As you can equip multiple cards per run, there are many thousands of potential “load-outs” with which to fine-tune the balance between skill and risk. The harder you stack the odds against you, the greater the opportunity for glory. Each offers a bonus (eg better starting weapons) or a drawback (eg no ammunition), which comes with a counter-balancing penalty or multiplier to your subsequent score. You buy (either with in-game currency or real world money) or win packs of cards. As in Halo 5, a new collectible card system adds modifiers to play. Here you find new challenge goals and the chance to complete against friends and other players online. Gone is the 2013’s game’s multiplayer mode, replaced by this score attack recasting of the main missions. Where once Tomb Raider led the field, now it merely rides with the pack, offering nudges of modest invention and improvement, but little to truly inspire and amaze. But in the ever-accelerating homogenisation of the blockbuster video games, it seems as if they’ve been held back by the need for the game to hit the expected notes of the genre. On the evidence of these optional tombs, which are the closest the game comes to replicating the style and satisfaction of historical Tomb Raider, it’s clear that developer Crystal Dynamics is a home to masterly designers who would, surely, be able to deliver many games’-worth of memorable and delightful puzzles. Tombs are mostly an optional extra in the rebooted version of the game These are Rise of the Tomb Raider’s strongest moments. Your reward is not only an upgraded ability, but also an honest sense of triumph. You must discover the entrance to the tomb, perhaps accessed through some remote cave, or down a disused Soviet mineshaft, and then work out how to reach the treasure in its farthest depth, or tallest summit. As in the 2013 reboot, these are relegated to optional side-missions. But there’s none of the enriching sense of accomplishment that one used to feel when working away at one of Tomb Raiders’ grand and exquisite environmental puzzles. Levels propel you forward with pitter-patter of manageable tasks, creating a sense of momentum. Even on the toughest difficulty, this is a fast-food approximation of challenge. There is, in nouveau-Tomb Raider, little true exploration or puzzle solving to do. Mostly, you run from highlighted object to object, collecting, prising, climbing or reading your way through the to-do list that’s been laid out in front of you. In this way you can read a location in seconds – there’s no need to slow down any more, survey your surroundings and figure out what you’re supposed to do. Soon enough you learn to enter every new area and stab the analogue stick in order to instantly highlight items of interest – ammo crates, relics, rope-slides, climbable branches, frolicking animals who can be hunted and turned into resources. The recipe is undeniably compelling and well measured, but ultimately feels shallow. The linear design allows Crystal Dynamics to finely control the game’s rhythms, changing the pace and feel of the story through the nature of the challenges with which you’re presented. Stealth follows light puzzling, follows light exploration, follows open battle, follows the kind of Indiana Jones set pieces in which you must, for example, flee a pursuing attack chopper, or a burning building. Nevertheless, the clanging incongruity remains, undiminished by familiarity, ludicrous in its continued repetition.įamiliar too, at least to players of the previous game, are your tasks, both primary and extra-curricular. The juxtaposition in these games between the likeable, quipping hero we often find in word, and the bloodthirsty, ruthless killer we find in deed has become such a cliche that pointing it out has become a cliche itself. She hurls them at her opponents with abandon, waiting for the flames to extinguish on their charred remains before plundering the body for ammunition or resources. Croft is able to knock up rudimentary explosive devices from tin cans or Molotov cocktails while cringing behind cover. Appearances deceive: this lithe, slender protagonist packs a serious punch, able to take out swarms of well-armed men, even those protected by Teflon body armour and six-foot-tall shields. If Croft is in search of inner peace, she shows little care or consideration for her fellow human in the moment-to-moment play.
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