a 1997 game. The game has also crashed about 20 times so far and I'm halfway through it; sometimes disabling "next-gen content" is the only way to progress through a level.

Next generation content is broken in the game. There's a patch to fix the crashing, but the placement of many objects (e.g. ropes, moving mechanisms) is still glitched and makes the game basically unplayable.

I agree with the checkpoint problem, though Legend/Underworld isn't quite as bad. There are sections in Anniversary (Egypt, Natla's mines) where the save system is grossly unfair. If a game has an easy difficulty, it should never require elite gameplay to progress. I don't think that jump sequence near the end is even possible without exploiting the grapple glitch, and even then it only works about 50% of the time.

2013 is much better designed in this respect. Of course the best system is having save anywhere, like the early PC versions did.

I don't understand how some people here criticise the older TR games for their control system yet think Legend/Underworld has a good control system. On the PC, very, very occasionally does the auto camera angle in TR1-5 come unstuck and do something unhelpful, and the controls remain consistent. Legend/Underworld gives a manual camera angle yet still screws it up and the control system to boot. On TR1-5, the camera is facing in the direction that Lara is facing, so if you hold down forward and press jump, she will jump *forward*, the gamer can see in the direction that they want her to jump, and the camera stays on point even if the gamer changes the direction of the jump even in mid flight. I'm wondering what is "clunky" about this.

The old versions are inferior for two reasons:

1. No auto-grab. Having to constantly hold a key or else Lara falls makes the game unplayable.
2. No mouse look which makes things like swimming unplayable, and simple direction changes a chore compared to using subtle mouse movements. It's like trying to play something like Quake without mouselook. It might've been possible back in the day, but now it's unusable.

Regardless of the control system, there's one fundamental fact in all of the games: the camera can't be inside a wall, nor can it be inside Lara. So that means if you're backed against a wall, the camera has no choice but to face in a different direction, which is usually at Lara's face.

I think they should allow the camera to go into walls like how some ARPGs make solid objects transparent when necessary to maintain character visibility. That way the camera would always be behind Lara, and forward would always mean forward.

But despite the flaws, the series is definitely one of the "big guns" of early 3D gaming, and it deserves accolades for that.

 

[mikeymikec]

The old versions are inferior for two reasons:

1. No auto-grab. Having to constantly hold a key or else Lara falls makes the game unplayable.

Having completed TR 1 - 5 multiple times each, I have to say, I don't find holding down a key to be difficult. The only "unplayable" bit I found in TR 1-5 was the final level in 5 is riddled with bugs, and the only way I've ever found to navigate it successfully (ie. without triggering bugs) was to read the walkthrough. So while I enjoy some of its levels, the final one ruins the game enough for me that I've played TR5 very little over the years.

No mouse look which makes things like swimming unplayable, and simple direction changes a chore compared to using subtle mouse movements. It's like trying to play something like Quake without mouselook. It might've been possible back in the day, but now it's unusable.

I agree that sometimes a free mouse look would make things a little easier, but I just turn Lara around when I want to look around... mostly how a normal person would look around I also hold down numpad-zero and use the arrow keys to get a first-person look in TR1-5.
I'm glad to read that I wasn't the only one to find next-gen content to be embarrassingly broken in Legend. Is it broken in Underworld too? I haven't bothered to play Underworld since I found the demo to work in the same way as it did in Legend.

Having completed Legend again, my main criticism of it is the control system and the business of controls reversing because of a game-induced camera angle change. The control system's inadequacies are exacerbated by the game's reliance on it by having tonnes of movement-based challenges. I have to say though, while there aren't anyway near as many puzzles in Legend as say TR2, Legend has way more puzzles than TR2013. I was going to add that the game is too short, but frankly with the amount of crashes I've experienced, then getting caught on scenery (especially with the final boss), while it would have irritated me if I had paid the full game price originally and got less than 10 hours out of it, I'm glad that it's over as I was close to rage-quitting on a few occasions.

 

[Skel]

Wow, early polygon graphics are rough.

It's amazing how sometimes I forget how far games have come graphics-wise. I've been looking at some of the 4k stuff, and while it's nice it hasn't really blown my skirt up.. then I see this and am reminded on how things used to look. It's amazing how all these little improvements aren't noticed until compared over a longer timeline..

 

[BFG10K]

Is it broken in Underworld too?

No, Underworld uses a different engine which works fine.

 

[mikeymikec]

It's amazing how sometimes I forget how far games have come graphics-wise. I've been looking at some of the 4k stuff, and while it's nice it hasn't really blown my skirt up.. then I see this and am reminded on how things used to look. It's amazing how all these little improvements aren't noticed until compared over a longer timeline..

I think the greatest advance has been facial expressions: Even from the point where eyeballs were 3D rendered and so became movable, if one compares say Legend to 'The Witcher 3', we've gone from Ken dolls / puppetry style expressions to pretty freaking realistic.

 

[mikeymikec]

I just noticed the reviews on Steam for TR Legend: 88% "very positive"?!? How?

Grr. It seems I cannot write a review on Steam for a game because I have not purchased it on Steam.

 

[BFG10K]

Shadow of Tomb Raider first teaser released: https://youtu.be/vuemrb_ur2w

Also the first three games will be getting a free remaster based on the mobile versions: https://www.dsogaming.com/news/tomb...e-a-new-3d-engine-will-be-free-to-old-owners/

 

[Arshad Hussain]

ROTR is good game packed with great gameplay and dynamics but it can never compare thrills that Tomb Raider 2 had.

 

[BFG10K]

Anybody else seen the movie yet? I’d recommend it, especially if you liked Tomb Raider 2013. The movie is directly based off the game and even has a few action sequences that mimic actual gameplay. I’d give it a solid 4 out of 5.

 

[mikeymikec]

I picked up TR Underworld at budget pricing on Steam. I've got someway through the Thailand level, but I've got to an area that requires a fair bit of acrobatics and the camera system is determined to give me motion sickness when trying to shoot lizard things or walk near corners, or flat-out refuse to show me what she can see in the only direction she's allowed to jump.

In the last instance, if the aim was to make me feel like Indiana Jones in this scene, it succeeded:

I can't honestly see me playing this game any further, at least not in the foreseeable future. Maybe I'll complete it out of boredom in 30-minute runs over the next ten years.

 

[BFG10K]

So everyone probably knows about Shadow of Tomb Raider: https://www.tombraider.com/en-us

But check out Dagger of Xian: http://tombraider-dox.com/

It's the Tomb Raider Anniversary feel combined with a re-imagined Tomb Raider 2 first level. The polished design has gorgeous Unreal 4 visuals, and feels like a real tomb raiding experience. No garbage Venice/Mafia.

It's made by a small team of fans and is absolutely free, which makes it even more amazing. It takes about one hour to finish and I highly recommend it.

 

[BFG10K]

I'll just leave these here...

Spoiler

 

[aigomorla]

lol i remember a long time ago, one of the biggest debate in gaming was who is the true queen in gaming..

Tifa from FF7 vs Lara from TR vs Chun Li from Street Fighter.

 

[BFG10K]

Tomb Raider bundle sale, includes everything except Shadow: https://store.steampowered.com/bundle/2823/Tomb_Raider_Collection/

As an aside, it was surprising to see Shadow go on sale so quickly. A whole bunch of pissed off reviews popped up quickly as a result.

 

[mikeymikec]

I picked up Rise of the Tomb Raider a year or so ago cheaply on Steam and just tried to play it. I have never encountered a game as relentless as this. I swear I've just encountered the more nerve-wracking moments of every Tomb Raider game I've ever played packed into the first 15-20 minutes of this game.

I'm wondering if I'm mis-remembering TR2013 and maybe it was just as relentless as Rise but that its opening plot made its pacing make a lot more sense and so I forgave it on that point. In this game the pacing seems entirely forced and unnecessary, as if it ought to be enjoyable. Judging by the votes for it, I'm guessing that some people do find that enjoyable, and I just need to accept that this franchise has moved on to a different audience.