By Anderson Colemon/south news editor
If a famous explorer were to say that Lara Croft wasn’t realistic, it would be clear that explorer hadn’t played Square Enix’s new installment of Tomb Raider.
The video game starts with Lara Croft on her first expedition to Devil’s Triangle to find the lost Japanese kingdom of Yamati.
On the way to the expedition, the ship Endurance gets caught in a storm that crashes the ship on Miyake Island.
Without food, water and supplies, Lara must take all she has learned and trust her instincts to survive.
To begin, the gameplay is visually striking because of the amount of realism.
Unlike the other Tomb Raider games, the player can see the amount of detail and quality the environment has to give. Throughout the game, the environment will change from a typical day to a blistering wintery cold that will affect Lara throughout the game.
Producers did well to borrow elements from other games by presenting the player with a third-person perspective of Lara, which gets the players more involved.
Realism was the first thing that drew me to this game and had me asking questions about previous Tomb Raider games: If Lara weighs more than a hundred pounds, then when she jumps on a piece of wood attached to the wall, why doesn’t it break?
In this game, that doesn’t occur. Everything Lara jumps onto withers, creaks and eventually breaks.
Another thing that works well with this game is what all prequel video games should have — allusion.
One knows who Lara will be in the future, but how she got there was interesting. It’s funny to hear her mutter the words, “I hate tombs.” Toward the end of the game, she has to save her friend and shoots the Sun Queen with the famous dual pistols she uses so well in the past franchises.
Even though the game contains a lot of positives, it also has some negatives.
The player can choose to play a multiplayer mode. During that mode, the player may experience lagging and a lack of depth. This mode may have been better if players could make their own character instead of playing with characters they are already trying not to hate and have rescued earlier in the campaign mode of the game.
Tomb Raider is an amazing game filled with adventure and action.
If you’re a fan of exploring tombs off the map and solving puzzles in a strategic manner, then this game is for you.
