Rise of the Tomb Raider (2015)

Today I had a rather long and frustrating day at work so I needed something brainless to wind down. So no intense combat of Silksong nor the focused traversal and story of Albatroz. I remember that I had this one on Steam and gave it a go.

It delivers. "Press forward to continue" gameplay, very generous quicktime events and the least likeable protagonist this side of GTA. It was less than an hour before Lara literally demolishes a priceless ancient necropolis. And what's hilarious is that the game at first had the bad guy put the charges, so I though "Ah, Lara will try to stop them, thus showing that she's better than them, but eventually fail and be forced to escape". Nope! She just takes the detonator and presses the button with a single sign of remorse in her body.

After beating it, I declare this game to be the single worst modern game I've played to date. Bulletwitch on the 360 was better optimized than this. The game is beautiful, but that's all it has going for it, and half its beauty is nullified by the fact that it takes place mostly in the snow, so. Multiple glitched achievements, numerous trackings that stop updating, inaccessible collectibles, terrible b movie plot fueled by the "gotta get the macguffin before the bad guys" trope, and so so SO much more.

Congratulations Crystal Dynamics, you irrevocably stained the predecessor forever by releasing this in the state it's in, then never patching it, and overall not caring enough to put more effort into its most important aspects. I now dislike Tomb Raider 2013 - a game that stood as an all time favorite - because of this horrid turd in a bag. I've always been of the opinion that something that comes after something else can't ruin what came before, hence people who say a finale ruins an entire show. It's a ludicrous idea. However, this is a rare example where I'm bending my own hard and fast rule, because my god, this makes me dislike the first reboot simply by its existence.

Worst game on a modern console I've endured thus far, and I played Prey for a few hours. Still, despite being fucked out of my multiple achievements and completion percentages, and despite absolutely hating every single narrative aspect about this, I did it. I stuck with it to the bitter fucking end.

And boy was it bitter.

So long Rise, you will not be missed or dearly remembered.

Once you step away from the plot, it really hits you just how unequivically broken this game is on fundamental levels. Challenges don't work or track, 90% of the achievements are glitched and don't unlock, and half of the free roam stuff is literally pointless customization for unnecessary crafting, and that's if you can get them to work to begin with.

The plot's nothing to write home about either, it's like I said by the book "get the macguffin before the bad guys do" bull, but it at least keeps moving and has a steady pace and is, if not interesting, at least tolerable to the maximum amount it can be. But once you step away from that, holy GOD is this thing busted beyond repair.

And I say beyond repair because it's been 7 years and none of this has been patched.

It's just outright remarkable to me that a game from an established IP, produced by an established studio, released by an established developer - an outright sequel to a best seller - was shipped in the state it's in, and then never fixed after the fact. This might be the single most broken game I've ever played, and I'll be SO HAPPY to be done with it and get my hard drive space back.

I think I've figured it out.

I think the key to enjoying open world titles (whether they're a step down from their predecessors or not) is to simply do the storyline and THEN go back and do everything else. It's too overwhelming otherwise. In some games, Mass Effect as perhaps the best example, you really should do the DLC and side missions and stuff during your main playthrough, but I think for stuff like Control or Rise of the Tomb Raider - both of which I'm struggling immensely to enjoy - I think it's a good idea to save everything for afterwards.

I will say this about Rise of the Tomb Raider...in spite of my problems with it, and in spite of its story being absolutely nonsense filled with generic bad guy #2 and the tried and true "gotta get to the deus ex machina macguffin before the bad guys do!" plotline, on a technical level it's one of the best games ever. The cutscenes and the acting therein is fantastic, the visuals are beautiful and the gameplay is so smooth. Sure the story is ridiculous and doesn't come close to the first, but if you can overlook that, and as I predicted once you get out of the snow it improves tremendously, then it's pretty mediocre.

But yeah. Obviously it depends on the game, but I think some of these more recent open world titles I've been trying to get through will be much more enjoyable if I simply ignore everything but the plot and stay on a linear path, then afterwards go back and mop up. It's the same problem binge watching has. If I'm given everything all at once, I can't do any of it. It's too overwhelming and feels like an obligation, hence why I prefer to stick to main story of a game or watch a single episode of something a week. I think that's the key to enjoying these more.

I'm really a stupid person, but I like to think I've at least figured this out, and that makes me feel a smidge smarter.

Trying to clear out my backlog, which is why I'm talking about some of these again, so while I'm on a shit storm rage, let's once again reiterate just how terrible the second Tomb Raider is. My GOD it's bad. How did they go from the first to this? It's like they weren't even made by the same people. Unbelievable.

Addendum: After hours and hours of gameplay, I may have to bail on this as well. It's just that awful. I really hate bailing on stuff, but there's way better stuff for me to be doing comparatively.

I'm done.

It sort of started to grow on me, but this game just reeks of underdevelopment in terms of the clarity of its ideas. The setting is awful, the story is stupid and overall Tomb Raider 2013 should've been a one and done. Such a shame, because Tomb Raider 2013 was an all time favorite and somehow they just completely botched everything that was good about it in this shoddy, slapped together pseudo sequel.

But, life is too short to suffer through stuff you hate.

While playing Rise of the Tomb Raider tonight, my girlfriend asked something I'd been wondering...where are all of Lara's friends from the first game?

So I did a little digging and I discovered an article that goes in depth about the 18 issue comic series that ran between the two, thusly bridging the plots. Despite the first game not being a "direct" sequel of sorts - since the plot of the 2013 game was more or less wrapped up by its climax - this sort of shit needs to stop happening.

The same exact thing happened to Halo 4, and, in an even worse case, Doom Eternal, wherein the plot of the entire first game is completely ignored entirely in favor of text heavy lore that is never fully explained or even remotely related to the first games story. But let's ignore that and discuss the Halo 4 and now Rise of the Tomb Raider issues, because as someone who used to get paid to write about video games, I feel it's my duty to report that this has happened too many times now for me to continue to ignore it.

Developers continue to allow entire plotpoints or what have you to be explained by ancillary and often unseen content in another medium altogether (in Halo's case books and in Tomb Raider's case comics), which winds up confusing a majority of the players of the follow up games. Halo 4 is almost impossible to decipher without the excess lore used in books that, let's face it, most of us who played it either aren't going to read or even know exists, and while I'm a huge comic book geek, the same can be said for Tomb Raider. I may have been willing to read the series, as it's much shorter than a novel and I enjoy the story and I enjoy comics, if I'd even known it existed to begin with. Information that is necessary to the plot of your story cannot be relegated to another medium outside the story it's related to. I'm a professional writer, knock. this shit. off.

Tomb Raider is a bit forgivable seeing as in this case it's more extra knowledge rather than required, but it still would've been nice to have known all of what happened between the two games without having to read about it in a random article a handful of years after the fact. But in the case of other games, like Halo or Doom, it's really not okay, and it's been going on forever.

Mass Effect 3 was possibly the first and worst example of this. A severely hyped up climax to a beloved franchise, with people chomping at the bit for answers to things. Answers the game had. Answers they were ready to give. Answers they then promptly put into a DLC and chopped out of the game, and released afterwards. The DLC in question was "Leviathan", which is, honestly, extremely crucial to understanding the entirety of why what's happening in the Mass Effect story is happening in the first place. This was, as I said, perhaps the first example of this sort of thing happening, but at least in this situation it was still in the medium that its story was...a video game. It wasn't pushed to a comic, or a novel or an animated tie in short released on Youtube at 2am. Was it okay? No. Absolutely not. And I guarantee it basically was a major reason the game got so much ire to begin with, because had it been included in the game proper, like it should've been, then perhaps people would've been a bit more forgiving towards other aspects, like the actual endings of ME3, but that's a whole other kettle of fish. Honestly I've always been of the opinion that if you actually believed you'd get an ending tailor made to your choices - vastly differing choices made across 3 titles by millions of people, none of whoms choices I bet matched remotely - then you only had yourself to blame, but whatever.

I know this is long and rambly and kind of bitchy maybe even, but I'm just getting so goddamned sick of stuff like this happening. DLC removing entire chunks from game was a problem for a long time, but, as I said, at least DLC was still a video game in the end. Now that plot's just being outright moved to other mediums entirely, and it's not okay, and it needs to stop.

I'm sorry for this rant. It's late, and I'm feeling sick this week and I'm just frustrated with the industry more than ever these days. How have you people been working on this medium this long and still capable of fucking it up this well?

Perhaps you can give me that answer in a goddamned comic book.