So I recently finished my playthrough of RotTR, and having played through it and the rebooted Tomb Raider, I thought it would be interesting to take stock of where the (second) rebooted TR stands and where it can improve going forward. I'll be dealing mostly with story, as the gameplay is basically the same as TR13 with a few minor tweaks and less QTEs (thank God), though there is one point I want to tackle at the end. As a final note, having a topic dedicated to the flaws of a particular game does not necessarily mean that I think the game is by any means bad; it just means there are areas that can be improved upon (as I think we would all agree).
With that established, let's jump in. Much of this will contain spoilers for the entire game, so read at your own discretion.
The Stakes are Very Poorly Established: Much of the game's narrative revolves around a race between Lara and what I can best describe as an almost cartoonishly evil organization named Trinity racing to obtain an object called the "Divine Source," some object that is supposed to have some power over life. It's established pretty early on that the main villains of the game, a brother and sister duo, are out to obtain the Divine Source in order to cure the sister from some terminal illness. Lara, meanwhile, wants to obtain it in order to restore the reputation of her father. All of that is fine. Problem comes from making the player actually care about any of the events going on, particularly towards the end of the game where Lara is being forced to murder an entire population of indigenous cave dwellers and a whole bunch of soldiers in order to obtain the artifact. The player never feels any sort of connection with Lara's father, and even if they did, that hardly justifies killing hundreds of people. The game repeatedly tells us that if the Divine Source falls into Trinity's hands, bad stuff will happen, but it never gets around to establishing what exactly any of this bad stuff is. The Divine Source is never established as having any destructive properties, so why exactly is Lara willing to continue risking her life while slaughtering so many other humans? Yeah, Trinity's men are almost cartoonishly evil, and they're certainly people I can root against, but not to the point where I'd be willing to risk life and limb in order to stop them, especially when all they really seem to want is an object that can't really hurt anyone. It'd be like a game where you're told to stop the Nazis from reaching a Care Bear of Destiny or something. We're never told or really shown what bad things will happen if Trinity obtains the Divine Source...just that it will be bad...somehow.
Lara's Sudden Change of Heart: So at the end of the game Lara decides to destroy the Divine Source against the wishes of a desperate Ana, with her motivation being, as best I can tell, that death is an essential part of human life and that we'd be going against what nature wanted or something by doing this. Which...is a really awkward shift in motivation for Lara, especially considering that much of her reasoning for wanting the Divine Source, outside of restoring her father's legacy, was to help humanity overcome things like diseases. This would be a totally fine conclusion for a story to come to, and one that would make for an interesting bit of character development throughout the game...it's just that we never really get around to any of that development. Lara never mentions, at any point in the game that she's conflicted between possibly going against what's "natural," and no one ever says anything to this effect before this scene. So, out of nowhere, Lara suddenly decides that death is necessary and the Source isn't worth obtaining just for that alone, never mind that it could still possibly be used to help cure diseases. There's no build up to this shift in thinking at all, and the suddenness of it is extremely jarring.
Lara is an increasing mess of a character: This continues a lot off the first complaint, but Lara's killings become really hard to defend in this game, especially when taken the personality she takes. While she's portrayed as a fairly likeable, ocassionally wise cracking hero, she has no qualms about murdering hundreds of people if they do so much as bother to get in her way. I'm not saying that a game needs to have a morally justifiable protagonist in order to be good; but at the very least it should be giving Lara a credible motive for what is essentially a campaign of minor genocide, and the consistent juxtaposition of a friendly, kind, caring character who then proceeds to slaughter rooms of people just because they're in the way of her next big archaelogical find is a litte jarring.
Trinity's Decision to Kill Lara's Dad: At the end of the game it's revealed that Trinity was the ones behind the death of Lara's dad as opposed to a suicide. Problem is that this decision makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. Trinity already had an undercover agent close to Lord Croft in Ana who surely would have been able to report on any discoveries he made. Even if Papa Croft refused to work with Trinity, they could continue to get information from him through Ana and expedite the process of tracking down the Divine Source. Instead, they order him to be killed, and it takes them a full additional twenty or so years just to locate the general location of it...something he had nearly pinned down before he died. So why kill him? Even if you think there's the potential for him to get suspicious of Ana and run away to find the Source, you can just send some people in to capture him (like they tried to do with Lara), and then torture him for more information. Assassinating him in his office makes absolutely no sense.
Balancing Act: I've come to accept that Tomb Raider is going to be a mix of MGS3 survivor stuff and Uncharted climbing/set pieces/3rd person shooting sequences. Still not convinced that's what Tomb Raider should be, but hey. What I do wish the game would do is perhaps balance these two sides some more; the opening leans very heavily towards the survivor aspect; with much of the time being spent out in the snow hunting/swimming/trying to not get eaten by a bear, while the last fourth or so of the game is pretty much nothing but Uncharted. Not that either of those is necessarily bad, but I'd argue pacing suffers in both cases, particularly in the latter, as it becomes kind of tiring to consistently be put through fire fight after fire fight after climbing up an exploding tower. My memory of TR13 is a bit fuzzy, but I remember it doing this much better. This constant barrage of action reminds me of the portion in Uncharted 3 when Drake barely avoids getting thrown out of a plane, survives a crash landing, and then gets thrown into a big shootout...only to have it followed up with another shootout on horseback. It just winds up being tiring to the player, and the adrenaline and excitement of being in a life or death situation wears off and is gradually replaced with a desire to just switch things up. Yeah, there are optional objectives to complete which are often far less fast paced, but the story is building to a climax at this point and going off to raid some optional tombs while your friend is being tortured doesn't really work. Perhaps replaces one of the seventy billion fights with armored zombiefied crusaders or gunmen with a big puzzle focused room, like the optional tombs.
