Tomb Raider (PC/PS3/Mac/360 - Q1 2013)
If you don’t mind the multitude of watermarks, treat your eyes to some stills from the latest effort to make Tomb Raider bankable again. Crystal Dynamics, most famous for gifting the Gex trilogy to the world, looks to reinvent the Lara we know, rebranding her as a survivalist rather than an invincible gun-toting, swollen lipped vixen. Broken bones, bruised arms, and pained expressions definitely isn’t the kind of raiding I grew acclimated to in the PSX days, but I hope to shit the redesign functions as well as it looks.
While tonally it’s set itself apart, many have ridiculed the one gameplay reel we’ve gotten for looking like a carbon copy of Naughty Dog’s Uncharted series. Conceptually, you could do worse than mirror Uncharted, but I agree it’d be the exact wrong course to take for Crystal Dynamics to cross the line from “homage” to “rip-off." Nathan Drake may owe Lara (and Indiana Jones…and the little dude from Pitfall) a lot, but despite the franchise’s seniority, Tomb Raider will still have to feel almost incomparable to compete.
[Forgive my rant; check out the rest of the screens as amends.]