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With the seemingly recent trend of reboots or origin stories, there is no real surprise that this famously buxom Tomb Raider heroine was given her own.
The storyline of the game is that of Lara Croft before she became the woman who stole crap from tombs. It all begins with her being with a crew aboard a ship sailing to the south of Japan looking for some ancient artefact that is part of an ancient myth. As the ship slowly gets closer to the island, a storm appears and causes the ship to crash, resulting in the wreckage and the survivors of the storm being washed up on the island. After being on the island for a while, someone kidnaps Lara Croft and drugs her. She awakes in a cave that she must escape from, first by setting fire to the cloth she is wrapped in, then by falling onto a bone and pulling it out of her leg, then crawling through a lot of small spaces, and finally using her survival instincts to build and do random crap to escape.
The main gist of the whole game is to learn about Lara before she became all badass, and to understand how she became an explorer and her love of tomb raiding. As the game progresses, you see Lara become more intense. You experience her first animal kill with a bow and arrow, which she apologies for after killing a deer, the near rape that she is subjected to, resulting in her killing her first human, and the weird monsters of myths. You collect artefacts and materials to upgrade your many weapons, ranging from a bow and arrow to a grenade-launching rifle, and kill many people before they get the chance to kill you.
The upgrading of weapons makes the game easier as it slowly gets more difficult with the introduction of stronger enemies and an increase in their numbers. However, I decided that the game would be even more fun if I just used the bow and the pickaxe. Indeed, the game did seem more fun, and I must admit I was impressed with my accuracy, seeing how in reality I could not hit a target if it was literally within reach.
The persistent fighting keeps the game interesting. Once again, I never listened to what was being said by any of the characters, and every time you find a diary entry I would switch off and stop listening to whatever accent decided to talk. The only part of the game I hated was the fact that every so often something or someone would jump out of nowhere and scare me. Not implying that I screamed and threw something at the TV, but I did start panicking and pressing random buttons, resulting in Lara Croft spasming at the wall or falling off something I am pretty sure you cannot normally fall off of.
Every now and then, a QTE (Quick Time Event) occurs in which you must press the correct button/s in the correct order to complete that specific moment in the game, otherwise the sweet and innocent Lara is sliced in half, crushed by a rock, or strangled to death. With my awesome reflexes, I managed to survive by quickly panicking and pressing the correct (and sometimes not so correct) buttons and hoping the flashing on the screen would go away and leave me alone. I was amazed at how I managed to survive those moments, yet later on inadvertently had her killed when I forgot that the wolves did not want to have a tea party and did indeed want to rip poor Lara apart because she does look tasty. My skills as a gaymer did improve as I went along.
The change from the original Lara to a newer, stylish, and sexier Lara, to me seemed like a better move. I am not complaining that the original image wasn’t a great thing to have as a strong female role model, but I feel that the smaller breasted, tight top, and trouser wearing Lara made her seem more sensible and better fitting as not only a role model, but also as an explorer. Whilst comparing the original Lara to the new version, I had a feeling that the older graphics made her seem like a plastic surgery victim. Like the women who appear on This Morning because, their operations have gone terribly wrong. I feel that maybe all this exploring and stealing from the tombs of dead people, who I am sure never existed, gave her the riches to fix her face into the emotionless Kristen Stewart of the video game world.
The main feature of the older games that I miss is the way her hands never opened. They stayed in a fist formation the whole time. It made me laugh when it looked like she was attempting to use the laptop at the end of a mission, but realised she had no idea what she was doing so just did the tried and tested method of hitting the thing as hard as you can and hope something happens.
The not-so-confusing Tomb Raider origin story, with the same title as the original Tomb Raider game, is a must play for anyone who actually likes games. If not just to stare at her butt, and although I may be gay I cannot deny I enjoyed her sexy computerised butt. Tomb Raider is the first game I have actually ever taken the time to complete 100%. It is one of those games that you will enjoy playing continuously until you have collected everything, or have grown bored of killing.
