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| Tomb Raider offers players intense hair effects with AMD's Tress FX effect, but it will tax your framerate. |
The original Tomb Raider was released back in 1996 and was one of the first Indiana Jones esc games to hit the streets. Lara Croft is back in this prequel and she’s
not as top heavy as she was in franchise's previous titles, so for those looking for
a chick with knockers bigger than her head you’re out of luck. Tomb Raider
delivers a fantastic experience all around hindered by some graphical issues.
In Tomb Raider you'll progress through the campaign you go
through places called camps which have you kill hordes of enemies and wild animals.
Your main enemies are the Solarii which are your human enemies in the
game who have inhabited the island you are on. In the camps you will find scrap metal which can upgrade your weapons increasing their damage, range, capacity, or special ability. To upgrade
your gear you will need to be at a camp fire, however some maps are very large which makes getting to campfires a long trek across the map just to modify your weapons. The campfires also
allow you fast travel to previous camps you have visited in the game. Mixed in throughout the camps are puzzles or obstacles that you'll need to perform some sort of platforming to get around.
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| The bow and arrow was our favorite weapon to use as it killed enemies silently. |
The weapons in Tomb Raider are powerful and fun to use as
there are a wide array them to choose from. We liked using the bow and arrow we
found it was great at long range and it allowed us to get one-hit headshot
kills. The bow also let us get silent kills which made being stealthy easy
instead of having to use Lara’s other weapons since those weapons are guns. Tomb
Raider starts you out with the bow and arrow and you’ll pick up an assault
rifle, a shotgun, and pistol along your journey. The shotgun is badass at close
range and it picks apart enemies quickly and easily. Lara’s pistol is alright,
but we didn't care too much for it as we didn’t see it offering a real advantage
over the bow and arrow or the other weapons.
Tomb Raider’s graphics are beautiful and it is definitely a
title that will push your GPU. When testing the game’s video capabilities we
found that it ran fantastically on our rig, which has an overclocked Intel 2700k
processor and a 660 Ti video card. We averaged 60fps in the games high-setting
preset at 1920x1080 with v-sync enabled. We also tested the game on an AMD 6850
and averaged 45fps on the high setting preset. The textures in the game are all
high resolution which is a plus as many games today have some low-texture
spots. A few times, however we ran into a few graphical glitches where the
plants shadows were rendered incorrectly as they were constantly flashing. We
only experienced this on my 660 Ti, so this is mostly an Nvidia problem. The
game also stopped working sometimes and it seemed to crash for no reason on me
which was kind of annoying have to restart it many times during my playthrough.
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| There's plenty of rock climbing that will need to be done in Tomb Raider. |
We ran the game on Ultimate setting with AMD’s TressFX
enabled and saw that the framerate on the 660 Ti was cut in half as we averaged
only 30fps on this setting at 1920x1080. TressFX is a GPU hog, so we don’t
recommend using it, as it’s the main culprit of framerate drops and dips in
Tomb Raider. Every time there was a close up of Lara’s hair the framerate
dipped to an unplayable 15 to 20fps.
The game only took us 9 hours to complete and it allows you to go back and roam around the island after you've finished the campaign. Once you've finished the campaign you can go back to the island and search around it for collectibles and fight some Solarii too.
For those who like collectibles there are plenty of treasures to scour the camps for. The game has achievements for collecting the treasures, so those who like to dig around for goodies will like this aspect of Tomb Raider. We liked collecting them as they looked cool as it gave me an incentive to search the camps explore the island.
The Mulitplayer is where this game is flat out horrible and
we didn’t enjoy it very much at all. Tomb Raider has a capture the flag mode which
has players play on two different sides one side being the Solarii and the other
being Lara’s crew. The two factions fight each other in each multiplayer round
and the game definitely favors Lara and her mates over the evil Solarii because
the Solarii lose almost every match we played. There is a capture the flag game
type which gives Lara’s crew the ability to stay alive on the ground and shoot
their foes while they are downed basically like the Last Stand perk in COD.
Lara’s side can also heal these players while the Solarii don’t have this perk
at all. The end result is that the Solarii get smashed in multiplayer games and
this puts a blemish on the otherwise fantastic game.
Tomb Raider is a great game and is one of the best games
we've played, so far this year. We enjoyed the awesome platforming and solid
gameplay mechanics of Tomb Raider. The story was kind of mediocre, so don’t
expect anything fantastic like Uncharted or Bioshock here. This game has put
Tomb Raider back on the map and has made it relevant again and it’s a kickass
prequel everyone should play.
-Chris Zele
Verdict: 9
(+) Weapons that are fun to use; Great platforming; Good replay value.
(-) Unbalanced Multiplayer.
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