![]() ![]() On occasion, the environments are a little busy for the smaller screen to handle – unlike, say, Assassin’s Creed IV, Tomb Raider is rarely well-lit, and you’re often at the mercy of howling winds, pounding rain and roaring flames. Blessedly, the rear touchpad isn’t needed at all. The PS4 version obviously enables remote play on the Vita, which works wonderfully well, integrating the touchscreen with the in-game map and only having to map one command (Lara’s Survival Instinct) to the actual screen. Used in conjunction with the Dual Shock 4’s onboard speakers that enhance gunshots, footsteps and rumbling thunder, it’s a great aid to the immersion. Strike up your torch (which you can now do with a handy swipe of the central touchpad) and the light will fluctuate between red, orange and yellow to simulate flames fire your weapon, and it will burst with white muzzle flash. A rather cool addition on the PS4 makes interesting use of the controller’s divisive light display. It’s a nice touch, but each command only negates a single button press, and so it doesn’t feel particularly essential. Unfortunately, as convenient as it is, issuing commands into your mic (or towards your Kinect device) like “bow”, “gun”, “show map” and “silencer” are at odds with Lara’s hands-on approach. The Definitive Edition adds a few gimmicky touches, like voice commands, for example. If you’ve already played through the game on last-gen hardware, however, there isn’t much of a reason to come back beyond the fact that it’s such a playable game. Being forced to really survive, to eat and make medicines or poisons to aid Lara’s desperate struggle would have deepened the game considerably, and (although it’s been said before) a few more tombs to raid wouldn’t have gone amiss. Likewise, you can pick certain plants to earn XP, but there’s little point beyond that as they do nothing. ![]() There are odd moments when you may find yourself wishing for something more hardcore – an early-game event, for instance, sees you forced to hunt a deer for meat, but it’s the only time you’ll ever have to feed Lara. Cut-scene animations are butter-smooth, the weather and lighting contributing to a powerful sense of place – Tomb Raider puts you there with Lara at all times, envelopes you in its atmosphere in a way few games can match. It is noticeable, and it can be slightly annoying when the developers have worked so hard to make the overall experience an immersive one. It should be noted, however, that they could have quality tested the graphics slightly better at times: no matter which Lara you see after she makes it to the island, whether in lashing rain or climbing out of the water, or even on the boat in the flashbacks set before the island, the mud-stains on her face are present and never change. She looks harder in the face – she’s still beautiful, still hiding her vulnerabilities beneath a determined scowl, but she’s harder nonetheless. She has been redesigned, given raven hair and a tougher countenance to bring her more in line with the Lara we remember from the earlier games. Character models don’t appear to be much changed, except for Lara, of course. The entire game has been tweaked and sharpened, with a greater attention to detail, more complex textures, improved lighting and weather effects. So when Square-Enix announced the development of the Definitive Edition for next-gen consoles, the question was: how will they improve on the original? The answer, for better or worse, is almost utterly skin-deep. ![]() Despite degenerating at times into a bit of a brainless shooter with far too high a body count, the mix of puzzles, action and exploration earned Tomb Raider numerous awards, an array of high-end review scores and a placement on many a Game of the Year list ( including our own). Opening with a shipwreck that sees our plucky young heroine plunged into a nightmare on a distant island inhabited by a group of crazed, Goddess-worshipping cultists, it’s a baptism of fire deal as Lara Croft is forced to adapt to live, learning to survive and to kill with equal efficiency. A smattering of overly “gamey” mechanics notwithstanding, their mud and blood-soaked origin story was astonishing, taking cues from both Uncharted and Assassin’s Creed to drag gaming’s First Lady into the HD era with aplomb. Aside a fairly significant overhaul of the frankly less-than-stellar multiplayer mode there really wasn’t much that Crystal Dynamics could do to improve on their triumphant Tomb Raider reboot. ![]()
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