After the reveals at The Game Awards, a reader is impressed by what he’s seen of Tomb Raider: Catalyst and the new remake, and is glad they’re taking the series back to its roots.
I started writing this on Thursday, when I hadn’t yet seen The Game Awards, but the Tomb Raider remake leaked, including the trailer, so it was obvious that something was going on. The remake looked good, although neither then or at The Game Awards did I get any real sense that it would actually play like the original, which is very different than modern games.
At the show we got our first look at the new game, Catalyst, and… if you took away the name I don’t believe anyone would be able to tell which was which. For anything else I would take that to be a negative but I actually find it very reassuring, because it shows that Crystal Dynamics has finally started to realise what it is that people used to like about the series.
Although some of Crystal Dynamics’ games have been good in themselves, I’ve never felt they really understood Lara Croft as a character and the best thing would be to have original developer Core Design still making them. Unfortunately though, they went bust decades ago.
The concept of Lara Croft is not a complicated one. Core said it often enough when they were still going: she’s like a female James Bond. So she’s cocky, she likes her job, and she likes to joke around and put bad guys down. None of that was in the reboot trilogy, which considering it didn’t play like Tomb Raider either might as well have been a completely different game.
I guess maybe they thought that was too simplistic or they were trying to get away from the sex symbol thing so much they didn’t want her to be flaunting herself in any way, even if it was just quipping at the bad guys. I get it, but the end result is that she just ended up having no personality at all, unless you count overly serious as a personality.
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Tomb Raider’s plots are all very silly and most of them involve the supernatural, so there’s really no reason to be taking them super seriously. The plot for Shadow Of The Tomb Raider, for example, was absolute nonsense and yet it was played straight and so just came across as dumb.
Lara and her adventures need to be larger than life. When the most famous villain of the whole 30 year series is a T-Rex that has only been in it once, that should tell you something. Well, the fact that he was front and centre in the remake trailer, with the velociraptors, was the best thing they could’ve done.
That combined with the trailer for Catalyst means I have some hope now for the series and that Crystal Dynamics are finally ready to take it back to its roots. But they have to make Lara Croft fun again. You have to believe she enjoys what she’s doing and that she’s larger than life, not grounded and boring.
As for the gameplay, they need to pull way back on the action. The action in Tomb Raider should be the platforming, not constantly murdering people. The platforming in the original games was very unique and almost like a rock-climbing simulator at times. Lean into that and have proper puzzles and you might create something people care about again.
The problem for Tomb Raider is when it went all in on copying Uncharted, which is ironic because Uncharted was copying it originally. Except Uncharted was never as big as peak Tomb Raider, so there’s absolutely no reason to do that now, when the series is mostly forgotten.
Looking backwards is usually the last thing you want from a long-running series, but when it’s so long since it’s done anything that resembles the games when they were truly popular it makes sense. I like the look of the new Tomb Raiders, and I hope they’re even more old school than they look already.
By reader Anthead
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