Upset at the lack of progress on a new Tomb Raider game, a reader makes some suggestions of how to improve Lara Croft’s next adventure.
There was an update this week on the new Tomb Raider, and it did not shock me when it turned out to be bad news. For the third time, developers have been laid off at Crystal Dynamics and there’s still no sign of the game being announced any time soon, let alone released.
The new game was announced back in 2021 and we’ve seen absolutely nothing of it so far. There’s no word on what it will be like, just that it will ‘unify the classic and reboot timelines’, which tells you nothing. I’m of the age that the original Tomb Raider on PS1 was a very formative game and at the time I always imagined it would be one of those series that would go on forever.
At first it did but then we got to Angel Of Darkness and everything started to go wrong. Things picked up again with the reboot trilogy but by the end of that I’d become sick of psycho Lara and turning the whole game into a generic third person shooter, with a little bit of stealth. I wanted a new game to go back to the series’ roots but I’m starting to worry it’ll never happen at all.
There’s lots of video game series that haven’t been looked after well over the years, but Tomb Raider has got to be the worst. Looking back at it now, with adult eyes, it’s clear that they were just churning them out as fast as possible back in the PS1 days, with no thought about where they were going or how they were going to stop people getting tired of the formula.
Angel Of Darkness was meant to shake things up, but it was a complete technical mess and I don’t think I really liked any part of it, including the story. The only thing I’d say for it is it was set a lot in ordinary locations, rather than only in rocky caves and the like.
I always felt that the obvious way to expand on Tomb Raider was to make Lara a more general action star, so she could have fights and car chases in cities but also tomb-raiding in remote places and weird locations. In the old days they always used to compare Lara to a female James Bond and on the PS1 you could see them try to expand the locations as they went along.
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For some reason, the reboot trilogy was all very one note though, mostly just non-descript jungles and the odd snowy mountain. That’s a part of Tomb Raider, for sure, but it really needed to move beyond that. If you’re getting beaten by a PS1 game, for the variety of your locations, then something’s not going right.
A lot has been said about how boring and serious Lara was in the reboot series and I would agree with that. But I would expand that and say there’s basically no interesting characters in any of the games. For me, this is one of the main failures, that should’ve been easy to fix with modern consoles, especially the fact that there’s no recurring or iconic villains.
The stories are also super forgettable and the things she’s after are always uninteresting. I think it’s been a mistake to base things on various mythologies and lost artefacts, because it just feels like she’s after whatever hasn’t been used by Indiana Jones yet and it all comes across as dealing with the scraps.
What I’d do is make things more based on fictional things, like have her run into a Cthulhu cult or do something proper with the dinosaurs that used to appear in the early games. This was never explained and I really don’t know how she’s not gone to a ‘lost world’ or Savage Land equivalent yet. Instead, we got weird zombie samurai for some reason.
There’s so much more you could with Tomb Raider, but I’m worried that even if this new game does manage to come out it’ll be another reboot that’ll rerun the old games again with better graphics. As much as I Iove those old games they could be so much better today, if they expanded beyond what they were 29 years ago.
It’ll be 30 next year, so hopefully we’ll find out something about what’s going on then, but I’m not hopeful that it’ll be anything close to what I think the series needs.
By reader Cranston
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