Beyond the Scion (2010)

Name:Beyond the Scion
Number:5
Year:2010
Mod for:Tomb Raider - The Last Revelation
Modder:EssGee
Genre:TPS/Platformer
Difficulty:5/5
Time:10 hours 30 minutes

It's time for more Tomb Raider, and don't let what this is a mod for fool you, this is connected to the original game's plot. As a crude Star Wars-style text crawl tells us, the plot of this mod is a what if scenario. What if the other two rulers of Atlantis were immortal, had mortal identities today, and what if Lara had the complete Scion after leaving Atlantis? Seems like we're exposing the plot twists before they start, but okay.

You don't really want to know how many tries this took.

To start with, this game differs from TLR in controls, there are more. A lot more. These controls add in things like jumping off ledges to pole jumping. They're more finicky than the usual Tomb Raider controls, but once you figure out their quirks they tend to work. But hoo, boy, you get a rough introduction to them.

One of the ground Atlanteans, this guy is a reskin of something for TLR, but I never got far enough to figure that out.

The first section is a remake of Tomb Raider: Anniversary's Atlantis section. So small amount of fighting the Atlanteans, mostly just going up a big shaft. Enemies seem to be a mix of remodeled TLR enemies with some new, weird additions. There are two versions of the flying Atlanteans for some reason. One of them you basically just have to kill before it can get anywhere near you, because it sticks to you like glue when it's attacking.

This took me hundreds of deaths and reloads simply because of how tricky it is to get used to pole jumping. It works weird for this game. You don't grab on with action/ctrl, you grab on with action and the forward button, then let go of the forward button when you want to jump. Most of the other moves don't have quite as many quirks in how they work, and some I'm surprised weren't just in TLR to begin with. Minus the unusual methods of getting them to work.

Audio for this cutscene is reused from the original I think, but a lot of further stuff was made for this mod.

The only reason why this mod starts off in Atlantis is so you can get a different cutscene where Lara misses the Scion instead of shooting it. Otherwise it proceeds exactly like it did in the original games. Exactly, even with the place seemingly blowing up. I wonder why we couldn't have just gotten a cutscene showing this done as the mod starts, because there's a reason why Atlantis was at the end of the game. You don't get the kind of weapons you should have by now. The game gives you a revolver and a scope, but you need that for targets. I shouldn't be conserving ammo here, I should be pondering which of my arsenal I should be using.

The boss fights here are very easy. We first have the "Torso Guy", which is at complete odds with how difficult this mod is otherwise. He charges towards you and then tries to swipe you, but if you stand against the wall, then jump over him, the model collision will glitch out and you'll go over him. Rinse, repeat, however long you need. Even for this big Atlantean, this instance is easy. At least previous ones felt like they could hurt you or you could jump off. Natla is barely even a fight, you just ignore her to pull switches in each corner of the arena to win. She disappears into the sky and the level ends.

Lara is reaching a letter in her library, right in front of her nice and shiny Scion. It's from T. O. Khan, get it? It urges Lara to hide the pieces of the Scion in three specially prepared vaults that were prepared for this exact purpose eons ago. To find them, Lara needs to find an Australian Aboriginal whose ancestor wrote down the locations of them in a cave. Khan suspects that Natla might intercept this letter. So many suspicious things are happening here, like if Natla is going to go after Lara, why wouldn't she also go after the vaults? Then again, if we get into that, we have to ask why Natla never went after them in the original either. I also have to ask why Lara should trust this letter and assume that Khan doesn't want them for herself.

Lara going after one of nature's most vicious killers.

Australia starts off weird. We get a cutscene where Lara finds out where she's supposed to go, then gets deposited into a wombat cave for no explained reason. Once she gets out, killing a wombat and dodging a suspiciously dropped boulder, we meet her companion who despite many suspicious circumstances, is entirely legitimate.

It's a nice enough level, despite having a whole bunch of just plain odd encounters. I feel like the author didn't really care for Tomb Raider's combat, and just threw in a bunch of random animals to fill time. I guess that's not really out of character for Tomb Raider, but it just feels like wildlife here is randomly deciding to pick a fight with Lara rather than Lara clearing out her path. I say this not as someone complaining that Lara is killing the local fauna or anything, just that I dislike it feeling like the local fauna is out to get Lara and will die to accomplish this goal.

That said, I dislike how so many jumps require you to lose health. It feels less like something clever and more like the game is just doing it to annoy you. There's health before and after each of these, and it isn't like health items are in short supply anyway, so it's basically just a thing that you have to go through.

I got as far as South America. At first, it was better than previous levels despite some issues. To start with those, each level starts Lara off in a small area where the only way out is to find a hidden switch. This is kind of annoying the first time it happens, because Lara has to back up, then look at a shaft she climbed down before she entered the level. It feels like an annoying gotcha that only works because there's a disconnect between Lara and the player.

Lara was in the water before the spikes somehow shot her up in the air, all without touching her.

Then there are the spike traps. They're not like normal TR spike traps, they pop out of walls and floors, which would be fine, except their collision is bigger than their models would suggest. Maybe it's just your typical collision in this game, but it feels larger and it never seems to stop to consider that Lara is standing still or slowly going down to them. I admit this could be me maliciously attributing behavior that's in the main game to stuff added in the mod. I do remember such traps in the base game, but not the behavior.

Water puzzles are the central theme in this level. You have to use a kayak to get past half the level, then the other half is centered around a big stone pillar. Every puzzle is above it or below it. I think my favorite was one where you have to jump across a series of platforms hung by weights to get to a switch. It's a clever enough set up that I didn't realize what I was going for until I had to get back on the platform.

Spot the switch, enemy and interactable object in this screenshot. Of course, the enemy won't wait and the object can be approached, but that switch is darn near impossible to spot.

But as I got through the second half, I felt like a lot of stuff was centered around tripping you up. It felt like there was pixel hunting going on, hiding items on top of similarly colored floors or switches in places that you would probably never think of looking for.

I gave up on the last section here, after a series of events that made me question why I should continue to the end. To start, you have to make a jump to a ladder over lava, then on the other side there's a push block. Push it to the end, and there's a pressure plate. The pressure plate opens a door you can easily spot as you go in. You have to push the push block back to the ladder, then use the pressure plate, which is timed, to reach the door. Except that it's very precisely timed, I couldn't do it and it isn't even the way forward, it's a secret. Based on events that would soon follow, I was not wrong to believe this.

The levelset is ultimately just fine. Most of it is enjoyable, but there are a few moments that are just so frustrating that I'm impressed nobody complained before. It's especially odd because most of these are at the start. In most other regards, the mod doesn't really excite. Yes, there are fancy new moves and some nice-looking areas. But the new moves are janky and a lot of the areas are kind of bland. Anything that could excel is tempered by some issue or another. So, 5/10 for level design and everything else I'm not so sure if I'm rating something new or not. From what I've seen, this isn't the only TR mod with these actions, so there must be some script modders can add to their mod.

I don't really get why this is so beloved, outside of it possibly being the first to do a lot of these things. It's very heavily balanced towards the platforming side of the game, to the point that it makes the token nature of TR's combat feel even more token. This also could have stood to be a lot more grand in the level design department. At times it didn't feel like a TR levelset, but a different game entirely. Perhaps there was more of this in the sections I couldn't get to, but it's a big ask to force players through something bad to get to something good.

Next time, more Spacewrecked, of course.