Bringing back the original
They kept the guns to a minimum which I wasn’t expecting but I think they made a good decision because it kept with the old story and also it was useful at the end where you had to get all your guns back and it would not have been helpful searching for 20 guns at the end. When I first got the game I was playing and was on the “lost city” I was about to pick up some ammo and it wouldn’t let me, That’s when I realised they had put an ammo limit on all the weapons! This is nothing like the good tomb raiders, The ammo collection was one of the highlights of all the games for me because I would be so happy if I defeated a whole bunch of enemies with just the pistols and knowing I had saved up loads of ammo. I felt under constant pressure to use the ammo I had gained, this made my experience in the game a little less exciting. Sometimes when I had saved up full ammunition on the shotgun I went to the “T-Rex boss” and wasted every shot on it, I looked around a bit and found about 10 shots back! Health packs on the other hand were in excess, by the end of the game I must have had about 90 small medi-packs which was more than enough for the finale of the game.
One of the things that made tomb raider, tomb raider was the control system and to be honest I don’t like the new system at all. They have removed the roll which was very useful when pulling timed levers and also you have to press a button to lock onto an enemy! The whole point in the auto lock on was to tell you she could see something even if you couldn’t. Things like the jumping onto narrow pillars was very cool and other things like rope swings did add a lot to the game on the other hand. Some of the traps were a lot more challenging than I thought and some relied on pure luck. For instance in Egypt there was a row of narrow pillars to jump across and on each one was a slamming wall if you didn’t have luck on your side you would lose balance and have to recover by which time you got splattered instantly.
Adrenaline was a brilliant new feature which I thought was fantastic and really hyped up the combat. You even had to think before you did it because you had to decide which direction to dodge and when to start the move. At first I did have a few problems with it because if you had multiple enemies when you dodged left or right the non-adrenaline filled enemy would whack you down just before you shot. Button tap sequences were also a lovely addition to the game because it just made the game more on edge and they weren’t so hard that you had to keep retrying until you memorized every button tap but they were perfectly timed so you could miss a button but most of the time you could just get it in. Unfortunately by the end of the game I knew which buttons to press on all sequences which made them a bit monotonous. It still beats old tomb raiders where you could just sit back and watch the cinematic.
Bosses on the game were far to easy! The only one I spent more than 5 minutes on was the final boss, the lady in magma form. They all depended on you using the adrenaline attack and towards the end that led to something else which you could take advantage of, for instance the horse men tried to freeze you afterwards and then you would grab the shield, the muscle monster just before the end rolled off the platform then you shot his fingers. The point is it all became slightly boring and very easy to predict. They kept the secrets! Which is also a massive feature in these games, some were very hard to find and took a keen eye like the shotgun in “lost city” behind the water fall. There were also bigger secrets to get extra content called artefacts. These were ok I guess but they should have put more ammo and health secrets. Overall I think this game was a good remake but had it’s down points, they should have stuck more to the original in the end. I still did play on this game for a long time trying to get all of the unlockables which made the game that much more playable once you completed it the first time. I would guarantee it to any tomb raider fan.