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Latest Blog Post
First Thoughts On Tomb Raider
Continuing the trend of everyone wanting to be Batman, we now have a grittier and more realistic Laura Croft reboot.
Shipwrecked on an island in the middle of a storm Laura immediately manages to find shelter, start a fire and kill a deer. She's a better Boy Scout than I ever was.
So Laura finds her friend's camcorder that just happens to have survived the storm and just happens to have an unfinished documentary on the entire crew? Kind of cheesy, but at least they were trying to come up with a logical reason for flashback cutscenes.
It's amazing how much abuse Laura has to absorb in these cutscenes. First hour of the game and she has already nearly drown, been shipwrecked, been knocked out, lit on fire, impaled with rusty metal and stepped in a bear trap. I can only imagine one of the writers was going through some pretty extreme relationship trouble during development.
Did I mentions Laura actually lit herself on fire as part of an escape plan? Tough girl cred established.
Larua's most valuable skill is definitely her ability to survive sudden hundred foot drops during cutscenes, a talent which the game likes to show off as often as physically possible. Her back must be made of reinforced steel and her skin out of kevlar.
Her second most valuable skill is probably the ability to field modify hand guns using nothing but airplane scraps, twigs and a campfire. Must have spent some time training under MacGyver.
The salvage and upgrade system is actually pretty nice. But seriously, why are there handgun mods lying around an ancient Japanese tomb? Wait, is that a World War 2 outpost? Alright, good enough to keep my suspension of disbelief going.
As far as I can tell, the main purpose of the collectable artifacts is to help remind you that Laura is, in fact, an archeologist. Otherwise you might mistake her for some sort of Amazonian warrior queen chosen by the gods themselves to lay waste to mankind.
Laura may be as indestructibly tough as your average action hero, but at least the game tries to make her feel human by giving her a few scars and scrapes. And sure, she may be jumping twelve foot chasms mere minutes after nearly losing her leg, but at least they made her limp for a few feet first.