As with all linear shooter-platformers, replay value is a once a year (at most) deal and campaign is below 20 hours.

User Rating: 7.5 | Tomb Raider (The Final Hours Edition) PC
By Jennaralize | Review Date:
For whatever reason, I went into Tomb Raider with the expectation of a shortish intro with lots of hand-holding, followed by a relatively open-world platformer and run+gun island shooter, similar to Far Cry 3. What I ended up playing, was 18 hours of collect tasks/quests, quick time events and the odd shooting sequence, plus a bit of climbing and easy to master acrobatics, which whilst they looked good, grew old pretty quick.

The "open world" sections are small and more akin to the different routes you can take when completing a mission in Deus Ex: Human Revolution, where you can choose to attack your mission goal via different routes in the level - an example of this would be the shanty town, where Lara can blast passages through the town with her shotgun, or take the high road and snipe from the rooftops - the goal is always the same point though and there is no alternate ending, only death and re-spawn.

Re-imagining? I'm not so sure, sometimes it feels more constricted, you can't even swim, which, strangely, I enjoyed in the previous games. It's more of a new skin to an old game, with loads of scripted events and cut-scenes. It's a play along movie, better, longer and more interesting than COD or the like, but it doesn't offer much replay value, even if you are a stat whore and like to get the perfect score.

On the plus side, the character models were great and tressfx makes Lara's hair all nice and swishy. The game plays really well on the highest settings if you have a crossfire 5850 setup or better (at 30-60fps) and with tressfx switched off, it plays great on a single 4 year old reference 5850, with a frame rate of 30+fps. When you first encounter the different elements of the game, they are fun to master and play about with, though the upgrades can often make you feel super over-powered, especially the machine gun, which absolutely destroys foes towards the end of the game, with it's attached grenade launcher providing some "you got fooken owned biaaaatch" moments.

All in all, it was an enjoyable experience at times, the graphics were nice, the story was interesting enough and the island looked lush and varied, but I couldn't give it more than 3/4 as it just doesn't have enough for me to want to come back and do it again. The linear nature of the game and the play-along-movie element makes it only replayable on a frequent basis if you have short term memory loss.

Worth the £17.50 I paid for it in the sale, but I wouldn't have paid more! :-)

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