Lara Croft has never looked so cool and with the firepower of the Xbox ONE, Tomb Raider: Definitive Edition doesn’t just look like it means business, it delivers an epic adventure that blurs the lines between gaming and movies. With a long and grizzly campaign and the potential of the online multiplayer game modes, it’s going to keep you jumping and fighting for survival for a long time to come.
Combine that with a young graduate Lara Croft and an eerie, storm struck island horror to swathe through and you’ve got a brilliant return to gaming for our long-standing pin-up girl. It’s the epic prequel reboot that the franchise needed and with it’s next gen mantle sheen it makes for a stunning entry to the year’s game releases, keeping us all entertained in the lull between the release of the launch games and the next wave of epic new titles like Titanfall and Destiny.
Storyline
The plot for the campaign mode could easily be that of a big budget action adventure movie, but equally it’s the perfect resetting of the clocks for the Lara Croft storyline. Starting out with Lara on her first professional field trip to find the lost civilisation of Yamatai, her ship is taken into stormy waters as she leads the expedition into the Dragon’s Triangle to follow her theory on the location of the island kingdom. When the ship gets decimated in the squall, the party are washed up on the island that they’d set out to find, but things get a whole lot messier before they can celebrate their discovery.
Upon landing on the island, Lara is kidnapped by one of the crazed inhabitants and from here on in it gets pretty grim as the young heroine must find the strength to survive the ordeal and cope with the wave after wave of islander baddies who are out to stop the expedition from leaving the island. The mystery builds throughout the game as you find out little truths about the story of the settlers and their relationship with the pseudo-deity, Queen Himiko, who inspired the myth of the island.
It’s a cinematic adventure that draws you into the main campaign brilliantly, keeping you fighting for survival with the odds seemingly stacked against you. The characters are pretty rich and the back story to the island is seemingly steeped in history, myth and legend, which adds to the solidity of the game. This flows in well with the premise of the online multiplayer mode of Tomb Raider: Definitive Edition, which pits the crash survivors against the island solaris with a variety of different objectives.
Storyline review: 5/5
Gameplay
Tomb Raider games have always been 3rd person adventurers, but in the Definitive Edition the free flowing gameplay gives Lara Croft the best set of moves she’s had to date. These start out fairly basic to begin with, but she’s a quick learner as she adapts rapidly to the need to survive, mastering long jumps, climbing, bow and arrow attacks, gun fire and bush-craft skills as she goes. This adds to the varied nature of the gameplay as you face a series of escalating challenges in a bid to make it through the devastation of the ordeal.
The genius of the smooth movement and development of Lara as she makes her way through the game is added to by a healthy chunk of puzzle solving that you’ll need to do to make it off the island alive. It’s a feature that continues on the tradition from previous entries to the Tomb Raider series, but in the Definitive Edition it’s definitely the best we’ve seen to-date, whether you need to figure out arcing a lamp through a high window to blast through to the next room or work out using a mechanism to escape the caves.
While just making your way around the island, working out puzzles and developing new skills is fun enough, the game really comes into its own when you’re facing up against the enemy. Every encounter is different and for the majority of them you’ll have a number of options to dispatch them, ranging from a silent and deadly delivery of arrows to an all out gun fight that’ll see you literally scrambling for Lara’s life.
The frantic close-quarters cinematic moments will leave you wildly flicking the analogue sticks and mashing buttons to stop everything from a wolf tearing out your throat or a bad-guy islander from stabbing you coldly. There’s also the odd one or two sneaker moments where you’ve just got to make it by the enemy without being spotted, which combined makes for a whole lot of action adventure brilliance.
In addition to the main campaign, which is the more significant element of the gameplay, there is also a set of online multi-player options that range from team death matches to objective based team games. While the games themselves are fun and engaging, the online experience isn’t great at the moment as it can be a struggle to find enough online player to scrape together a decent game unless you bring all of your friends to the party, making it a bit frustrating. Hopefully as more people get into playing the multiplayer modes more potential teammates will improve this element of the game, but right now it’s bringing the review score down a little.
Gameplay review: 4.3/5
Graphics
The next gen port of what was already shaping up to be a bit of a classic has instilled even more greatness into the game and the super charged graphics re-skin is a big part of that. It isn’t quite as all embracing as dedicated titles like Ryse: Son of Rome or Forza Motorsport 5 in terms of its use of the graphics capabilities of the next gen consoles, but it does look impressive throughout.
The storm struck island has got a lifelike feel and there are some really cool embellishments that bring the visuals to life. As well as the weather element, fire is a big part of the game and looks real whether its the torch you often use to make your way through dark areas or work out puzzles, or the massive explosions that occasionally engulf the game, and sometimes Lara too.
It’s not all perfect as every now and again you spot a bit of an angle where you should be seeing perfectly rounded skin, but on the whole these are rare and only vaguely noticeable. However, the additional quality of the rendering and fine tuning of the granularity of the details in the graphics have definitely given the game another lease of life.
Graphics review: 4/5
Tomb Raider: Definitive Edition is a great entry to the next gen world, bridging the gap between the console launch window, where we had a big bumper pack of games released, and the next big entries set to hit the shelves in spring 2014. For a lot of gamers that already played it on the PS3 or Xbox 360, you might not be inclined to go through it all again, but for anyone that missed it, or for big fans of it first time around, this has got the potential to be a big entry to the start of 2014 gaming.
The good news is that the game’s sequel, Rise Of The Tomb Raider, has also been confirmed, giving Lara Croft Fans even more action adventure and survival thrills to tackle.
Tomb Raider: Definitive Edition review: 4.4/5
