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I marathoned the game yesterday and cleared the main campaign on Normal in about fourteen hours, with 76% completion. I'm not a big fan of how much combat sneaks its way into these games, and the early hours would have a lot more impact if there weren't as many crazy cultists everywhere. That said, they managed to make Lara Croft a sympathetic character for the most part, which I would've thought to be impossible. I'm one of the guys who has a real problem with the old Tomb Raider games and with Uncharted, about how the high body count ruins a lot of the atmosphere they're trying to create, and putting it all in the context of a mad struggle for survival makes it all much more bearable than Drake's happy-go-lucky indifference. I do see the point of the people who notice a shift. It wouldn't surprise me if they deliberately changed direction on the game after a little while, to go back to the old style of Lara as a superhero rather than a mud-splattered, bandage-covered survivor. It is weird that she never has to sleep or eat after the first couple of hours, although you could handwave it as something she does while she's at the camps. I would've also liked to have seen a couple more quiet moments where there isn't some kind of imminent peril I'm on my way towards; it seemed like every time I found one of the tombs or a challenge, it was by accident on my way to rescue somebody or do something important.
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Mar 18, 2013 04:21
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I don't doubt that a lot of people in this thread and on this forum would play the rear end off of a survival-driven game where you wash up on an island, wounded, alone, and delirious from hunger, and must slowly nurse yourself back to health by hunting, fishing, and scavenging. Instead of a progression system where you gradually accumulate better equipment and abilities, you're simply restoring yourself to some semblance of a standard range of motion. Only then, once all that's dealt with, can you turn to the issues of exploring the island and eventually escaping it. It could probably be a pretty nifty game, but the first hour or so would either be a tremendous exercise in punching oneself in the dick (your character is realistically injured to the point of being nearly helpless and your first actions necessarily involve eating bugs or sucking moisture off leaves) or barely touched (your character's injuries are mostly cosmetic unless it's a cutscene and you're hunting wild boars within ten minutes of pushing the start button). Either way, I have to figure it wouldn't have much in the way of mass-market appeal, or at least not as much as "hot brunette mows down armies of dudes" does.
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Mar 18, 2013 07:36
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I hope the survivors of this game end up being Lara's crew in the next. I always thought it was a weakness of the previous games that she didn't really have any supporting characters that persisted from game to game until Legend, and even then they popped up out of nowhere.RatHat posted:Yeah, it might outsell the new GoW but no way in hell is anything going to be outselling the SC2 expansion. Watch the digital sales on SC2. Video game sales charts still have a tendency to ignore anything that didn't happen in a brick-and-mortar store, so I wouldn't be shocked if TR crushes SC2 in physical copies, but SC2 blows it away on digital.
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Mar 19, 2013 01:21
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RatHat posted:Whoever designed the death scenes in this game has some issues. Honestly, I think most of that's just because of who the death scenes are happening to, rather than the content thereof. I know I tend to react more adversely when a particularly violent death scene is happening to a female character (which is another discussion, I know), and I'm not alone in that.
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Mar 19, 2013 09:04
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Feeble posted:One thing I gotta ask though: Am I the only one getting huge gay vibes from Lara and Sam? Maybe it's just because my sister's gay and I've grown accustomed to picking up on which of her friends are lesbians as well, ("gaydar-by-proxy," if you will) but drat near every time they're on screen it feels like they're ten minutes away from finding a quiet place to study the history of Sappho, if you catch my drift. I thought they were a pretty good representation of a certain kind of particularly close friendship I've seen before, but thought the usual Internet crowd was overreacting right up until the ending where Sam puts on the bright white maiden dress and Lara bridal-carries her down the side of a mountain. Then I started to think Rhianna Pratchett was doing it on purpose.
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May 28, 2013 16:09
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I've seen a lot of people talking about "ludonarrative dissonance" lately in relation to games protagonists and their respective body counts, so I'm hoping this next generation will feature more action games where the hero hasn't personally killed more people than tectonic activity. Tomb Raider at least pays lip service to that in this version, but it does puncture any narrative when the protagonist kills hundreds of people over the course of a day.
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Aug 13, 2013 19:42
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DrNutt posted:I recently started playing The Last of Us hoping it would be better about that, but other than making ammo a little scarce and the combat extra brutal, it's still just, you know, kill a poo poo ton of dudes. Like, where do they all come from? Heh, yeah. I haven't played Last of Us yet, but I did play I Am Alive, and it's almost as bad. That's a game where you walk into post-apocalyptic San Francisco and probably end up killing a good half of the people who are left inside the city.
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Aug 13, 2013 23:02
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