Tomb Raider - Anniversary: Intro

Way back when the Tomb Raider games were vaguely relevant to gaming history, I played about half of the ones of value. I eventually beat the original, the demo of 2, parts of 3 and 4, while Chronicles had the audacity to crash on me. I got very far in Angel of Darkness, but actually found it more annoying when it was being Tomb Raider and not whatever it was trying to be. Up until this point, the games are all broadly the same, Lara gets more abilities until she's basically British Samus who can roundhouse kick people outside of cutscenes.

Then we get to Legend. I liked Legend as a kid, but in retrospect, I think it's just a general like. My memories of it now make it out to be a fine game...just fine. Keeley Hawes is a great Lara, but the game itself is quite short, significantly changes Lara's personality, and was kind of simple. Adding more people to a Tomb Raider game feels like heresy, Lara's the kind of person who has three people come to her funeral, and doesn't have a whole team watching her. Given that this is in the same continuity as that game, this probably doesn't bode well for my opinion.
I note that given the hub-drub about Lara as a character I mentioned, it's ironic that this one is not written by a woman. The original three games were written by Vicky Arnold, despite some credits from Toby Gard. It's Arnold who gave Lara most of her actual character. I'm not sure about The Last Revelation, there's a "Hope" there, but that doesn't necessarily mean that's a girl. Nobody cares about Chronicles and Angel of Darkness was written by a man. The Legend continuity games, before the prequel reboot, were all Toby Gard and whoever he roped in that year. And after this they've all been written by women, at least the entries that people care about.

Side fun fact, Hawes is the longest lasting Lara in the franchise, starting in Legend and despite getting kicked off for the reboots, continued to appear in the franchise in the weirdly named Lara Croft games and most recently Tomb Raider: Reloaded. Which gets to my other fun fact. Tomb Raider 1 might just be the most remade game ever made. We have the original, this one, the upcoming remaster and the aforementioned Reloaded, which is a mobile game retelling of the series.

The game starts with an intro cutscene. What I presume is the testing of the atomic bomb. Was it always intended to be an atomic bomb testing like here and the meteor landing from the original was just technical limitations? A crystal breaks open and out pops a mysterious winged figure who is a complete mystery. Considering that the original game had a very Indiana Jones vibe until the game pulled the rug out from under you, this like a lame change. Come to think of it, Indiana Jones got lame when they had a nuclear bomb.

It's short, surprisingly, and we get the menu. There's a woman who I presume is Lara Croft, but gives me a serious uncanny valley vibe. I can recognize the intent, but it's not quite coming across, she looks like an AI upscale or some fan recreation. Still better the screenshots I've seen of the '10s one. Very nice effects, jiggle physics in her boobs, but more importantly, her clothing moves whenever she touches it. Very nice. I like the model other than the face. I go through the menus, mostly turning off any unnecessary aids like hints or automatic aiming/grabbing. We want the full Tomb Raider experience.

Like with the original, we have Croft Manor. There's a cutscene, unlike the original's unnotable view of the outside, we're straight inside. Winston has left Lady Croft a note, telling us that there was a large shipment of antiquities, he left it here because the gallery is locked from the inside, the alarm went off, and the water supply has been shut off because they're building a pool. All jokes to the original, stuff was being moved in the original, there was no gallery, and you ended the section in the pool. On the bright side, Lara's journal has been found and he returned it to it's hiding place in her bedroom. Which also wasn't there in the original. Not quite the tutorial level it was originally.

This is less a tutorial and more a level where you're given free reign under safe conditions. An important distinction. Lara moves around with the WASD keys and the camera is controlled via the mouse. Basically your standard control scheme. Lara feels heavy. I expect that in the original, it's designed around that, but this is supposed to be the nice new fancy version where Lara moves free and loose. Jumping is nice, it still retains that feel the original does. It's not too different. The fancy dive function no longer kills Lara if she jumps onto solid concrete.

Instead it feels like Lara is slower than she was originally, at least while running around and jumping. Lara does not jump as high as she used to. She's no longer that top level athlete, she's a more reasonable renaissance woman level of athleticism. Lara can also now grab onto things in a much wider arc. Despite my fondness of the original's grabbing, I do this think is a better way of doing things. Assuming you turn off automatic grab. Kind of, you climb over some things by jumping, grabbing is the only manual action.

The controls very clunky though, in a way the original was not. Movement feels weird, since even running Lara feels slow in a way she once did not. Turning seems weird this way, a strange compromise designed to appeal to people who want the original Tomb Raider without actually liking it. The camera is basically the same as before, except it can be turned when moving. Even then it fights you more than the original. The game also gives you a few commands which feel like unnecessary stuff. Climbing is a combination of a grab button and space, quite inconsistently. You can do stealth with R, but alt walks and crouch is shift. Some combination could be done.

This seems to be from that period where doing something weird like jumping or rolling, that is crouching while running, is faster than actually running. Assuming you aren't going up stairs, in which case Lara climbs up it like she's climbing up some short rock. The autosave function kicks in way too much, walking halfway across the room activates it sometimes.

I wasn't quite right, this is a puzzle level of sorts. To start with you can pick up a gear on top of those crates, I do like the grabbing here. And then move a crate over to a pressure plate over the fire. Too bad Lara needs to put out the fire.

Figures I got a shot of the 1 frame this actually looks like crap.

Hey, Lara figured out how to open a door! Some of the hallways have journals hinting at the events of other classic Tomb Raider games. Half the stuff in here only makes sense if you played the previous games.

The library, and the door locks behind Lara. Yeah, there's another original game reference. There are more books, including a reference to the opening level of the original, and some very obvious books which open bookcases. Seriously, this game is more obvious than Nitemare 3D. First we get a map, and then we get some guns.

Now, the guns by default function like they do in Tomb Raider, at least they seem to. Lara reloads automatically whenever she runs out of ammo, because who would ever want to reload at a different time? (Why they felt like Lara should reload in this game is beyond me) Manual aim is entered via Z, and you can't move while doing it. Environmental interaction with the guns is mostly just limited to obvious breakable objects, like glass or crates. (One of which reveals a treasure item, just metaphorical points it seems) I also noticed that shadows are only formed by Lara here, not scenery. For a game that generally looks as good as this, that's kind of noticeable. We're not in the era of very gamey graphics here where we can forgive shadows being more form than function, we're supposed to be looking at the real world now. Well, the real world with dinosaurs in some random valley.

To get out, Lara needs to jump on a suspicious portrait then shoot a target that appears. Gotta do it quickly because people might otherwise sleep on this one. This opens a secret path.

Boxes! Ah, now I remember that time in the late '90s and '00s where you had hundreds of boxes you had to destroy, because god forbid ammo be laying around somewhere. There's a bucket on the left, because Tomb Raider is an adventure game, and we're going to put in some adventuring.

The room this leads to is the gallery. I can deactivate the alarm quite easily. There's some more glass I can break, because a collector of priceless antiquities doesn't install glass that can be opened and just uses a 9mm lockpick. It's superficial.

There's one last room upstairs, the bedroom. Winston's here. You can't interact with him or anything, he's just standing there. Hmm. Lara's shorter than him, which depending on how tall he's supposed to be may have resulted in Lara losing quite a few inches. Her journal is is hidden behind a medusa relief on the wall, revealed by pulling two daggers. The journal reveals Lara's thoughts on the current situation. "Medusa was a frightful creature from Greek mythology." And that's everywhere in the room. Not even an elucidation on that one?

Also, there's an outfit room, in which I have no outfits to switch to.

Downstairs, there's only a path to the garden, here. Taking a piece of an arrow head I found in one of the glass sections, I put it on the sundial. The garden is only open from 7 to 2 according to the notice next to it, and the puzzle seems to be to rotate the dial via turning it. This is tricky to do right, thanks to it not working unless you precisely line it up.

The garden is a maze, your objective is to get the grapple in the middle of it, in addition to any other treasure found around there. I guess that makes sense for something Lara would have. The grapple, once obtained, is activated with Q and possibly with the addition of manual targeting beforehand. It grabs onto ring objects. Including a panel here, which means I've found a use for that gear. That allows me to activate a lever to...some end.

I don't spy anything in the sitting room that has a ring just yet, but then I notice a door I can open that I missed before. This leads to the gym. This one's certainly a step up from the original's in design, though perhaps not quite meeting safety standards now. There's a pool to the right, which is empty for previously mentioned reasons.

What catches my eye first are these point pillars, I'm sure there's some technical name for it. I remember something like this in Sly Cooper 2, you can jump across these. What isn't coming over from other games is that past a certain distance, Lara acts like she's going to fall, then does. To stop it, you press E.

Better go through these in order. These, something I suspect won't make a reappearance in the game proper, are spinning poles. Go onto one with enough force and they spin 90 degrees. Somethings it works weirdly. The poles, I'm sure, will reappear. Feels more Spider-man than Tomb Raider, especially since Lara can fall from a much higher height unharmed. There's also more twists in the platforming, nice twists. In addition to the previous jumping from side-to-side, you can also jump off a ledge backwards, or up. Ladders also make an appearance, with the exact same abilities as everything else. This particular section leads to a button which raises those pillars. Strange.

That's because it activates the way forward on section number 2. One thing I'm finding I don't care for is how the game decides that while hanging from a ledge is the perfect time to restrict your ability to use the camera. I do note that this feels a lot less helpful as far as telling you your limitations are. It's at this point I try 3 and get stuck with a grappling hook puzzle...because my progress wasn't saved from last session which is just about everything I just wrote. That this game which says it's automatically saving, isn't, and that's the only way to save? Awful. On my way back to do everything over, I discover that E also works for reloading. That's the button you double up on?

Making it back, I can now do a wall run with the grappling hook. It's your basic use of momentum to get somewhere. But I can't complete the trip, I missed something earlier. This leads into something of a nagging problem I've had, while the game is fine, it's consistently slightly worse in all areas except graphically and audibly. Sure Lara gets a lot more moves but only at predetermined points and with far more mercy to it. You're not really in control, for instance I wouldn't need to solve something elsewhere in the original, Lara could just make a left jump from a ledge on a corner piece. Most insultingly, the game doesn't even let you hang from sloping ledges.

I decide to just go into the regular game at this point since I don't really have the time to play this entire thing in one big swoop.

Come to think of it, is that really the sort of attention you want?

The intro movie starts off mostly the same, just done better. Lara is about to do a deal with someone, we see a man approach dropping down a magazine showing her taking down bigfoot. The original was about finding bigfoot, which considering Lara's usual actions, probably means the same thing. Larson flirts with her, she shoots him down. He still has a Texan accent, but his boss, Natla, does not. She looks very weird, whereas originally that wasn't odd.

Natla tells Lara about the Scion, at which point she talks about how her father was looking for it. I've said before I liked the original characterization of Lara the best, nearly everything after the original series changes this. Fine. Change Lara from the borderline psycho to a daddy's girl, I'm sure that'll fix the public perception of Lara. But must we make the story personal? Remembering Legend and Underworld, those games were also personal, and from what I hear the survivor trilogy was too. It feels like lazy writing, we couldn't think of a real reason to make our protagonist want to do something, it has to be connected to some important event from their past.

The funny thing is, this is absurd to begin with, before that's brought up Lara brings up her classic series reasoning, she does it for sport.

After this, it starts us outside the mountain caves in Peru. Not as a cutscene like the original, but as an actual level. I'm guessing because market research said that nobody is going to play Croft Manor until after they finish the game. This is basically your typical tutorial, quickly going through actions in a way that introduces them one at a time. It looks nice though, like a forgotten mountain village, if a bit too fresh. That said, I could have sworn Lara was wearing a jacket outside.

Was the Matrix still even cool in 2007?

Press a button, and the doors open, spawning wolves. Not to fight, it's a cutscene. A really, really lame cutscene. Action is poorly connected, Lara jumps around weird and shoots in a bizarre manner I have never seen her do before. The guide's dead, unfortunately, onto the interior.

The new interior is curious. It changes into what looks like a city or at least man-made area pretty quickly, which makes the question of how the wildlife got in here more obvious than last time, because you could at least imagine you weren't seeing all of the cave system.

I spot a pathway to a secret pretty quickly, a nice upper pathway. Only it makes obvious in what ways this is inferior to the original. What you have to do is jump up some pathways, then jump from a slide to an artifact. (one of the items that gets you unlockables) The thing is, you get basically no slide time on the slide. Worse yet, half the time I'm climbing up the ledge Lara mysteriously slides through the ground to fall down. Good thing there's automatic saves and generous fall damage. It takes me a while, it's far from as as smooth as the original was.

I can see they're roughly approximating the design as it was originally, which is very nice. Bats, of course. Shooting doesn't feel more interesting than the original, just more involved. The secret to my left, or what was a secret is still a medikit.

Bats are, if anything, weaker than they were in the original game, since you aren't ever really in danger of getting next to them. Now, this secret is new, but very appropriate to what the game should have done. You can see that glowing thing. Go right, using the grappling hook, then do some ledge dancing around until you reach there. Fall, and there are some ledges that take you back here from there. Old Tomb Raider would never be merciful like that.

This kind of looks less impressive than the old bridge setup. Oh, and this time the first one collapses, hope you started taking out the wolves below beforehand. There's a not really secret introducing the "Lara can fall if you don't press E" mechanic.

The classic jump over a broken bridge, but there's stuff below and oh, a bear. There's rope here now, which just seems weird to me. You don't even need to fall this time around, there are ledges to Lara's right. There's a medikit in an alcove off to the left you have to use the rope to reach, which reminds you that you can turn left and right on a rope. Considering how limiting this game can be sometimes, not necessarily an unwise reminder.

He looks like he has a disease or something.

Somehow enemy AI feels worse than it did in the original. I'm standing on a ledge, safely out of his reach and he just stands there. Taking a dozen gunshots. This area now leads to a one-way path into the bridge area, only this time it has an artifact.

This is different, and impressive...until I realize it's just here to introduce the pole mechanic and there's nothing else here. There isn't even a way to reach the upper alcoves here, they're just for show.

Really? You kept the worst part of the original level? The darts still aren't a threat. It's even easier to dodge them now that Lara can roll around everywhere like Captain Kirk. At the end is a door, with a pressure plate that would open the door if I didn't need to do something else first. The game then suggests I look at Lara's journal for a hint. I've checked it before and it said nothing of value. It still says nothing of value. "There must be some way to open this door." I could respect Lara's journal giving you a hint, but telling you things you should be able to spot like figuring out you have to open a door after a cutscene showing very suspicious levers?

Climbing up, I see the rest of this grand hall. I already know I have to use the grappling hook on weights above the door somehow, so I go in the opposite direction, expecting the relic of the level, which is fancier than the artifacts. I spot a wolf long before it ever becomes a threat. The music gives me another hint, but the thing gets stuck on a wall. On a wall. I enter the room and it nearly kills Lara. 

The game stops to helpfully tell me I can press space to recover after such attacks.Enemy design like this is a two-edged sword. The attack bit is very clever, but the players most likely to appreciate it are the players most likely to never encounter it. Meanwhile what I think was an ambush might just be stupid AI accidentally becoming brilliant. I'll reserve judgement for later.

After jumping across some more poles, I discover that in fact, that ambush was intentional...because the next couple of wolves botch it. Now the puzzle here isn't really an improvement over the original, jump on two weights holding the door forward in place, but you have to do it within a certain amount of time after lowering one weight. I don't know how much, it's so generous that it doesn't feel like a time limit even with taking out the wolves.

Once that happens, a floor pops out of the top of the door. Aha, this must be the way to the relic. One thing I really want to point out here, you see that pole above Lara? That's a rotating one, only whenever Lara is on it the thing rotates. The problem is it's one that stops Lara's momentum dead and you can't keep it in its original position no matter what. You can reach on top of the weight and get to some ledges from there, but the ledges don't lead anywhere. The trick is to keep the down movement button pressed as you reach the pole and speed jump off it that way. Then it's just more pole jumping.

You can tell the relics are special because they give a neat little movement, then inform you about what it is. Not about anything it brings up, just what it is. According to info I could find, Chicha is a beer made from chewed-up corn, saliva and some spices. I'm not going to rush out to buy some, even assuming there was a place that even sold it, since corn beer just doesn't sound appealing to me. Shocking that an American, who I'm sure is legally obligated to have some percentage of corn in his blood, would turn it down, but there it is.

Anyway, I'm going to stop here even though that's not how I did it before, as there was a lot of meat to Croft Manor. The door leads into the next level of course.

This Session: 3 hours