Tomb Rider (2012)

[Art Blade]

I liked the "better dressed" bit, Fiach  :-() :-X And good luck with your investment.

[Fiach]

I liked the "better dressed" bit, Fiach  :-() :-X And good luck with your investment.

Cheers mate, trying to blast through Bioshock 1 and 2 before getting it , but they are so good, I'm scouring every nook and cranny for stuff and savouring every minute, I definately wont be finished in time....and they are not particularly long games :(

[Art Blade]

well, savour and finish them in your own time before you start the new one with just a little bit of delay. You know, it's quite in fashion these days to relate "delay" to new games.

And, you wouldn't want to wear a brand new jacket, either, would you? I mean, just how nuveau rich would that look on you. Of course you'd  first have the butler wear it a bit for you. :-()

[Fiach]

well, savour and finish them in your own time before you start the new one with just a little bit of delay. You know, it's quite in fashion these days to relate "delay" to new games.

And, you wouldn't want to wear a brand new jacket, either, would you? I mean, just how nuveau rich would that look on you. Of course you'd  first have the butler wear it a bit for you. :-()

LOL, reminds me of this :

The Rich Couple was going out for the evening when the Lady of the House gave the Butler, Sheldon, the rest of the night off. She said that she and her husband would be home very late that evening and that Sheldon should enjoy the rest of evening.



Well, as it turned out the Wife wasn't having a good time at the party and came home early. As she walked into the house she sees Sheldon sitting in the dining room. She calls for him and tells him to follow her to the Master Bedroom. She closes it and locks the door, she looks at him and smiles ... then she says ...



Sheldon, "Take off my Dress" ...

He does it carefully ..



Sheldon, "Take off my Stockings and Garter" ...

He silently obeys her ...



Sheldon, "Remove my Bra and Panties" ...

As Sheldon does this the tension continues to mount.



She looks at him ... "Sheldon, If I ever catch you wearing my clothes again you're fired!" ...

[Art Blade]

  +1  :-X brilliant  :-D

[JRD]

So here are a few pictures of TR. It's been a couple weeks since I had time to play but I should have more coming now.

Introducing Lara and the island! The game has really nice light effects

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This is one of the first tombs Lara will find. It works like in AC. You have to solve a puzzle to get to a tomb and get a reward. Only here the puzzles are much more simple and the tombs can be completed quite fast. Haven't seen any time constrain either so you can take your time.

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Climbing a tower... FC3 anyone? From up there you have a beautiful view, Just Cause 2 style... it's a Square Enix game after all!  ;)

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More scenery... the areas where Lara is are not really big but you are not bounded with (visible) walls so it feels good to be outside!

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[fragger]

Thanks for the pics JRD :-X :)

Looks good, the lighting and texturing appears to be quite a bit more advanced compared to earlier TR titles.

[Jim di Griz]

If you can find out who the distributors are, send 'em an e-mail about the DLC code. Someone I know did that for WRC3 as the codes didn't ship with the games - he got one mailed to him next day.

Might not w@&k, but there's no harm in trying.

[Dweller_Benthos]

I've been watching a let's play on youtube, and there are a lot of things I find similar to FC3, game play style. If it wasn't a 3rd person game, I might actually play it....

[PZ]

Nice pics, JRD  :-X

[Jim di Griz]

Fine picture indeed. I think they missed an opportunity here to allow consoles to use their screenshot functions. There have been some truly superb shots I really wish I could have taken.

As for the third person Dweller, this is nothing like most games that use this - it feels far more fluid and natural than any game I've played so far. It's certainly light-years ahead of the stilted Resident Evil or Dead Space II and III's third-person feel.

[Fiach]

I think I was one of the four people that actually liked RE6, very cinematic, I thought about RE6 alot as I played TR2013, there were alot of mechanic similarities I felt..

[Jim di Griz]

True enough it's cinematic and the scope is far better than previous RE games, which had a sort of fixed peering over the should effect - that was what I really meant to say.

[JRD]

A few more screenies  :-()

The game keeps showing nice environments and never gives me the senasation of a linear corridor shooter

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There's a nice playground there... the lines criss crossing the level can be used to move around... you can create some zip lines too

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All this area is open for you to explore and fight

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Another tomb to raid

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The island was home of an ancient Japanese cult and there are some WWII elements here and there like old crashed planes, which keeps me thinking about FC3 all the time.

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.

I'm having a great time playing TR. I was playing Max Payne 3 a while ago but dropped the game due to it's constricted and boring nature. This game, even though linear, is much more fun to play!  :-X

[Art Blade]

did you forget one pic? I found it when checking "unseen" media. It looks cool -- what did you do to her?  >:D

Spoiler

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[JRD]

LOL... I was saving it for later! 

At some point Lara escapes from her certain death by jumping on a pool of blood. There is a scene where she emerges from that pool, all covered in blood... very cool!  >:D

For the rest of this level she is playing inside a maze of caves and she still covered in blood.

Actually Lara gets dirtier and her clothes ripped and thorn as the game progresses. Nice attention to details. When she goes down a river she emerges without all dirt on her but soon enough she will look as someone having a really bad day again... except her hair, Lara is NOT having a bad hair day.  ;D

[Art Blade]

ehehe :-()

[fragger]

I actually picked up TR a couple of weeks ago but haven't gotten around to installing it yet :-[ Will do so soon and let you guys know what I thunk. Sorry about the procrastination - between watching Battlestar Galactica and blowing away island trash I haven't had much spare time left over...

But Lara's in it so I should enjoy it ;)

[Art Blade]

have fun  :)

[fragger]

I finally got around to playing this, and I must say I'm quite impressed. Years ago they tried to jazz up the Tomb Raider series and made a hash of it (I think it was the fifth title in the series that they screwed up by trying to improve it) but they've done a considerably better job this time around, bringing Lara into the "modern" gaming era. This game is a prequel to all TR games, with Lara either a teenager or a very young woman who apparently hasn't received her title of Lady Croft as yet, judging by the fact that she utters the odd unladylike swear word from time to time (no effs though, only esses - so far, anyway).

After a half-hour install followed immediately by the customary three-hour update courtesy of my good mates at Steam, I got into the game. There's a cool intro sequence which doesn't go on for too long before you're in. I haven't gotten very far into it yet, but I can tell I'm going to get hooked. Lara looks fantastic, even bedraggled and covered in grime as she is. The way she is animated is terrific, evidently motion-captured, very fluid and natural. She still runs, walks, jumps and climbs like she did in earlier games and the transitions from one set of moves to another is very smooth and realistic. Idle animations are nice to watch and Lara's expressions are quite varied when you can see her face. Being a third-person game you're usually seeing the back of her while she's moving, but you can swing the "camera" view all around her once she's stationary.

Graphically it's far and away the best TR yet with excellent lighting and environmental effects, rich detail, and about the best fire and water effects I've seen in a game thus far. Frame rate is great with everything either on (except for anti-aliasing, which I always turn off) or set to "normal". TRs have always been pretty resource-friendly. I've yet to experiment with the higher settings, but at this stage it looks terrific in fullscreen mode @ 1920x1080 res and is silky smooth. All control keys are fully remappable (PC version, obviously) and the controls are quick and responsive.

All in all, it's quite an immersive escapade. Maybe it's just my innate male protectiveness gene kicking in, but I always find that I get quite attached to Lara in these games and feel a distinct pang when she meets some yucky demise because of my blundering - I almost feel like I've let her down. And there are some nasty things that can happen to her if you don't look after her. So far she's been crushed by a falling boulder and mauled to death by a wolf because I wasn't quick enough on the keys. Sorry about that, Lara...

You can skill up, upgrade weapons and do other stuff at "Base Camps" that you discover along the way. The TAB key will bring up various inventory and stat screens which you can cycle through, and which I discovered entirely by accident. I don't think it tells you about that in the options/controls section, but maybe I missed it. If you're stuck for ideas on where to go and how to proceed, while Lara is stationary you can hit an Examine Environment key (Q by default) which will make the scene go black and white except for things you can interact with, which will be highlighted. As long as Lara remains stationary you can pan the camera all around the scene to find these interactive objects and directional clues, then as soon as you start to move Lara the display goes back to normal. It's a neat tool.

Enough for now, I want to get back into the game and have some more adventures.

Here's a few screenies. For once, there is a built-in screenshot function <F12>. Bear in mind that the pics lose a lot in the resizing and compression process - ingame they look much nicer:

A ships' graveyard, with vessels from many time periods all mixed up together. The wave action looks fantastic, with big rolling swells and fountains of crashing spray.

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What is this place, and why didn't I stay in England?

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Water effects look almost photographic in TR (take note, Ubi) as does this anatomically-correct B-25, which Lara has to find a way to climb across to proceed.

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Cold, hungry and in need of an extreme makeover.

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Found my first weapon! Just call me Artemis.

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Not a happy camper. Can't say I blame her.

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Hello? Anyone home?

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The map. As you can see, I haven't gotten very far yet.

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[Art Blade]

very nice post, fragger :)

Some time ago, one or two months perhaps, I watched half a playthrough on YT and I was impressed, too. She looks better in motion (as in, while gaming) than in stills, so screencaps don't do her justice. However, I have never been a TR fan but if they had started with this, I might have become one  :-()

[fragger]

Cheers Art :)

Overall I'm quite enjoying the game. It's not an open world game by any means, however there is some scope for exploration. The base camps that you discover along the way serve as fast travel points, so that you can jump back to areas you've already visited and find stuff you may have missed. Some of the earlier goodies can only be gotten later anyway as you need certain skills and/or upgrades to get to them. Generally speaking, you can't just walk from one area to another, and you can't go just anywhere you like as many areas are bounded by some kind of impassable barrier such as cliffs, crevasses and thick scrub, and the only way to get to or from them is by fast travelling in and out.

I touched on the pluses in my last post, here are some minuses.

There are a number of quick time events, and some of them can be tricky. Or rather, they consist of dying a lot until you learn their routine. For instance, there is a part where Lara finds herself sliding down a long natural white water chute. You have to make her slide to one side of the chute or the other to avoid getting her impaled on piles of debris on the way down. However, there are no prompts to help you know when or which way to dodge, it all happens very quickly and the view is bouncing around a bit so that you can't really make out these traps until you land on them, so it becomes a case of reloading and doing the sequence over and over until you learn when and where to dodge, essentially by painful trial and error. This, combined with the checkpoint saving system, meant that I had to do that sequence eight times before I got it right. There are quite a few of these sorts of things. Not a huge amount of fun.

The combat model is a bit clumsy, which is unfortunate because there is quite a lot of it. However, weapons and weapons skills can be upgraded as you progress by earning enough "salvage" money (by finding and breaking open crates, looting bodies, etc) which can actually help offset the slightly dodgy combat physics. I say dodgy because you need to aim first then shoot (no hip shooting), and when you aim, Lara slips to one side of the screen while an aiming reticule appears in the centre. This tends to throw you off a tad and as the control is quite sensitive it can be very easy to miss, especially when things get frenetic. All in all I never feel like I have the sort of control that I should have.  Lara can do stealth kills by sneaking up on bad guys and throttling them with her bow, which is quite satisfying, and she has some melee moves that you can skill up to, but they're not at all easy to pull off.

Puzzles are a bit of a letdown, mainly because there are so few of them. The only halfway decent ones are inside hidden tombs that you can find along the way, but these are not the main focus of the game, they're just a way to get extra goodies, basically. And they're not that difficult. One of the attractions of previous TR games for me were the puzzles, and some of the multi-level ones could require a good dollop of lateral thought to solve. The ones in this game are pretty lacklustre by comparison.

Despite all that, I'm still drawn to the game. Gone are the blocky-looking environments of previous TRs, the terrain in this one is very organic and natural-looking. There appears to be a day/night cycle but I won't know for sure until I've played the game a couple of times to compare (if I play it again, which I may). I've died a lot of times, almost always during one scripted sequence or another :D But there is a strong sense of satisfaction when you complete an objective and the game is clever in enough other ways to make up for the downers.

But sooner or later I just know there's going to be at least one boss fight, and you all know how I feel about those... :-\\

[PZ]

But sooner or later I just know there's going to be at least one boss fight, and you all know how I feel about those... :-\\

Are you sure fragger?  I thought you fondly reminisced about the boss fight in FC3 

Spoiler

   8-X sorry fragger, I just can't help myself

[fragger]

Hehehe Oh yeah, I just love boss fights! Actually, I haven't run into any yet, but I think I will eventually.

The more I see of this game, the more I think it's actually one of the best-looking games I've seen - not just among TR games, but any games. The level and quality of detail is excellent. Animated sequences are terrific, whether you're trying to cross a crumbling bridge or escape from a burning palace that is literally collapsing around you. The physics of such things are truly impressive.

I wish I could show you how this scene looks animated. Got to be some of the best seawater effects I've seen to date - frothy wavelets washing in and out at the shoreline and realistic wave action further out. Whoever created it did a superb job.

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A couple of action pics, just to demonstrate what the combat looks like. On the left in the second pic, you can see how I just scored some XPs for a headshot on the guy with the crosshairs on him (which you can just make out - they're quite fine and tend to disappear in these scaled-down compressed pics). Even though I find the combat system a tad clumsy, there's no denying that the weapons behave quite realistically - and they sound great!

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Mokuba, TR style.

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A couple of shots showing the level of detail, which is quite meticulous. Some areas are rather large and can easily take a couple of hours or more to explore fully.

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[Art Blade]

fragger, there are also some sort of secret challenges. For example get a torch and light whatever it is (candle? oil lamp?) in the lap of Buddha statues; shoot lit round lampions; torch posters glued to walls. That sort of thing :)