The delectable, feisty Lara Croft is one of the games world's best-loved characters but, frankly, in recent years her starring vehicles haven't come anywhere near to doing justice to her iconic status and tangible charms.
The rot set in a while back – original developer Core Design (based in Derby) never got to grips with developing for the PlayStation 2, and its first effort for that platform – 2003's Angel of Darkness – was such a mess that publisher Eidos handed the franchise to San Francisco developer Crystal Dynamics, whose subsequent iterations, while at least not being riddled with bugs, have hardly set the world alight. All of which can mean only one thing: time for a franchise reboot.
And here it is. Tomb Raider, due out at an unspecified time next year, is notably unlike its predecessors. Square Enix – the Japanese publisher which absorbed Eidos after it struggled financially – has shown teasers of it before and, while we didn't get hands-on experience of it at E3, we did at least see a detailed demo.
Lara's roots Tomb Raider goes back to the first stirrings of the Lara Croft myth: a 21-year-old Lara is on her first archaeological excursion since graduating from University. Naturally, being Lara, the ship she's aboard is wrecked, on the shore of a small island somewhere off the coast of Japan.
The action begins in a mysterious cave, in which Lara is imprisoned – hung from its roof by her feet, to be precise. Her first mission is to get free, which she achieves by swinging, in order to come into contact with a convenient flaming torch (interaction between the physics engine and virtual fire is clearly a key mechanism, at least in the game's early stages) that burns off her bindings.
She then plummets to the ground; when she lands, her side is impaled by a stake, and she shrieks and swears. This time around, Lara is supposed to be more human and believable than before, and the rebooted Tomb Raider edgier and grittier than its predecessors.
Emotion and Smart Response
Staggering to her feet and looking to escape from the cave, Lara continued to show flashes of emotion – not something she was allowed to do in previous games – and demonstrated a new gaming mechanic Crystal Dynamics calls Smart Response.
It's essentially a fancier version of what are generally known as Quick Time Events, where you have to respond quickly to an in-game happening by hitting the prescribed button. For example, Lara was scrambling through a narrow passageway only to have her legs grabbed by one of her captors; you had to free her by waggling the left joystick.
We later saw her crawling up a ramp using the left and right triggers. Fear not, though, Tomb Raider die-hards – this sort of gameplay won't be at the game's core, but will feature during scripted events, probably mostly in the game's early stages.
Puzzle time
No Tomb Raider game would be worthy of the name without puzzles, and the ones we saw were physics-based – something Crystal Dynamics has dabbled with in its recent Tomb Raider games, but in Tomb Raider, appears to have committed to.
After Lara grabbed a torch, enabling her to burn her way into a previously inaccessible chamber, she found that she couldn't do the same to get to the next chamber, as water gushing over the exit put her torch out.
But a bit of leaping around and pulling a lever that tipped up one of two suspended cages – her captors had assembled all manner of objects from the flotsam washing up in the cave – enabled her to send a pile of flaming rubbish towards a collection of gas canisters which blew an exit hole to the island above.
Island survival
Finally, Lara made it above ground, and we got to see some of Tomb Raider's more characteristic gameplay. Making her way towards an abandoned, semi-ruined village, she found a new character in the franchise, Roth, who was the captain of the expedition's wrecked ship.
Having fought off an attack by wolves and sustained a leg injury, Roth revealed that his assailants had taken his medical kit back to their lair before passing out. Lara, still unarmed, set out to retrieve it, aided by another new feature, Survival Instinct: essentially a pathfinder, which revealed the wolves' tracks and can generally be used to assess different paths to Lara's objectives.
Having acquired the kit and a crucial radio transmitter, Lara had to fight off a wolf with her bare hands. In contrast to her previously offhand dispatching of wild animals, Lara actually apologised to the dead wolf, saying: "It was you or me."
Lara's first mentor
Thus she was able to revive Roth who, it was revealed, was her first mentor, and the man who taught her survival skills. We saw the very beginning of that process, as he sent her to place the transmitter at the highest point of the island.
After a period of classic Lara-style roof-jumping and swinging, Roth gave her two axes, which she could use to climb rock-faces. Crystal Dynamics was keen to emphasise that Tomb Raider is a proper multi-path game, with many ways of getting from point to point (a refreshing change from Tomb raiders of yore).
And finally, they spoke about the Base Camp system, which lets you teleport quickly to different parts of the island, buy upgrades for weapons and gadgets and even fashion new ones via a salvage system.
What we think
With its emphasis on survival, and chronicling of how Lara acquired her semi-superhuman skills, along with the extra sense of realism engendered by the fact that Lara, for once, actually show a credible range of emotion rather than being merely kick-ass and full of bravado, things bode very well for this franchise-reboot.
It has what is required to tempt disillusioned Tomb Raider fans back into the fold, and providing its execution matches its ambition, ought to attract a new generation of fans when it arrives next year. Nice to see the old girl back on form.
