pfister_ - tomb raider anniversary -- one hour review
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tomb raider anniversary -- one hour review
Tomb Raider Anniversary is a 3D platformer for the Xbox 360 developed by Crystal Dynamics and Buzz Monkey Software. It's also for the PS2, PSP, Wii, and PC, but I'm playing the 360 version. I hear the Wii and the PSP versions suck; your mileage may vary.
This is an interesting beast. The original Tomb Raider came out in 1996, the same year as Quake and Super Mario 64. I played it in 1997, and honestly didn't think much of it; the controls were pretty terrible, and the fresh wonder of an immersive 3D world wasn't there for me since I'd played Quake the year before. I didn't get more than a few levels in.
Super Mario 64 showed the world that camera-relative controls were the Right Thing for 3D platformers, but Core Design followed up on Tomb Raider with a sequence of more and more poorly-received cookie-cutter sequels that refused to learn that lesson, forcing the players to steer the purportedly lithe and athletic Lara Croft around as one would a tank. With Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness, they genuinely seemed to be attempting a design reboot, but that game was forced out the door in an unfinished state to match the release of of the associated film, Tomb Raider: Cradle of Life. After that disaster, Eidos pried the series from Core with its cold, dead hands, and gave it to Crystal Dynamics.
Pinching the platforming controls from Ubisoft's Prince of Persia: Sands of Time -- which was only fair, since Tomb Raider was largely inspired by the original Prince of Persia -- Crystal produced Tomb Raider: Legend, hailed by many as the first good game in the series since Tomb Raider, and hailed by me as the first good game in the series.
With Tomb Raider Anniversary we have an ostensible remake of the original game in the Legend engine. I don't know how close it's going to be -- and I don't remember the original that well to begin with, so I honestly may never know -- but what I'm hoping for, for historical purposes, is a game that modern gamers can use as a reference point. Tomb Raider hasn't aged well; no 3D platformer designed before the release of Super Mario 64 has. The developers can be absolved since they didn't know any better, but that doesn't help today's gamer, e.g. me, who recognizes Tomb Raider as a seminal game and wants to absorb what was great about it, but can't stand to play the game because of the terrible graphics and controls.
I'm thinking, though, that the developers of Tomb Raider Anniversary had a different priority in mind: to make a good game. And, you know, I'll settle for one of those too.
0:00 Dinosaurs in the attract mode! That's a little spoily, isn't it? I thought the appearance of the dinosaurs in the original story was supposed to be a big shock? I guess it's common knowledge today, though. I mean, I knew about them, despite not having played far enough to see them firsthand.
0:01 Hell, I hadn't expected this. The lack of visual fidelity in the rendering of human faces is bothering me. I'm sure they'd look fine to me if I were looking at the Wii or PS2 version, but something about booting up the 360 puts me in a different frame of mind.
0:03 Yep, same deal with the low-poly mountains at the start of the first level. Oh well. I'll probably get used to it.
0:04 When hanging from a ledge and shimmying, you can tap a button in rhythm to speed up your motion. It's good way to keep the player engaged and prevent the feeling that the game is wasting my time.
0:06 The grappling hook interface is a bit less engaging, though. The tutorial tells me to jump and press the grapple button, so I try that a few times and I either jump or grapple, depending on the amount of time between the button presses. It takes me a while to realize they mean jump forward, across the gap, then grapple. And of course on my first attempt at that, I miss and die.
0:08 Checkpoint. There's a big door up ahead with the guide standing in front of it. I talk to him a while, but he clearly doesn't want to be there. "I don't know how to open it. I'm only the guide." Eventually he throws me a hint. "We can go to the left." Your left or mine?
0:09 The camera's left, of course. He doesn't follow me.
0:12 I platform up to the top of the door and push a big button to open it. It's satisfying and doesn't take too long to figure out where to go, but I don't think that's so much a case of the level design being full of subtle cues as the puzzle just being easy. After I open the door, some wolves run out to eat the guide. In a cutscene, I leap down and start acrobatically murdering them. That would've been the perfect place to drop in a quick-time event, but they chose not to. How restrained of them! Legend was full of that stuff.
0:14 Nice variety of footstep sounds. For some reason the snow-crunching sound jumps out at me. As good, I mean, not as annoying and distracting, as you'd expect someone might mean when describing a footstep sound jumping out at them. I don't know, I just work here!
0:16 Killing some bats. Combat is pretty trivial, a matter of pressing left trigger to lock on and right trigger to shoot.
0:17 The bats keep coming. Usually this sort of game breaks up the gameplay into combat sections and platforming sections, for variety's sake. If I have to keep stopping my platforming to shoot down a bat every 15 seconds, I'm going to be annoyed. That was something Sands of Time did occasionally -- with bats, even -- and just barely got away with, so who knows what lesson other developers learned from that.
0:21 I'm going in circles. Confusing level layout -- made worse because there are actual platforming challenges going in circles. When I accomplish something, I expect to make progress, not be dumped right back where I started.
0:23 As it turned out, the path forward was the one with no challenges in the way at all. Mindfuck! Are they setting the stage for a gameful of expectation-defying design decisions? Oh, if only I could believe.
0:24 As I walk across a bridge, it breaks, I fall to the ground, and a wolf howls nearby. I don't see any wolves ahead of me, so my instinct is to fall back to the safe area until I can assess the situation. The musical sting comes right about as I realize that I can't get back to safety, and in fact the wolves were almost certainly just behind me. They turned out to be nearly as ineffective in combat as the bats, but that was still a very effective moment.
0:26 From a hanging position, Lara just spontaneously did this neat little deliberate flip-forward-into-handstand-and-pose instead of the usual scramble to get up on top of a ledge.
0:28 Now she's doing it every time. Am I pressing the buttons differently? This question would have a lot more mystique if I'd gotten the Wii version of the game.
0:30 I leap across a gap in the ruins and Lara grabs a dangling liana that I didn't see. Good thing that was there, because I wouldn't have made it across otherwise! The liana leads down into the gap -- I think I'm supposed to go in there eventually, so I explore around on the far side of the gap first, finding a medipack.
0:32 Yipes, there's a bear down here. It does some serious damage, largely because I keep getting stuck on things -- the camera is showing me and the bear, and not where I'm going. That's not a bad heuristic, and I don't know if they could've made it smarter, but I'm blaming the camera anyways.
0:34 After getting lost again, I find a "relic." It's an indistinct glowy thing. I guess the indistinct glowy stuff really draws the museum crowds nowadays.
0:37 As I'm swinging on the liana along the gap to reach what looks like a collectible item off to the side, I get a close-up shot of the liana's texture, and it's not a liana at all; it's a rope dangling into the ruins from the jungle canopy! How did that get there? Maybe someone beat me to exploring these ruins. They must've been the ones leaving all these medipacks lying around.
0:38 I pick up the collectible item I was swinging for. The game isn't telling me what it is. Another relic, I guess.
0:39 I take some damage in the fall getting down from the alcove. Now my health is low enough that the game feels the need to constantly remind me by playing a heartbeat sound. It's going at about 15 beats per minute -- that can't be healthy.
0:40 I figure out the button I need to press to use that medipack. Sweet, sweet silence.
0:43 As I reach another big door, the game instructs me to check out Lara's journal, but I don't read fast enough to see how before the message disappears.
0:44 Going through the menus, I see a way to turn on commentary markers. I love developer commentaries. That feature means an almost guaranteed replay for me -- which means an almost guaranteed completion, in case the implication isn't clear.
0:45 "Overwrite saved game? All data will be lost." There's a horrifying thought, but I'm pretty sure they don't mean all data.
0:46 Well, I can't find my journal. I'll try to muddle through anyways.
0:49 To horizontal bars you can Prince-of-Persia around, the designers have added hinges, so the bars move around from the force you apply when you grab onto them. A good trick.
0:50 I pull down one of two pendulum-lever thingies that starts a timer. Whenever I hit a timed puzzle in which the timer isn't explicit, I want to wait it out the first time so I know how much time I have.
0:52 I make it to the other thingy before the timer runs out, but now I just have two timers going. What do I do now? I don't just jump down to the big door, do I?
0:54 No, I dangle and drop. There's a floor plate in front of the door. I press it, the door opens, and that's the end of the level.
0:55 ... but there's no loading screen! The first level transitions seamlessly into the second, and I just keep running. They must've put a fair amount of effort into making that happen -- and I'm pretty sure Tomb Raider didn't have backtracking across level boundaries, so it wasn't exactly necessary.
0:56 A bear comes at me, and there's a tutorial pop-up about how when some animals attack and the screen blurs, I have to press B to do an "adrenaline dodge" or I get mauled. That's a pretty understated way to incorporate quick-time events into the game.
0:58 I'm hearing the same dripping water loop that I was complaining about in Orcs and Elves. It's a lot less prominent here, but I wonder whether it's a deliberate homage on the part of the sound designers, like the Wilhelm scream and the same goddamn door hinge squeak you hear everywhere.
1:00 Whenever I press A to unpause, Lara does a jump. Normally that's merely dumb, but it's pretty annoying when I paused whilst clutching a column or swinging on a rope.
Would I play this game for more than an hour? Yeah, it's engaging enough. Also, remember when I said TMNT's platforming was "solid"? I don't know what the hell I was thinking. I think this title's actually-solid platforming has shocked me back to my senses.
Also, I really want to hear the developer commentary.
Tags: one hour review
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