Tomb Raider preview – Hands-on with the incredibly capable Lara Croft

Crystal Dynamic's upcoming Tomb Raider is already controversial, and not for being an Uncharted clone (which it only sort of is) – more for the trailers and demos that supposedly painted the protagonist, Lara Croft, as helpless. She was thrown against the wall over and over again, smashed into the ground, and assaulted, seemingly just to get a thrill out of the viewer. After playing through a portion of the game, and seeing some of the segments from the trailers in context, we were impressed to see how it all played out, and took away a message not of helplessness, but empowerment.

http://www.gamesradar.com/tomb-raider-preview-hands-incredibly-capable-lara-croft/

The demo we played took place fairly early in the game, but even at that point in the game Lara had already been through some pretty rough stuff. She was trapped, had been attacked, and had already seen her friend murdered. She was scared, alone, and hungry. And wet – it was raining, and she needed to start doing the sort of stuff you need to do when you're stuck somewhere.

Lara walked towards the first obstacle in the demo: a log, that acted as a bridge between two ledges. It would be difficult to cross without falling, especially with the wounds she was cradling already, but she had to pass to move on. "I can do this," she said to herself, and lo and behold, she did it.

After stumbling towards a wrecked airplane, hanging daintily off the side of a mountain (a scene reminding us of the train car from the opening of Uncharted 2), Lara surveyed the nearly impossible situation. "I can do this," Lara muttered to herself, and then proceeded to do it once more.  

This continued as we played through the lengthy demo, with Lara repeating "I can do this," almost as a mantra, every time she was met with opposition. In the face of impossible odds she picked herself up, surveyed the situation, and in spite of it all, continued forward. When we plucked a bow from a corpse that was hanging by a tree, "I can do this." When we used the bow to hunt animals in the surrounding forrest for food, "I can do this." When she gutted the animals. When she cooked their meat.

The game looked good, too, and controlled well, but we walked away from our play session not focusing on how it felt, but how it made us feel about Lara. We were shocked with how impressed we were, so far, with how interesting of a character Crystal Dynamics had turned Lara Croft into, and how much we wanted to see more of that.