This long awaited reboot of the franchise tells Lara's origin story with great gameplay and visuals experiences.
It tells the story of Lara's first dice with death and killing and how she went from an innocent archeologist to the Lara we have gotten to know over the games. One of the first things you will notice is her appearance. It is much more realistic (no massive...features) and portrays her as an innocent young adult. You feel her emotions and pain from the very start (which throws you into the action very fast) and carries on throughout. The game has you hunting for food and collecting salvage to upgrade your weapons and while doing so, you also gain skill points which you can use to unlock combat moves and gun skill upgrades. Along the way, there are 8 or so tombs which you can raid for a treasure map at its end. These all have the same challenge and creativity of the previous games while using up to date physics and new gameplay mechanics which in their own right are spectacular.
In the first hour or so of the game, you are thrown into this island wilderness and have to grasp the skills to survive and ultimately, escape the island. When you get further in, there is some more climbing involved and Crystal Dynamics have taken the movement mechanics from the previous games and updated them to make them more fluid and fun to perform. One thing a lot of people had their suspicions of were the frequent use of quick-time events or QTE's but as the game opens up and gives you some more freedom, these dwindle away into almost obscurity and are rarely seen in the rest of the game apart from one or two instances.
Along with having fantastic and smooth gameplay, you get some great visual experiences. The landscape is incredibly detailed and immersive with loads of hidden objects like GPS stashes and relics which you can examine to learn more about the inhabitants of the island and take you deeper into the history of it. Similar to the Batman: Arkham games, your clothes get more torn and worn as you progress through the story. Also similar to Batman's cape flow is the addition to the PC version of TressFX or Lara's hair physics for a more simpler name. Once turned on, her hair flows around in the wind and over her shoulders which adds to the realism of the game. The only downside is a lot of people have been complaining of a considerable drop in FPS while having this feature turned on. Because it was developed with AMD in mind, the most trouble seems to come from Nvidia cards. My rather modest PC with a GTX 560 can run it from around 24-35 FPS in cutscenes and around 35-50 FPS during gameplay but I think the 6xx series of cards have more problems judging by the Steam forums.
The story is better than expected. It really puts Lara through her paces and ultimately finishes in a very climatic ending. There are lot of cinematic moments which blend in with the gameplay very nicely to make it feel like you are Lara and are going through what she is going through. Compared to past games, the story is noticeably shorter. With taking it slow and completing all tombs and collecting a fair amount of relics and other collectibles (overall 73% completion so far), it took me around 9 hours to complete. With the speed of the game pacing and the amount of action you are involved in, it felt considerably longer however.
Tomb Raider is a very intense action adventure game that does a great job of telling Lara's back story which will hopefully lead into some very good sequels. Square Enix and Crystal Dynamics have really pulled out everything to make the best game they can and they have definitely pleased one Tomb Raider fan with a great, long-awaited reboot to the popular and best-selling franchise.