First introduced during the E3 2011 with a trailer impressive enough to instantly create a huge hype for fans of the series, Tomb Raider again show its face on the famous gaming convention.
During the conference, Microsoft’s co-creator of the game by Crystal Dynamics, Daniel Bisson, and studio head Darrell Gallagher appeared to give a taste of how it would be the reboot of the popular series of adventure.
The demo begins with Lara running across a bridge, already carrying bows and arrows and a rifle in her arsenal. Right from the beginning we realized that the movement of Lara looks good with a varied and interesting animation. The track on which she walks, as well as throughout the route shown in the demo gives the impression of being somewhat linear-shaped corridor, which seems strange to those who expected an open-world aspect of the game, very speculated after appearing in the news magazines like Game Informer January 2011 and PC Gamer UK.
The action does not take long to happen when Lara finds a group of people and demonstrates the mechanics of archery in the game: a target appears and decreases to center, allowing a clear and deadly shot. After killing the first two men, the third realizing the presence of the girl retaliates with a firearm. Despite some exaggeration, as the weapon being capable of destroying rocks, wood and practically anything that Lara uses as cover, the action is frantic and constant, requiring the player not only hide but to move, waiting until the enemy’s bullets ran out to open a window allowing Lara counter.
After this scene the girl is still on the trail, crossing a rope that leads directly to a cut-scene that shows her communicating with someone through a device. Again, she slides down a rope and falls into a house where other armed men are waiting to be slaughtered. This time Lara uses fire arrows to explode some flammable substance near the enemies, an interesting detail, showing that the bow might be a key part in the battle system depending on the type of substances that can be aggregated to the arrows. The action continues when the young woman finds more men forward and uses the bow and the environment to fight them.
The last scenes makes everything more surreal when Lara crosses a lake and is sucked by the current, being dragged for miles as it is thrown against a number of objects that surely would have killed any real human being. The situation becomes more bizarre when Lara is thrown into the wreckage of a plane that crashes into a cliff and she is forced to jump with a parachute that was left conveniently. With the fall the girl is again thrown against trees and branches but ends physically well despite a new dirty look on the character and a changed animation to give the impression that she had been hurt, not sufficiently strong to convince the player that after all those blows the only thing that would have happened were some broken ribs.The trailer ends with Lara reaching a rudimentary kind of town, with a view of the sky and sunshine.
The presentation ends and cuts to studio head, Darell Gallangher, announcing that the first Tomb Raider downloadeable content would be exclusive to Xbox 360, something that surely did not leave any of the journalists or users watching happy.
On the same day another demo was shown via Spike TV called “Open World gameplay” which is supposed to show the speculated exploration that would be featured in the game. But all that was shown were cut-scenes of Lara arriving at the island on which the game unfolds and other linear paths.
Despite this disappointment in regard of this aspect in both videos, overall, the reboot of Tomb Raider promises to be full of action, sufficient to suppress the lack of games in the genre we’ve seen in this generation and cheer fans of the series, long deprived of a good series production. If these failures were just a bad choice for the convention, only time will tell.