GordonJAGReview Tomb Raider Review

It’s weird reviewing a game that’s a decade old. It’s just far enough out from current gameplay standards that you can see the skeleton of gameplay systems that would become the bloated, morbidly obese systems that make the AAA games today take 80 years to finish. It’s kind of fun to look at it through a somewhat historical lens with its fine but uninspired combat, a story that takes 10 hours to budge an inch, and its side content that you’re under no obligation to engage with even though it’s the best part of the game. Yep, it’s pretty much the baby’s version of a 2024 AAA game. In a way, that’s a good thing. AAA games are too bloated today, so being able to finish Tomb Raider in a reasonable time left me feeling better about the game than I would have if I had to spend 50 hours with this version of Lara Croft. What isn’t a good thing is how a game called Tomb Raider makes raiding tombs a side activity. The tombs are just kind of there as short, snacky puzzles that only feel like they are there so the developers can call it a Tomb Raider game. I’m sorry, did you seriously take the gameplay concept based on the game’s name and make it secondary to shooting identical cultists with a bow and arrow 800 times? Yeah, so the gameplay wasn’t a massive hook. Outside of Tomb Raider making raiding tombs a secondary gameplay option, it was mostly inoffensive. The weapons all work how they should, and most importantly, the game was nice enough to play on both gamepad and mouse and keyboard. Just be prepared to get a bunch of walls acquainted with Lara’s nasty armpit so you can duck in and out while popping the heads off people who can’t fully stick behind cover despite having managed to survive on a cursed island for years. When you’re not doing that, you get some fun puzzles to do otherwise. That’s all I want to say about the gameplay because it’s functional enough to fill the space without doing anything seriously wrong. What I want to talk about is Lara because I cannot stand this version of Lara Croft, and I have a soapbox to get on and things I want to say about this portrayal of her. I know this was kind of a thing when the game came out, but it’s kind of gross how this game treats her. Now, I do not care about violence in games. I do not care about women being in violent games. I do not care if those games have their violence directed toward the women in them. I’ve played Stellar Blade, Bayonetta, Nier: Automata, and other games that have playable women in situations where they can get the tar kicked out of them. To be as crude as possible, I could boot up Mortal Kombat (2011), start a fight against a woman wearing practically nothing but high-heeled boots and underwear, beat her in the fight, and drag her crotch-first into a spinning saw blade to kill her. And even that doesn’t manage to feel as creepy as Tomb Raider. Seriously, it’s like the developers wanted to make a game where they just have a girl get the brakes beaten off her, realized that’d be kind of weird, so they scrambled to find a female character they could use who was known for being in situations that are sort of dangerous. That’s what it feels like with Lara Croft in this game. It’s like Crystal Dynamics was taking some amount of joy in just putting her through as much punishment as they could get away with. What makes it feel even more exploitative is how Lara isn’t really less sexualized than she was before. Old Lara’s model was so insanely curvy that she didn’t look anything like a human woman. She looked like a toy with her absurd facial features and figure. More realistic-looking sexualized women were hitting the gaming scene when the PS2 launched. That meant that the old Lara model stopped being appealing real quick. It added sort of a silly vibe to her games that made even her getting eaten by a dinosaur feel like two action figures were fighting each other. In this game, they made Lara look like a conventionally attractive young woman who looks like a real person, or at least as much as the graphics tech of the time would allow. Gone are the insane curves that just aren’t possible without having your organs teleported out of your body. In are the realistic curves of a woman you could actually see in real life. In a way, this is arguably more sexualized because they wanted to keep the large chest and hourglass figure of the old Lara while applying it to a body shape that could feasibly belong to a human woman. And I know for a fact they deliberately sexualized her this way because they forgot to disable her chest’s jiggle physics when aiming. That means they either added them in as a little joke for one kind of situation that might not be often noticed, or they had them in the whole time during development and opted not to go forward with using them while just happening to forget about them when she’s aiming. I’m not a game developer, but if I was choosing one to be the most likely option, it would be the second one. Speaking of her rack, the camera loves to make sure her chest is in the center of every shot like it dropped its wallet down her bra and is waiting to start digging around for it. Seriously, one of the first ways—if not the first way—for Lara to die is for an insane guy to pull her across the ground, which shoves her chest into the camera, before he slams a makeshift axe in it while the camera centers in on her cleavage. I don’t want to say the violence is sexualized, but that is not a good piece of evidence against that idea. Neither is the guy who starts getting handsy with her when she’s restrained. Oh, but he didn’t want to do anything sexual to her. He just wanted to grab her face, smell her hair, and then either strangle her or blow her brains out with a gun. Oh, yeah, that’s a lot better. Besides the absurd violence directed against Lara, her character exists in a completely different galaxy from the gameplay. I don’t buy her arc of a helpless girl turning into a hardened warrior forged by trauma, rare axes to the chest, or the occasional impalement on a spike. She has A Moment the first time she kills someone, but after that, she’s an expert on slaughtering her enemies with every weapon she can find with no remorse or conflict over killing. That doesn’t even go into the fact that she’s already an Olympic-level gymnast who can make 20-foot leaps look like a normal person jumping down two steps. The writers don’t want me to think she starts as this badass lady who can slaughter hundreds, but the gameplay does nothing to reflect that. On top of that, she is completely reactionary. Everything happens to her or around her, and she just has to react to it all. This island which has had active people on it for at least 70 years has tons of old ruins and wreckage, naturally. Yet, somehow, things just start to fall apart the moment Lara is near or on them. It’s like the island and everything on it was cursed to start crumbling the moment a pair of DDD cups came within 15 feet of anything. It all makes the world feel so stiff, inorganic, and like it’s seriously just a massive toybox designed to make Lara suffer. I don’t even know who wanted that when this reboot was announced. Okay, old Lara wasn’t bringing home the gold in the character department. It’s not like current Lara is either. As an origin story for this character, I feel distinctly ungrabbed, and even a little put-off. Genuinely, it felt like Crystal Dynamics thought they could have people feeling protective of this woman because she’s pretty and they put her through insane amounts of abuse, and they somehow thought no one would notice that it borders on being creepy. I don’t know, maybe my interpretation of the character says more about me than it does her or the writers. Still, the gameplay isn’t good enough for me to recommend this game with how gross it left me feeling about Lara.