TR2013 - Not much story, not much to do, not much continuity, and overpriced. Otherwise fun and Lara is pretty.
Summary of Pros: Lara is beautiful. If you don't fall in love within a few minutes, you don't like females. The basic story is interesting. For the most part the game installed with relative ease and played with only the nominally expected number of crashes per hour. I am using an Asus P5N32E-SLI motherboard and I tried both the Nvidea GT-240 and GTX-680 graphics boards. It saves reasonably well and there is a good balance of puzzles and shooting.
Now, here's what I really think of it all. I'll ease into this:
Each graphical depiction of Lara outside the game seems to be a completely different female. All hotties, of course, but none of them look like the girl that ends up being Lara in the game. Call it a nit, OK, but that old cornerstone of thriller movies (and games), suspension of disbelief depends on many small things, and one of them is continuity. If the heroine is 3 or 4 different females, um, what happened? You don't want this in people's minds.
Rumors about character development of Lara, if such actually exist, are sadly mistaken. Beyond the flatness of the plot and story telling, I got so tired of Lara's deer in the headlights expression while running around looking like she just crawled out of a septic tank. She gets wet a lot, and she is a pretty, young female. Are we to believe that a quick splash in the ocean or river might not clean her up a bit? I don't know any women, of any age, who would wander around for days without washing some of that stuff off. This inattention to such obvious detail suggests to me that some producer needs his cheap butt kicked. This is pathetic.
I have also noticed that on some PC's she looks cleaner than on mine. How can that be? Maybe there is a costume glitch or something I missed, like a working public shower in Shanty Town? I doubt it. Just cross platform compatibility discontinuities, probably.
And Lara's almost unchangeable "deer in the headlight" facial expression as she creeps around in the various places demonstrates more corner cutting by the producers. Not good.
The User Interface is NOT from ScaleForm, and you can really tell. Apparently, it just didn't seem necessary to provide the user with any graphical inspirations during loading or playing. Nevertheless, the UI does function well enough once you figure it out what it means.
And figuring it out is largely what just playing this game is about. There is downloadable .pdf file called a user manual. It is pathetically useless. The only place you will learn anything about how this game works is via online forums. And scanning around these I see that there is a lot of confusion and guesswork as players try to help each other. The big question, in general: Is this game really this screwed up, or am I doing something wrong?
For the most part the controls are an improvement over some past attempts. They did a pretty good job of it this time, for the most part. There is are exceptions to this. If you have begun to play the game then within a few hours you have gone online to join the throngs of others all pleading for help with how to get the controls to work in many of the fight scenes. The wiggle A-D-A-D followed by a prompt to press the F or E button often works. Fortunately there is so little continuity of anything in this game that the wiggle A-D-A-D is not used more than once or twice, and in those places where it is used, it doesn't work well at all. For example, early on, retrieving the backpack with the first aid kit from the cave with the wolf in it can take hours to get through. I was ready to give up on this section --- then, by total accident, I managed to get the magical timing right and ended up stabbing the wolf to death with a knife I didn't know I had. It truly tries one's patience. When you hit these bad places, set your resolution to minimal, back down all the filtering and processing that can use your CPU, and make sure you are in the easiest player mode. That may help. Based on some forum comments, others seem to think so.
A word or two about Saves. You are never left great distances from where you quit, and often you come right back to your last save-point. When you die, you do start over at the same exact point you started from or from the most recent autosave point (and you have no way of knowing when it autosaves). This means you can kill 30 bad guys and be almost where you want to go, and die. Then you get to kill them all over…and over….and over….frustrating, but in a game with so very little content, I guess it helps make you think you're getting a lot for your money. Nevertheless, you can save the game when you want to. The language that goes with the UI for saving is apparently poorly translated from Japanese because it makes very little sense, but try it a few times and you will find that you can save with little fear of loosing progress.
Then there is this new notion called "dodge-kill". You earn the ability to use this, and it only barely works at all. The premise is Lara can duck under the attacker's weapon swing by using the SHIFT key (keyboard default), and come up with a few milliseconds to swing her ice-axe at the bad guy. The swings are prompted with an "!" or some other symbol that generally means press F. Lara always comes up facing the wrong way and since her weapon sighting pattern is offset, so you can spend many repeats trying to get it all to work for you. If it says MASH F or MASH E that apparently means to repeatedly press these keys as rapidly as your fingers will permit. Mashing the key always leads to an accidental result. You may kill the bad guy the first time, or you may just get so tired of it you trash the whole game and find something else to do. This is an inherently broken piece of software. It doesn't seem to matter what platform you are using, it just works very poorly.
Then again, there is very little actual game playing imagination written into this game, and ample indications that Square Enix took liberal shortcuts to get the game out amidst their financial crises and management failings. Maybe this is just a deliberate artifice to give the player the sense that they are fighting a tough enemy. I can only say that I expect the controls to work. I do not expect to have to reset my graphics to minimal resolution, or go buy a new computer to get through a battle. Now not to exaggerate, because much of the time you can fight and feel like your skill level is at fault when you die. But in at least 3 critical places the controls are broken or deliberately buggered to screw you up, and that is just bound to anger a lot of players.
The game is clearly split into two parts. The first is a lot of running around shooting people in the head and solving some pretty nice puzzles. There is a good balance between shooting, thinking and skill development. (When the controls actually work.) But the first part of the game ends after Lara escapes the Temple, a fiery mess by the way, but it works pretty easily once you realize you have to steer Lara continuously with the keyboard while she is running and jumping on collapsing bridges and walls. Then after Roth dies, and Lara takes off on the second part of the story. Her crew of wimps have gone to fix a boat because a militant female character doesn't get the facts of life… Lara is told, "We're leaving without you if you don't get back." What? Lara has saved these jerks from cannibalistic death, or worse, and they don't support her? Poor story telling here with no foundation for the character attitudes. Accordingly, it is a useless mechanism for increasing the tension in the game but it does irritate the player.
This is where I realized that after playing about 20 hours I was just about to enter the final level of the game: Drive the boat up river and rescue Sam from Mathias– kill the evil dead queen and thereby end the curse on the island. Well, for the over $50 I paid, I wanted to get more than 20 some hours out of this thing, so I began using the Fast Travel Feature to do fascinating things like search for Mushrooms and GPS stashes, whatever that is supposed to be. Finding all these things gives you some skill points so you can upgrade your character and weapons. Thrilling? No.
Call me cynical, but picking Mushrooms is pretty lame side-mission when escape from the biggest dead body preserve unknown to man is presumably the priority. Come on writers, you can do better than that. I know it gets tiring, so next time drink more beer and maybe the ideas will improve.
For "side missions" you can search for GPS things, search for documents, search for treasure maps that tell you where all the other things are, search for boring relics that each have significance to Japanese archeologists ONLY, explore a few very boring tombs, and kill all the deer, pigs, seagulls, crows and crabs. Did I miss anything? Oh yes, you get to blow up magnetic mines that bob around here and there. Hardly worth the time. The point is, I forced myself to go do all this mindless, irrelevant and non-story related stuff for several days just to stretch out the game. It was not fun, entertaining, or in any manner coherent with the theme of the game. It was just hard-headed perseverance. No way I'm going to let some failing Japanese game company screw me out of a day's pay with a game that most people will complete in 20 hours or less.
Lets consider the TOMBS that Lara gets to RAID. Do you recall that in previous adventures it could take days to get though a tomb? Not any longer. It takes 15 minutes if you are smart and/or lucky, and 30 minutes if you are me. Each TOMB has a puzzle to figure out, and the puzzle requires that you develop almost exact timing of a few sequential moves. Once you figure out what you are supposed to do, and it is not always obvious (thankfully), you can then do each of them a thousand times or maybe just once, if you get lucky. This is another way of taking a small amount of actual story content and making it stretch into a painful and almost endless finger exercise. Too little to do in these tombs, and the rewards are trivial. Usually you get a treasure map or a part of a gun.
This really, really disappoints me. There is just too little game here. What is there is good quality, but there is just not anywhere near enough meaningful, exciting, challenging work to do to get through this otherwise interesting reincarnation of one of the most important games in the history of the art. The budget must have been abysmally small. Maybe the paucity of content in this game is fallout from problems at Square Enix, I don't know. But at the 65% done point, I found myself working to stretch out the game, and it is really hard to do because finding mushrooms is really so boring.
Now, in spite of all efforts not to, I have finished the game. It was a frustrating game for the reasons given above. I have played every Tomb Raider since the very first one. They have produced some great games and some real losers over the years. When Crystal Dynamics got involved they put the game back on track so I was expecting much more this time. Didn't get it. On a scale of 1 -10 with Borderlands 2 and Mass Effect 2 (not 3) ranking 10, Crysis 2 ranking about 7, regrettably I'd give TR2013 a 4.
Tip --- wait a while, buy it on sale, and buy the cheapest version you can find. Using the entertainment value of any of the DLC that follows Borderlands 2 as the yardstick, this game, in its final entirety is worth about $15.