![]() You will have to escape burning buildings. ![]() Where the cynical person would simply say that it is just copying elements from what games like Uncharted have done, a critically-minded person would counter that those games were themselves inspired by the original Tomb Raider. The main gameplay is your standard climb-and-shoot style that you would expect from a modern third-person action adventure game. ![]() It is a damn rare occurrence in this industry and should be applauded. She is a human being who happens to be female. She also never goes into the role of your typical man-shaming action girl who screams "girl power" while she kicks a guy in the nads. Unlike the blantant lies from the marketing, she is not the target of sexually aggressive advances. The enemies do not constantly throw out misogynistic insults. The camera doesn't overly focus on giving you cleavage shots, nor does it gravitate towards checking out her "lady lumps" when she climbs up ladders or the like. Not to say that she isn't an idealized one, but in the direction of a typical action movie hero not as an objectified sexual hunk of eye candy. ![]() Where once Lara Croft was used as the go-to short shorts wearing pin-up girl of the videogame world, here she is a real woman. Any concerns I had (that were enough to inspire writing an article on the matter) have been proven to be unfounded the more I played. The one thing I have no complaints about is the character of Lara herself. This is more of a minor pet peevish annoyance than a full-blown negative against the game. Luckily, the amount of time you spend with the side characters is quite minimal. It is an odd balance in that I never questioned that Lara herself cared about these people, just that the game never successfully gets the player to also care for them. They all exist primarily as one note human MacGuffins that are just there to give Lara enough reason to go the places she does. The muscular but gentle-souled non-white guy, the joke cracking nerdy guy, the tough black chick, perky asian chick, the arrogant uptight white professor, and so on. You could pull out a checklist of required after-school special diversity and go to town checking it off. The other characters on the other hand seem like they were printed out of the same one dimensional trope-omatic they used when writing episodes of Captain Planet. She has clear motivations, emotions, and an actual character arc that is enjoyable to experience. It is great in that Lara herself is a fully fleshed out human-type character person. In many ways the plot is both the best and worst thing in the game. So the story becomes one of survival where Lara must transform into the hero we know she is destined to become. A cult that kind of enjoys burning women alive in ritual for. Lara is traveling with a group in search of some fabled lost ruins and after a shipwreck, ends up marooned on an island that happens to have a crazed cult on it. Where the very first Tomb Raider (1996) introduced us to Lara Croft in the prime of her adventuring ways, this 2013 "Lara Croft Begins" version introduces us to her before she's set foot in a tomb, let alone done any raiding. However, the good lady Lara lucked into a second life by way of the one thing that seems to always happen when the entertainment industry machine has killed something through progressively terrible sequels. These downs were so low that we almost entombed poor Ms. Like any long-running entertainment franchise, Tomb Raider has had its ups and its downs.
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