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Tomb Raider Preview for PlayStation 3 (PS3)

Tomb Raider Preview for PlayStation 3 (PS3)

A Bloody Burnout

Crystal Dynamics wants us to remember that Lara Croft is a living (albeit digital) person, and that, as skilled a survivalist as she may be, she was not brought up under adversity. It seems, then, that the developers are determined to break her, as the experiences they subject her to are chained together into a sort of unending parade of horror and distress that blends together on the very edge of believability. This is a bit of a problem, since the entire point of the game is to be a more believable take on Lara Croft, the Tomb Raider who, over the course of her career, has confronted the supernatural and superhuman alike.

Tomb Raider Screenshot

The demo we saw at E3 began with Lara standing atop a precipice on a mountainside, gazing out into the distance. The dev takes control and guides her as she’s clutching her bloody side. She limps down the path until she sees, in the distance, the remains of the crashed ship she arrived on, as well as a dinghy that has made it to shore, revealing that others from the trip have made it to the island. She continues on her way, cautiously balancing her way across a thin fallen tree that bridges a gap. This is not the confident, self-assured Lara we used to control, who would casually jump many times her height over precarious drops.

A bit further down, Lara comes across what appears to be a World War II-era plane, decrepit and hanging upside-down from strands of ivy in a waterfall. She makes her way up it, along the body and the wing as pieces tear off and fall to the ground hundreds of yards below, the entire chassis shifting just from the force of her weight.

Tomb Raider Screenshot

Can we call this the Uncharted edition of E3, yet? Between Tomb Raider and Star Wars 1313, set-piece platforming seems to be the newest trend in games. At least with Tomb Raider, the relationship is somewhat expected: Nathan Drake’s adventures have always seemed to borrow a certain something from Lara Croft’s.

Making it across, Lara barely avoids the plane’s heavy wing as it comes crashing down. As the demo goes on, Lara acquires a radio from supplies left behind by her companions, a bow from a corpse suspended above a stream (again, this seems to be another excuse to have her hit the ground hard and make us wince in sympathetic pain). She finds arrows nearby, hunts a deer (which she has to finish off up close and carve up herself), then finds shelter as the sun sets and builds a fire using her last match (also found among the supplies with the radio).

Tomb Raider Screenshot

I could go on describing the demo—the encounter with a crazed old man who holds one of Lara’s friends hostage, the wolves that attack her when she gets her leg caught in a bear trap, the group’s decision to split up, which leads Lara and her professor friend to a better understanding of the island, but also directly into the hands of a group that takes them captive until Lara kills their apparent leader during an attempted rape (the first human, it would seem that she has ever killed)—but this would certainly get repetitive. It does so when experienced directly, so I can only imagine it’s doubly so secondhand.

More to the point, the game paints Lara as almost hysterical compared to her companions. Perhaps understandable given that she has seen one of her friends killed before her eyes (and more during the final demo sequence, when the tribe or clan they are captured by begins to kill them off, in response to Lara’s resistance), but it’s hard to imagine a developer making a game that paints a man in the same light. In fact, all of Lara’s male companions seem oddly oblivious to the danger of what is going on around them, hitting on both extremes with nary a measured response among them.

Tomb Raider Screenshot

Beyond that, there are still janky animations in a title that has been in development this long, including odd hitching while Lara is climbing across the plane. Yes, it’s been pushed back to 2013, but that was a very recent decision; it was to be a third quarter release until May of this year.

This is accompanied by a fairly transparent gameplay flow. It seems to move in direct, segregated states. Platforming/climbing, combat, shooting gallery, quick time events, puzzle-solving, resource gathering. Sometimes more than one of these bleeds into the other, but they felt fairly distinct in most of the demo Square Enix was showing.

There are tons of neat things going on, of course, with the bow and arrow providing a less reactionary means of ranged combat, forcing the player to focus and plan, and both a skill and a crafting system. Experience earned from a variety of actions in the game allows the player to buy new skills, such as arrow collection, with which Lara can recover arrows she has loosed into her foes. Crafting allows items to be improved and strengthened using scrap, which can aid in puzzle solving as well as in gameplay.

In the end, though, the focus seems to fall less on the gameplay and more on the experience, on being this wayward, imperiled young socialite as she becomes stronger. It’s telling, though, that the voice actress seems to have been made to provide more pants, screams, yells and moans of pain than dialogue, outright demanding pity from the audience. At the end of the demo, Lara is pinned to the ground by a man who, after her resistance to his advances, is ready to throttle her to death. They struggle for a gun and she manages to point it at his head until, pulling the trigger, she paints the ground and herself with his blood and grey matter. She stands and the camera centers on her horrified, blood-streaked face.

I know how this moment is supposed to make me feel, but instead I’m just numb. The rest of the demo, so densely packed with terrible things and so vocal and blatant about how they should be perceived, has put me into a state of emotional fatigue, and left me utterly desensitized to Lara’s plight.

Game Features:

  • It has superb physics-based gameplay.
  • A heart-pounding narrative in Lara’s most personal, character-defining adventure to date.
  • The games present a world in 3D: a series of tombs and other locations through which the player must guide Lara.

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