This game is SO good, makes me think of how Uncharted is childs play… am I wrong? I just love the art direction… especially the tundra rus/mongol feel.
It really amazes me how much art production is VERY good in alot of AAA games these days… like the Assassins Creed games (almost all of Ubisoft games actually). I sometimes play games like these just to wander around almost like a virtual museum… so cool.
BTW, the endurance mode is really fun but infuriating! Made it to 14 days had like 30 artifacts, called copter, then in comes the horde… killed a bear, 3 tigers, a few trinity soldiers and then a cat jumped at me right when i was about to grab the rope to leave… SUCKS, but was so much fun!
I finally finished RotTR last weekend. It started off so well, and then became kind of tough going from around halfway through. The main plotline was totally acceptable action-movie nonsense, with totally predictable plot twists. I didn’t even mind the cartoonishly evil villains too much. It’s what you expect from the genre.
But I just couldn’t stand what they’ve done with Lara. Such an incredibly boring and overly serious goody-good character, whose main motivation appears to be that people laughed at her dad? Maybe this is what the Lara of TR 2013 was also like, but at least it was hidden since her main mode of interaction there was to stab people in the head with a climbing axe. Damn it CD, make her interesting somehow.
The Endurance Mode sounds fantastic, I need to get in on that. More Tomb Raider gameplay, less Tomb Raider dialogue should be the perfect combination. Is it completely new maps, or does it reuse the existing ones?
Microsoft, in a stunt to promote the 2015 Xbox One release of Rise of the Tomb Raider, strapped eight people to a billboard in central London, in winter — and challenged them to “survive”. Not only could you watch them, via webcast, struggle to stay awake and upright, you could vote on which “weather conditions” they should suffer, from a menu that included “arctic cold, intense wind, wild snowstorms and sudden heat.”
For twenty-four hours, those eight people hung suspended in the London skyline while, basically, random assholes took turns pressing the button to blast industrial fans in their faces. One contestant dropped out after medics worried she was showing signs of hypothermia.
[quote=“tomchick, post:525, topic:74980, full:true”]
It’s a single new map for Endurance. There are other cool modes, though, that use different maps.[/quote]
Based on a few games I think it’s a procedurally generated map that’s different every time. That of course is totally in spirit with the rest of the mode, but it does mean there isn’t much of a sense of place here. And at least once I’ve gotten very confused when I’d picked a specific ruin as the thing to orient myself around. An almost identical copy had been spawned a hundred meters away, and after stumbling on that I was very confused about why nothing seemed to be in the right place.
Also, screw instakill traps in Crypts. I didn’t think I’d ever care about the card mechanism of this game, but if I ever find a card that grants the automatic trap detection skill, I’m equipping it every game no matter how expensive :)
So this game has me most interested: Should I start with the New Tomb raider and complete that and then go to the Rise of the Tomb Raider? Isn’t the story of Lara important? (New Tomb raider meaning the one that dropped last year or so).
While I do agree you should start with the preceding game, I wouldn’t go so far as to say that its a fantastic game. Its entertaining, but for me I really miss the game structure of the old ones. The new approach is very scripted and linear with hardly any tombs about…
Finishing this up, I am at 91% and nearing the end (just past the BS ambush they toss at you).
Overall the Tombs in this game are still disappointing. I finished the last Tomb and Crypt, the one where you get Greek fire arrows was so easy, I figured it out in less than a minute. Seriously…
I hope the next game has you know… Actual Tombs have enough content to last at least 15 minutes.
I played on Survivor as well, and for the most part didn’t find it that hard. But I do recall several bullshit ambushes, or at least several that struck me as pretty bullshit. Luckily grenade arrows are pretty much a “get out of ambush free” card.
This is another game where I would have been very happy to have about 1/2 the combat and double the exploration. The combination of ‘you need to use cover’ combined with ‘every enemy will chuck grenades at you nonstop’ really pissed me off quite quickly.
If they ever nail the exploration aspects of this, with the ability to make these amazing looking game worlds, it’s going to be a real home run for me. I’ve always liked the original TR, that was 90%+ exploration and not so much fighting. I suppose fighting is a good way to pad your playtime though, as the same area with a bunch of enemies in it takes exponentially longer to get through. The used to slow you down with puzzles, now they do it with enemies. /shrug.
You know, if they had like a slider you could configure that determined how many enemies you wanted to face, that would be pretty great. I’d crank it down to zero and wander around but I’m weird that way.
I’m wrapping this one up as well. Overall, I preferred the balance of gameplay in this one more than the prior. I’m still waiting for them to debut a tyrannosaur in one of these games. With the dramatic storytelling presentation, I expect it will be a fun scene.
You guys talking about the level of exploration in the originals has got me remembering the first game, the only one I spent substantial time in. I remember being particularly impressed with the Croft Mansion in the old game. It was probably my favorite part, actually, for the way to built up the all the traversal techniques to build up some really fiendish puzzles. The new game’s Croft Mansion iteration chooses presentation over skills exploration. It’s a pale shadow of its predecessor.
On the other hand, the way you move through environments in the new one – the pacing of that is terrific. The first Tomb Raider game made me feel trapped in that endless, sprawling ruins environment. I’m not sure I’d want to go deeper on the tomb puzzles if it means giving up on places like the Geothermal Valley.
I’m playing this now and I’m really not fond of Lara as a character in this one, also boy the story is rubbish. Didn’t it win an award for game writing or something? I have no idea how.
I just started it and the writing and story are so terrible that I quit and double-check that I bought the correct game and not some cheap knock off. It’s almost like they had to put in extra effort to make it that bad.
