Product Description:
After a brutal storm destroys the boat she was travelling on, a frightened young woman is left washed ashore on an unknown beach. On her own but not alone she has only one goal, to survive. Here begins the first adventure for a young and inexperienced Lara Croft in a story which charts the journey of an ordinary woman who finds out just how far she must go in order to stay alive.
Product Details:
- Designed to reboot the game series for both the new generation of gamers, as well as longtime fans
- Set before even the earliest of classic games in series, Tomb Raider serves as origin story for Lara Croft, detailing her metamorphosis from unsure young woman, to superstar adventurer
- Incorporates a variety of gameplay genres, including survival, stealth, melee and ranged combat, exploration, and more
- Utilize a variety of weapons, including bow and arrow, an ice ax, and pistol
- Grow Xbox LIVE gamer score as Lara pushes beyond the limits of human endurance and unravels the dark history of a forgotten island
Customer Reviews:
Tomb Raider Gets A Fresh Start By Jacob Warren
After being forced into a corner of mediocrity and shameless attempts and polygonal "sex appeal" the Tomb Raider franchise is finally given the chance to start anew with a fresh look at the beginnings of series protagonist Lara Croft.
To keep a long story short, this series reboot showcases Lara's transformation from an inexperienced young woman in search of adventure into a strong and unstoppable survivor. This isn't the unrealistically large-breasted Angelina Jolie look-alike who runs around in short-shorts with her belly button on display to appeal to lonely fanboys. This is Tomb Raider matured and honed to perfection. Adventure, danger, suspense, terror. And all centered around a well-rounded character (yes, Lara is finally a real character now).
Visually Tomb Raider is magnificent. Sure, there's a lot of browns and grays in many settings, but when the game opens up to the island the graphics showcase the wonderful designs crafted with such care at Crystal Dynamics.
Voice acting is great. Lara's portrayal (in both voice and motion-capture) is ahead of previous games by leaps and bounds. Sound design and music are generally excellent.
Finally, we have gameplay. Tomb Raider offers a welcome mixture of shooting, platforming, sneaking, and cinematic quick time events (QTE's). Many gamers dislike QTE's, and I understand why, but I personally welcome them when they are placed sensibly within the game. Tomb Raider gets it right, using these events to keep you on the edge of your seat. One wrong move and Lara dies, sometimes rather graphically.
On the whole developer Crystal Dynamics and publisher Square Enix have crafted a gem of a game that can be enjoyed by a new generation as well as series veterans. Tomb Raider is a force to be reckoned with once again, and I pity the next big action-adventure game that tries to do better.A Fantastic Effort from Square-Enix and Crystal Dynamics! Tomb Raider is a Winner By C.Raven
Square Enix has been pushing the envelope lately. Last year's Sleeping Dogs blended Grand Theft Auto-style driving and shooting and classic "True Crime" grit with elements of classic martial arts films, and Hitman: Absolution dropped players into the shoes of Agent 47 for the fifth time with stealthy gusto.
And then came Tomb Raider. Having a video game series spawn nine direct sequels is no small feat. But to hear it told on the internet and in a couple of magazines months before its release, this would have easily been one to pass on. Lara Croft is young, naive, fragile and vulnerable, not the dual-gun wielding, ass-kicking bombshell she has been for nine games and two movies now. Let me reassure you, there is plenty to love here.
After being shipwrecked in southern Japan, Lara Croft is knocked unconscious and taken prisoner by the indigenous tribe. Her crewmates are lost. She is alone. When the dust settles and Lara opens her eyes, she finds herself bound upside down, hanging from the ceiling with several corpses. In the first five minutes of play, she escapes her bats nest, falls a good thirty feet to the ground and lands on a broken femur, which pierces her through the side. From that scene, I was hooked. Even through the stumbling and near-misses that Lara experiences in the first 10% of her journey, I found myself unable to leave her side. Her struggle through the hardship makes a bond with the player that few games can match.
The first and foremost part of this game is survival. Lara will occasionally get hungry if you aren't keeping on top of things. Fortunately, food caches are so frequent in the game and wild animals are everywhere, so this shouldn't be an issue. Stealth can be a key factor, too. A couple of stealth kills can save you a good 10 minutes of combat in the late game.
There are some areas where the game falters. Combat is repetitive as hell, and the game doesn't reward diversity in combat like Devil May Cry, nore does it really nudge you into any particular tactics. Bullets and arrows kill things, and dynamite hurts when it blows you up. That's really all there is to it here.
The multiplayer portion of the game seems unnecessary, and unless you're a bored fanatic of Call of Duty, you won't find much to please you here. Most of the DLC available now revolves around online multiplayer (weapons & maps), which seems like an oversight in a primarily single-player game, and the modes aren't very diverse. As good as the single player game was, I feel like it could have been that much better had Tomb Raider not shipped with online multiplayer.
The game's setting is a small string of islands in the Dragon's Triangle in southern Japan. The tombs are diverse, from the dark underground tunnels to the World War II testing facilities to the makeshift shantytown. The optional ones don't exactly jump out at you: the game alerts you when you're near the entrance to one, and you can either continue on with the story or search for that hidden entrance. The rewards for completing tombs are just as you'd expect: a fancy ancient relic, some insight into the island's history, or both. Just as rewarding are some of the death sequences. Should you lead Lara Croft down the wrong path she will die, sometimes in an amazingly gory fashion that would make LIMBO proud.
Tomb Raider sounds amazing. Every bit of it. The voice acting was fantastic. Lara's every gasp, whimper and grunt seem unique, as if SEE had captured dozens of hours of Camilla Luddington falling down the stairs. Her dialogue is hilarious at times. After opening a sarcophagus near the middle of the game and reaping her putrid reward, Lara blurts out "I hate tombs!" The other crewmates and villains have equally great voice acting, but the standouts are the samoan Jonah Miava (voiced by Earl Baylon) and the cult leader Mathias (voiced by Robert Craighead). Just as important, the musical score is astounding. Jason Graves (composer for the Dead Space series, Alpha Protocol and F.3.A.R.) brings the story home with a mix of tribal drums and chilling strings.
After beating the game tonight, I came away only slightly disappointed. The final boss fight turned out to be misleading, and the final sequence of the game was a QTE. Unless you're a completionist or an avid fan of mediocre online shooters, you can be done with Tomb Raider in as little as 10-12 hours. For those who take the time to explore, though, it can be extremely rewarding.Lara Croft Gets Mature-In More Than One Way By W. freeman
I played a few of the Tomb Raider games and really didn't get into them much, i'm not sure if it's because I was playing as a girl? Not to sound sexist, or i just preferred Indiana Jones, and Drakes Fortune over her. I really enjoyed the Uncharted games and could probably go through them again. I think this game is actually better in different ways. Graphically I do find it to be better, and Square Enix have always been known for great graphics and atmosphere. One of my favorites being Just Cause 2. The game mechanics are smooth as silk, the aiming and shooting accuracy are much better than Drakes Fortune, along with the controls. Not to discredit those games, but this game seems more plausible (for a game), and has more of a humanistic side to it. You really feel what Lara is going through, and it has a lot more emotional in a survival sense. This game is more staying alive then just searching for things and shooting people. Although there is a lot of that as well. The hunting is great, even when your just doing nothing you can simply shoot rabbits, deer, birds and wolves to gain skill points. And find salvage to upgrade simple things like a knife or axe. Even though i'm somewhere in the middle of the game, i don't see my opinion going anywhere but up, but it's already as far as it can go.
This game, much like Drake, Resident Evil, Dead Space etc. is "extremely" engrossing, and just a joy to play. Without having some of the tedious tasks that the for mentioned games have. Yes there are many quick time events, but they are easy, and not nearly as frequently annoying as say Resident Evil 6. Save points are all over the place, and the autosave does more than enough so that you don't have to continuously repeat a task over and over. And the game is "fairly" easy. On another note when i say Mature i mean it, this isn't the innocent Lara portrayed in the other games, or even the movies. The is the rated R version. There is LOTS of violence, cursing, and other elements that make the game for adults. Which is great. It's about time we have an adult platforming adventure game, without going so overboard it's not enjoyable. Well this is the game. The graphics as i said are just amazing, i have it on PC, so i could test out my rig, then got it for 360, to enjoy sitting on the couch in front of the big screen with surround sound. Both look amazing, but of course the PC has higher resolution, and the detailing while amazing, can make it, well, almost unrealistic looking. Also platformers are much more fun on consoles IMO. I use my rig for FPS mostly. So pick this game up, there is plenty of gameplay time, and even downloadable content to keep you busy for many hours. I rarely buy "new" games, i always get used or wait till the price comes down. But Tomb Raider is definitely worth it. The only other game i plan on purchasing "new" is Bioshock Infinite, which looks also to be amazing.
Other perks
Using the bow, climbing, scaling cliffs, weapon upgrades, the thrill of the kill, the will to survive, and oh yeah. This is one of the hottest versions of Lara to date. You're just wanting a scene to watch her bathe, even though she's a bunch of pixels and polygons. HA. Maybe that will come later, or we'll have the Naked Raider DLC. Either way, incredible game, which i'll probably go through again, sometime in the summer. ;o) Play on!!
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