Level Design and Player Controls

Kinky positions

Level design is just as bland. Progression through the game is linear, which makes a joke of all the new movements available to Lara. Yes, contortion fans, you can finally twist and turn the Brit babe in all sorts of neat and semi-kinky positions. You can make her crawl on her belly, get down on all fours, bend over, slide along walls, push and pull heavy objects, sneak up behind enemy guards, beat up enemy guards with punch and kick combos, do the watusi, and so on. She even gains arm and leg strength as the game goes on, in a nod to RPG-style character development.

This doesn’t make any real difference to gameplay, however, as the levels all run on rails. There isn’t any room to experiment with these new skills, which are useful only in specific situations. Doing something new, even when it involves Lara bending over right in front of the camera, loses its appeal when the moves are so obviously scripted. Core should have opened up the levels before opening up the menu of movements.

Must be off-season

Classy Paris

Avoiding tourists the hard way

Getting sweaty with the undead

All this newfound agility was clearly supposed to be a big deal. Which makes me wonder why Core didn’t bother with a half-decent control system. Lara’s supposed to be more athletic and nubile than ever, so why does it feel like I’m guiding a Sherman tank with two broken hands? Controls are terrible no matter if you’re using the mouse, keyboard, or gamepad. Each is clunky, though oddly enough for a console port the gamepad is probably the worst of the bunch. It simply isn’t responsive. The effort required to maneuver Lara across a room can cause your thumbs to go numb, and there’s an extremely irritating hitch in Lara’s stride whenever she moves forward. Rather than immediately launching into a trot, she takes a couple of measured paces, as if she’s deciding whether or not she thinks escaping the undead skeleton on her heels is worth getting all sweaty.

Simply rotating to face a desired direction, or to line up in front of a door that needs to be opened is also a real pain. Lara can only face a limited number of directions, so you often have to fool around with light touches and taps on the d-pad to get her into the right position. It’s just like the original Tomb Raider, or the early releases in the Resident Evil series, and as much as I’m into gaming nostalgia, I can’t understand why Core hasn’t realized that almost a decade has passed since those games (which had annoying control setups even way back when) were popular.