This game is... fine. I guess. So much has been said about it, I feel like I shouldn't carry on too long about it. Like, yeah, Lara is a pretty terrible archaeologist. She does all the usual archaeologist stuff of traveling to a foreign place and stealing all their cultural objects but then, on top of that, she also shoots whoever happens to be living there and destroys entire ancient buildings, like, come on girl, what are you even doing.
The main plot feels so empty for a lot of it. The vast majority of the game is just "rescue Lara's friend(s)" and it constantly finds new reasons why you can't quite get to them yet or whatever. Pretty much everything interesting about the plot is developed via the collectible journals which sure is an interesting choice.
The puzzle solving and platforming aspects were mostly fine? It got pretty janky in some spots and the majority of my deaths were trying to make a jump and Lara not grabbing or the camera turning her mid-air and making me fall to my death but when it works it's completely competent, I guess.
Speaking of completely competent: The shooting. I liked the combat early on when encounters were very small-scale (with usually only 3-5 enemies) but once it gave me the assault rifle and grenade launcher, every fight was like a dozen dudes and it got very boring very quickly. At first I had thought this was a response to that half-joking criticism people like to level at Uncharted where they say that Nathan Drake is a mass murderer with how much dude-shootin' he does but it turns out, no, they were just slowly escalating the encounter size until I had a proper arsenal. At one point it took away all the weapons except the bow and that was awesome!! I really liked that part!! More of that, please!!
I feel like collectibles in games can be somewhat controversial but I kind of liked some of what this game did? The journals are where a lot of character and plot development actually happens (which is maybe an indictment of the actual main plot of the game) and the artifacts give nice little tidbits of actual history (that I really wish were longer). But those two gave me enough that I made sure to get all of both of those before I finished the game. There's a ton of other collectibles too, though, and those definitely feel like a waste of my time for the sake of padding out the game. The GPS Caches, for example, give a minuscule amount of experience but there is approximately eight trillion of them in each zone to find.
Lara and Sam are definitely gay, right? Sam calls Lara 'sweetie' several times and in basically every cutscene they're in, they're holding hands or putting their arms around each other and I'm choosing to read that as romantic because it being a game about a woman rescuing her girlfriend is a thousand times more interesting to me.
Fuck QTEs, always and forever. It took me, like, three QTEs to get tired of mashing a button to do a thing. And in the prologue/tutorial section, the QTEs weren't displaying properly so I had to watch Lara's skull get crushed by a boulder like eight times before the game decided to tell me what button I needed to be pushing. Luckily it seemed to just be like that for the first couple because if the whole game had been that then I never would've finished this. Not just from QTE frustration but also because I got real tired real quick of seeing all the brutal and gruesome shit they do to Lara here. From what I understand, they tone it down in the sequels which is good, but oh my god it's so awful here. Truly hate it.
And one last thing: fuck the bright white flashes that you get from almost every menu option at a campfire. I had to close my eyes every time I clicked to buy an upgrade or unlock a skill or fast travel cause that shit is so uncomfortable. Fuck off, don't do that, what the hell.
Anyway. It was funny to play this after having watched the 2018 Tomb Raider movie because that takes some of this game's plot (Queen Himiko, Yamatai, some other proper nouns) so every time I recognized something I could be like "wow cool reference to a movie that came out 5 years later".
Very middling game that was a generally okay way to spend 13 hours. I feel like at a different time I could have more venom for this game and the way it's indicative of the design tendencies of AAA games but I just don't have that in me right now because all I wanted was a cool place to runny jumpy collect things and rescue cute girlfriend and that is basically what I got.
The main plot feels so empty for a lot of it. The vast majority of the game is just "rescue Lara's friend(s)" and it constantly finds new reasons why you can't quite get to them yet or whatever. Pretty much everything interesting about the plot is developed via the collectible journals which sure is an interesting choice.
The puzzle solving and platforming aspects were mostly fine? It got pretty janky in some spots and the majority of my deaths were trying to make a jump and Lara not grabbing or the camera turning her mid-air and making me fall to my death but when it works it's completely competent, I guess.
Speaking of completely competent: The shooting. I liked the combat early on when encounters were very small-scale (with usually only 3-5 enemies) but once it gave me the assault rifle and grenade launcher, every fight was like a dozen dudes and it got very boring very quickly. At first I had thought this was a response to that half-joking criticism people like to level at Uncharted where they say that Nathan Drake is a mass murderer with how much dude-shootin' he does but it turns out, no, they were just slowly escalating the encounter size until I had a proper arsenal. At one point it took away all the weapons except the bow and that was awesome!! I really liked that part!! More of that, please!!
I feel like collectibles in games can be somewhat controversial but I kind of liked some of what this game did? The journals are where a lot of character and plot development actually happens (which is maybe an indictment of the actual main plot of the game) and the artifacts give nice little tidbits of actual history (that I really wish were longer). But those two gave me enough that I made sure to get all of both of those before I finished the game. There's a ton of other collectibles too, though, and those definitely feel like a waste of my time for the sake of padding out the game. The GPS Caches, for example, give a minuscule amount of experience but there is approximately eight trillion of them in each zone to find.
Lara and Sam are definitely gay, right? Sam calls Lara 'sweetie' several times and in basically every cutscene they're in, they're holding hands or putting their arms around each other and I'm choosing to read that as romantic because it being a game about a woman rescuing her girlfriend is a thousand times more interesting to me.
Fuck QTEs, always and forever. It took me, like, three QTEs to get tired of mashing a button to do a thing. And in the prologue/tutorial section, the QTEs weren't displaying properly so I had to watch Lara's skull get crushed by a boulder like eight times before the game decided to tell me what button I needed to be pushing. Luckily it seemed to just be like that for the first couple because if the whole game had been that then I never would've finished this. Not just from QTE frustration but also because I got real tired real quick of seeing all the brutal and gruesome shit they do to Lara here. From what I understand, they tone it down in the sequels which is good, but oh my god it's so awful here. Truly hate it.
And one last thing: fuck the bright white flashes that you get from almost every menu option at a campfire. I had to close my eyes every time I clicked to buy an upgrade or unlock a skill or fast travel cause that shit is so uncomfortable. Fuck off, don't do that, what the hell.
Anyway. It was funny to play this after having watched the 2018 Tomb Raider movie because that takes some of this game's plot (Queen Himiko, Yamatai, some other proper nouns) so every time I recognized something I could be like "wow cool reference to a movie that came out 5 years later".
Very middling game that was a generally okay way to spend 13 hours. I feel like at a different time I could have more venom for this game and the way it's indicative of the design tendencies of AAA games but I just don't have that in me right now because all I wanted was a cool place to runny jumpy collect things and rescue cute girlfriend and that is basically what I got.
3 Comments
@TransWitchSammy I hadn't thought about The Descent but you're totally right, they really are pulling from it quite a bit, especially early on with all the gore-filled caves they make you crawl through. And then again later on in the weird geothermal caverns bit where there's that inexplicable jail/prison?? And none of it has any real connection to anything else going on, they just really wanted those Vibes and missed the mark quite hard, what a weird game.
Thank you, I'm glad people like my vaguely review-shaped rambling posts on here haha
Thank you, I'm glad people like my vaguely review-shaped rambling posts on here haha
YEAH FUCK YEAH FUCK THOSE WHITE FLASHING LIGHTS OH MY GOD I GAVE THIS A LIKE JUST FOR THAT HOW DID I FORGET TO MENTION THAT I'M EDITING MY REVIEW RIGHT NOW THANKS
TransWitchSammy
1 year ago
It feels like it wants to be goofier or a little less grimly serious but is so held back by trends that it totally fails to capitalize on any of it and not a lot of the characters or writing feel strong enough to carry a lot of the emotional core. It's such a bizarrely middling game that feels like it should've been better than it is but it just like....isn't.
Rise, I feel, embraces a lot of the goofiness of the original games better while toning down some of the worst aspects of this game from what I've played of it but idk if it keeps it up fully cause I haven't finished it.
Good review!