Tomb Raider 2013

[RK47]

...stop just stop, next thing we'll argue that she shd've crafted tampons out of the dead animals and satchels to carry more ammo and guns.

 

[Dexter]

Why does earning XP by getting kills and hunting animals let you construct silencers, stocks and iron sights for your guns?

It doesn't as far as I know, XP is for developing "skills", salvage from chests and dead people is for upgrading equipment.

As for why Lara goes from "innocent but trained in the arts of combat" to "mass murderer" within the course of the game. Likely because it's a game after all, complemented by game mechanics and they didn't want you to play 20 hours of target practice.

 

[Azrael the cat]

Actually it was FEAR 2. And sadly it was the only shocking part of the story - it wasn't the colossal fuckup that FEAR 3 was (both in terms of retcons, making the awful mistake of bringing back a great antagonist who had his full character arc in FEAR 1 and didn't have anywhere interesting left to go (by the time you finally capture him in FEAR 1, you've learnt that he's leading precision strikes on guys who have been doing an experiment that's fucked up beyond words and deserve to die, that you're his brother, and he ends up letting you kill him without fighting back rather than kill his kid brother), and utter craphole of a story) - but it was a massive step down from FEAR 1 (which really didn't need a sequel - they should have cut that crappy sequel-bait last scene, as the scene just before was a perfectly crafted ending).


FEAR 1 SPOILERS BELOW

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Oh, and to answer an earlier question - is there a game where a female character gets successfully raped? FEAR 1. Many many times, from the moment she hit puberty until she had 2 kids and eventually got enough control of her psychic powers that she became too uncontrollable and had to be put in stasis.

Obviously you don't see any of it - you've come to stop Fettel many years afterwards, and whilst it's clear from about 1/3 in that the company was doing something fucked up, it isn't until a fair bit later that you find out just how fucked up it was (and then when you think it couldn't get worse, you find out it was the CEO's own daughter). And then you find out that you and Fettel are her kids and he's got a pretty good reason for what he's doing. It's part of why the initial ending (before the sequel-bait helicopter bit) fits the game so much better - Fettel has done what he was after (he's gotten his revenge on everyone involved in the experiment, freed Alma from stasis, lead his brother to the various evidence of what has happened and who they are, and allowed his brother to kill him), and ironically (given that the thing Alma was most furious about was that they took her kids away from her) when you finally encounter her in her physical/zombie form (rather than her various psychic apparitions) she immediately tries to kill you. If you kill her instead, she realises at the very last gunshot that you're her kid, and the game flashes to a scene of her screaming as the scientists rip the infant protagonist away from her. Much better ending, mood-wise, for a game that in its last third became much more of a 'depressingly fucked up horror' than a 'monster closet horror' (the helicopter sequel-bait is very much in the 'monster closet' category and out of whack with the mood of the game by that point).

To be fair, FEAR 2 had some potential - you get a good explanation of why (after the 1st mission) the protagonist gets the same ability as the point man in FEAR 1, and the idea of the company copying the genetics of both the protagonist and Fettel from FEAR 1 and using it to psychicaly 'augment' a whole team of soldiers against their will/knowledge could have been interesting. But if they were going to play that card, they really needed a LOT more character development and time spent with the other squadmates (especially the one you end up fighting), to stop it from being just a cheesy way of explaining why someone other than the FEAR 1 protagonist has the same super-speed and psychic link to Alma. For that matter, it was a bit retarded that all the squadmates seemed to have the protagonist's powers - it's clear in FEAR 1 that whilst both brothers have the psychic link, their powers are completely different and there's a random element to what powers will manifest (the protagonist has his super-speed, Fettel can psychically control a small army of clones and reads the memories of the guys he is killing by eating their brains): it was fine to have a boss-fight against a soldier with identical powers to you, but the sections where you're travelling with the other soliders who survived the augmentation process could have been much more tactical if they had different powers to you, enabling you to work as a team.

 

[DemonKing]

Some parts of the game were too much built on "action" like the Solarii Fortress (with your typical action movie explosions in the background while you try to "get to the choppa!" or the Chasm Stronghold near the end with endless waves of samurai were the worst parts of the game. There wasn't any exploration and there weren't any collectibles or anything in these areas. There's enough better FPS/TPS out there, I don't know why they're trying to imitate them, instead of concentrating on the strong points of the series.
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I actually liked these areas as they were a bit of a change up from the structures the game had established to that point and helped move the story along. I thought Lara successfully taking on hordes of samurai constructs towards the end game very empowering in the sense it showed you what a kick ass fighting machine she had become to get to that point. I didn't find the lack of collectibles disturbing as it wouldn't really be appropriate at that point to stop and hunt around for stuff in the middle of combat/fleeing for your life.

 

[Morgoth]

http://www.destructoid.com/three-tomb-raider-dlc-costumes-have-leaked-251782.phtml

What are they thinking? This shit will never sell (among hetero male players).

No exposed knockers, no buy.

 

[Grunker]

Just finished this. Pleasantly surprised, but that doesn't mean much since I expected a huge turd. I more or less agree with Errant Signal's sentiments on the game.

 

[Average Manatee]

when the game offers you to kill hundreds of people

But they're all men, and therefore don't count. If all that horrible stuff was happening to a male protagonist, nobody would give a toss.

Case in point; Dead Space, where the various horrific, macabre, and excrutiatingly painful ways to die in the game were used as a marketing gimmick.

Case in point; name a male protagonist in a big name game production that gets sexually assaulted or harassed. That's the op's complaint. Or that's what it should be.

If a man encounters a beautiful woman who is clearly acting slutty and isn't allowed to fuck her, that is sexual harassment.

 

[Multi-headed Cow]

This can be had (In Steam key format of course) for $13.60 from Greenman Gaming. Not sure if I wanna spend $14 for murderporn and all the feminine grunting I can eat, but I am mildly tempted since I enjoy linear spectacle videogames well enough and a buddy of mine certainly liked it.

 

[Metro]

Not worth $1

 

[Grunker]

This can be had (In Steam key format of course) for $13.60 from Greenman Gaming. Not sure if I wanna spend $14 for murderporn and all the feminine grunting I can eat, but I am mildly tempted since I enjoy linear spectacle videogames well enough and a buddy of mine certainly liked it.

Disregard Metro. Game is worth you time and a bit of your money, depending on your patience for popamole.

 

[potatojohn]

It's extremely bad. Probably the worst game in the past five years. It's basically just a chain of QTE, cinematics and a couple of dozen bad popamole shootery bits with waves of suicidal bullet sponge bums with infinite dynamite and perfect throwing precision.

It's not even murderporn ala SoF because it's so lazily made. Just a couple of repetitive mo-capped death animations.

 

[Metro]

This can be had (In Steam key format of course) for $13.60 from Greenman Gaming. Not sure if I wanna spend $14 for murderporn and all the feminine grunting I can eat, but I am mildly tempted since I enjoy linear spectacle videogames well enough and a buddy of mine certainly liked it.

Disregard Metro. Game is worth you time and a bit of your money, depending on your patience for popamole.

Disregard Grunker because... well... seriously... it's fucking popamole QTE.

 

[CSM]

Pretty good game once you get the past the annoying QTE's in the beginning.

 

[CyberP]

Only the codex can make me hate modern gaming more than I already do.

 

[Shaewaroz]

To my recollection there were QTEs thorough the entire game. And yea, I played it through. It' basically another Uncharted game with more QTEs.

 

[sea]

To my recollection there were QTEs thorough the entire game. And yea, I played it through. It' basically another Uncharted game with more QTEs.

From what I recall they pretty much entirely disappeared after the 1/3 mark through the game.

 

[Shaewaroz]

What about all the QTEs in combat and while falling or trying to hang on not to fall (while screaming annoyingly the whole time)? If you mean to imply that after the 1/3 mark there were no moments like these, you must have been playing a different game. Not to even mention all the events where you have to tap Q to turn valves, open drawbridges and doors, some of which also had time limits.

A lot of the gameplay features where not exactly QTEs but equally shallow nonetheless. For instance the part where Lara is trying to navigate the rapids - press right -> get impaled by a log, press left -> you're safe.

But I still finished the game so it wasn't all bad.

 

[Telengard]

A lot of the gameplay features where not exactly QTEs but equally shallow nonetheless. For instance the part where Lara is trying to navigate the rapids - press right -> get impaled by a log, press left -> you're safe.

Actually, while that maybe doesn't fit the QTE pattern that modern games use, it is actually a classic form of QTE. Used in places such as here:

So, you're even more right about the numerous QTEs.

 

[racofer]

That shaky camera. Ugh.

 

[Shaewaroz]

I hated the QTEs, but what really made me want to pull my hair off was the constant gasping and screaming. Why the fck does she have to scream all the fkin time??? Makes you want to strangle someone.

 

[Jedi Exile]

I didn't get past the QTEs. Not sure it was worth it - the game is a typical console trash.

 

[Melcar]

I hated the QTEs, but what really made me want to pull my hair off was the constant gasping and screaming. Why the fck does she have to scream all the fkin time??? Makes you want to strangle someone.

Rape simulation.

 

[ghostdog]

If you manage get past the annoying first 30 minutes or so, the QTE's and cutscenes become very scarce (QTE's almost disappear IIRC) and the island basically opens up for you with a lot of stuff to do. Exploring, hunting animals, discovering secret tombs (that offer the classic tomb raider approach) and sneaking up to Russian rapists was fun, in a popamolish way. It definitely has much more actual gameplay than Uncharted and the likes. One of the best popamole games I've played lately.

 

[Metro]

Game is still awful.

 

[Eddas]

If you manage get past the annoying first 30 minutes or so, the QTE's and cutscenes become very scarce (QTE's almost disappear IIRC) and the island basically opens up for you with a lot of stuff to do. Exploring, hunting animals, discovering secret tombs (that offer the classic tomb raider approach) and sneaking up to Russian rapists was fun, in a popamolish way. It definitely has much more actual gameplay than Uncharted and the likes. One of the best popamole games I've played lately.

It's a bad Tomb Raider, but it's an OK game. It was a fresh experience, but at the same time tiresome. Glad I waited this long to buy it, worth the (almost) 5 dollars. I don't recall any news about this at the time of release, but this was a reboot, right? Are there news on another title being made?