Okay, I'm going to go into my issues with this game and why I have no intention of playing it. And believe it or not, it has absolutely nothing to do with any attempted rape scene.
I've been a fan of the
Tomb Raider games since playing the first one on the Sega Saturn. Until this one, I had bought and played every
Tomb Raider game with the exception of
Angel of Darkness (and despite hearing about how bad it was I still want to play that). The
Legend/Anniversary/Underworld trilogy are my favorite games in the franchise despite what popular opinion believes (I never saw anything about the gameplay that said it needed to be scrapped and overhauled). So I had pretty much built up in my mind the type of person that Lara Croft is. (I refuse to use the phrase "badass" because it has long since suffered the same fate as
"bling bling".) I have no problem with the idea retooling Lara Croft to bring in a new wave of fans. I have no problem with the idea of showing Lara at an earlier point in her life where she doesn't have all the answers and needs help from others. I have no problems with Lara being shown at a point in her life where she's unsure of herself, not knowledgeable of the dangers she faces and, yes, fearful for her life when she is threatened. All those actually sound like an interesting and unique experience.
But I have
HUGE problems with the way this game seems to execute those ideas.
Let's start with Lara's new look. Now I will admit that the previous character design (i.e.: Mega-boobage) caught my attention when I first saw it, but I was very quickly able to look past it to what the character herself is supposed to be. Since then, I've come to look at it the same way as Solid Snake's mullet or Alex Mercer's hoodie, it's just there. Then came the release to show off Lara's new "realistic" look. Now if you're going to choose to do that, then just do it. If you're going to answer the inevitable questions that people will have about the change and why you did it, that's also fine. What you don't do is promote that on the forefront of your advertising among things that you're going to "right the wrongs" the previous games did. And then have media outlets already trumpet this as a godsend despite the fact that it doesn't have any impact on the game itself. All it succeeds in doing is alienating myself as a previous fan by making me look like the only reason I'm a fan is because of the T&A factor, and I don't appreciate that.
So now that you've lost me as a potential customer by insulting the games that made me a fan in the first place and my admiration for them, let's see if you can try to win me back by telling me what differences your game has to offer. And that's when I hear things like "survival horror". And what do I think when I hear "survival horror"? I think of games like
Resident Evil,
Silent Hill, and
Fatal Frame. Games where you're alone in an dark, enclosed environment, wading through tight spaces, constantly being on guard for whatever horror is waiting for you around that dark corner you can't quite see around. This is not something that should be a primary feature in a
Tomb Raider game. It can be there in little sporadic moments for tension, but not as the main focus of the game. Then as more details about the game come out, I hear comparisons that it plays like a female version of
Uncharted. Let me explain why this is not automatically a good thing. When I play a
Tomb Raider game, here's what I commonly expect to see mostly. A vast, wide open area (outdoor or indoor) where I can take the scenery in. Solving large, complicated puzzles to open a pathway into an ancient ruin and avoiding booby traps while engaging in the occasional gunfight to keep you on your toes. It's slow and methodical, but it gives you time to think. Now I haven't played the
Uncharted games (I don't own a PS3), but from what I've seen, they're kind of like
Tomb Raider but more action oriented. The exotic locales are there, but it seems more concerned with how soon it can get Nathan Drake into shooting something or fighting someone first, and dealing with solving puzzles second. The opening to
Uncharted 2 has Drake wake up on a train that's dangling off a cliff and the first thing you need to do is climb up it before it falls. That's great for
Uncharted because that's its defining characteristic. That's what separates it from
Tomb Raider and gives each game its own identity. And if a brand new game franchise wants to copy elements from either one or both, that's one thing. But to see an established game franchise lose the element that made it unique and try to become a clone of the other?
Well, what would be your response if someone said this: Do you know what fighting games like
Street Fighter,
Tekken,
Virtua Fighter,
King of Fighters,
Soul Calibur and
Dead or Alive need? Over the top gore, the ability to show bones snapping, and mutilating finishing moves that kill your opponent in the bloodiest and most violent way. That would make them so much more awesome. Why not? It works in
Mortal Kombat.
And finally, there's the characterization of Lara herself. Now as I said before, I have no problem with Lara being portrayed in her early days as someone whose nervous about being in over her head in dangerous situations. But to go so far to the other extreme? To see her begin to lose it when she accidentally impales herself while trying to escape a trap? To watch her completely flip out when something or someone tries to drag her into a cave that she's trying to get out of? To see her have an emotional breakdown when she realizes that no one is coming to save her and she has to get out this on her own? To watch her apologize to a non-threatening deer she killed as some weak justification for why she will nonchalantly gun down bears, tigers, and wolves that will try to kill her in the future? That's the character development that will lead her into becoming the cool confident thrill-seeking Lara that mostly knows of the potential danger that she can get in and tries to plan ahead for that danger, or can figure her way out of a situation on the fly? This Lara that "didn't seek adventure, adventure sought her"? I'm not buying it. I'm not buying that the Lara we knew started out like this, or that this Lara will become that. This Lara appears to be on her way to becoming a cold-blooded killer who wears a permanent scowl on her face, growls every word she says and is willing to gun down any strange guy that looks at her funny if the local cops happen to be looking the other way. And even if they do try to show little signs that somehow this does become the Lara we know, there's a reason why
Batman Begins wasn't just two hours of constant scenes of little Bruce Wayne having pants wetting nightmares of the guy that killed his parents coming after him, only to end with him realizing that he "needed to get his shit together" and leave for his globetrotting training sessions on the hope that there will be a sequel that has him coming back as the Batman that we all know. Now all they had to do was to get me to give this game a chance was to remove this Lara and replace her with another female character. Just have you play as her without changing anything about the game but her name. Create a brand new character, use one of the other female characters in this game's party. Hell, you can still call it
Tomb Raider (if a character's name is not in the title of a story, then it's not mandatory that they be in it). But this is Lara Croft we're talking about. If you want me to accept your Lara Croft as more than just some cheap marketing ploy, you better damn sure know what you're doing.
Now I know the argument is going to come up saying that I'm judging the game solely on the trailers and they don't represent the final game. And you're right, they don't represent the final game. But what they do represent are the parts of the game that are supposed to convince me into buying the final game. And in that, they failed miserably. I've read everything up to and including the review of the final game on this site to try and convince me that this game is worth playing. And I'm still not convinced. What if the trailers for
The Avengers (Assemble) implied that the movie was nothing but "Watch Scarlet Johansson in tight black leather for two and a half hours"? It doesn't matter if that wasn't what the final product was or not. That's what you advertised your product as. And if you lose potential customers that were on the fence because of that, how is it their fault and not yours?
