Tomb Raider is an action-adventure game developed by Crystal Dynamics. It is a full reboot of the Tomb Raider franchise, depicting a young Lara (21) during her first adventure. The game is being developed by 80% of the team that worked on previous Lara Croft games and features a brand new engine (The Crystal Engine).
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The game is scheduled for a Fall 2012 release date.
The game will tell an alternate tale of Lara Croft's first adventure, where she is young (21 years old) and inexperienced. When traveling on the ship Endurance towards an island off the coast of Japan, determined to make a name for herself in the world, a violent storm destroys the ship and washes Lara ashore on a beach of an unknown island. Alone, frightened and injured, she has to learn to survive and eventually become the daring adventurer she is destined to become.
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Like in other Croft games, Lara Croft is a mix of puzzle solving, platforming and combat in an open world environment. Lara has a reduced set of skills compared to other games in the series. She no longer has her double pistols or her gymnastics abilities, meaning that somersaults over rocks or diving in slow motion while maintaining pin point accuracy with a gun is out of the question. Most of the combat is done via quick-time events. The game is also based around survival, meaning that you will have to find food and water while making spears to defend yourself.
Despite this downgrade in skills, Lara still has one or two tricks up her sleeve. You can now change the direction in which Lara jumps at the last second (even while she is jumping) and you can also do what the developers call a "Wall Scramble" which lets her climb higher.
The first part of the demo set out to establish the atmosphere for the new game, both visually and in its approach for how the game will play. More than any prior Tomb Raider the action followed a script, with a strong push being felt to Lara moving through the environment to the next event.
The look is very dark, grimy, and bloody. On falling in her escape, Lara lands on an exposed piece of steel rebar that skewers her in the abdomen right where her kidney would be. Despite the realistic look, she shrugs off the grievous injury after holding her side a few moments. After such a grievous wound, it's a bit odd to see her only a few minutes exerting herself to make jumps she can barely span.
Throughout this section, quick time events played a big role in the action. For a series that built its reputation on Lara's acrobatic exploration ability, it seems like a step backward to watch her escape dangerous situations by pressing a button at the right time. For a brief moment in the middle of this stretch she got back to figuring out how to get through an area by solving an environmental puzzle. But after that, the big escape was another cinematic experience of timed button tapping in response to onscreen prompts rather than being in full control.
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