[SPOILERS BELOW]
Talk about taking a beating. Seriously, the amount of crap Lara goes through in this game is unbelievable! She survives ludicrous falls, smashing through sheets of corrugated metal and splintering wood, flying down several waterfalls and white water rapids, getting shot at, blown up and just generally getting battered left, right and centre. I guess that's one way to endear a character to an audience: just beat them up until you automatically feel sympathy for them.
In all seriousness, Tomb Raider, even with its heavily plot armoured protagonist, is a excellent game - but it's one I feel I've played before. Let me explain: Tomb Raider feels like a combination of multiple titles. Specifically, the metroidvania-like design of Batman: Arkham Asylum, the cinematic and climbing sequences of the Uncharted series and the parkour and collect-a-thon gameplay of a Ubisoft sandbox title. It reminds me of a favourite game of mine, Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor: while most of what it's doing isn't new at all, what it does, it does very well.
In other words, the strongest aspects of the game are these aforementioned elements. They're well-polished and lend themselves to a good deal of variety. Unlike most games where I often just stick with one weapon, each weapon and piece of equipment has its own use cases i.e. the bow for silent headshots, the assault rifle for spray-and-pray gunfire, the climbing axe for a quick-and-dirty melee attack etc. Tomb Raider also make fine use of the environmental design as, not only is the game gorgeous to look at, but its also good at drawing your attention to alternative paths and extra loot which, in turn, helps you to further hone your skills and think of creative ways in which you can use your equipment to traverse the various areas and vistas. The simple and straightforward skill tree is also effective at giving the player reasons for collecting things and killing enemies skillfully with your varying arsenal, providing you with skill points which you can put towards making Lara a stronger character gameplay-wise.
Speaking of Lara, the characters are mostly good...well, kind of. The only ones I actually felt any sympathy or emotion for would be Lara, Roth and Jonah. Every other character (Reyes, Whitman, Alex etc.) just weren't compelling for me; which is not to say they weren't performed well as they were.
It also doesn't help that the story is kinda lame. Well, more specifically, most everything else besides Lara's core development and growth as a character. Many of the later scenes revolve around characters asking other characters to "trust" them (Yawn), Mathias is a boring uncompelling villain who predictably you kill in a QTE, which the game already has plenty of (bigger Yawn) - and what's most annoying about Mathias, the QTE snorefest, is that he's preceded by an actually interesting boss fight with a big samurai monstrosity which actually required me to have good positioning and aiming-Oh, come on! Why couldn't this be the final boss fight? Just remove the big samurai dude and give its AI to Mathias. He already has a big stabby staff and everything! The opportunity was there to have an interesting boss fight with the 'big bad', but the game completely and utterly whiffed it. Why do so many games like Tomb Raider do this - have the villain be
killed via quick-time event? At least, Batman: Arkham Asylum had the decency to
have some kind of boss fight. Yes, it was very, VERY straightforward and
basic, but it was something!
Now, in all fairness, the subplot behind the mystery of Himiko the Sun Queen and the island of Yamatai is interesting...apart from the scene where Lara realises that the mysterious out-of-nowhere storms that are destroying the rescue planes and helicopters that come to the island are being made by Queen Himiko herself!...Wasn't that kind of obvious? It's made worse by the fact that it's played off as a moment in which the audience is supposed to "realise" along with Lara (as if we didn't figure that whole storms thing ages ago - it's a real "Well, duh!" moment).
Overall: Gameplay: good, Lara: good, Story: meh.
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