"Tomb Raider - preview"

Tomb Raider see the rebirth of Lara Croft, gaming's most famous heroine, in a gritty tale of survival, Tom Hoggins gets a first glimpse at the secrets of this brave departure

Formats: Xbox 360. PS3. PC
Developer: Crystal Dynamics
Publisher: Square Enix
Released: TBA 2012

There's a scene halfway through this Tomb Raider demonstration that's as clear a statement of intent as any. Lara Croft, battered, bloodied and bruised emerges from a hellish cavern into a gorgeous, expansive cove. In many ways it's the mirror of a similar scene in the first Uncharted. Remember it? Hero Nathan Drake clambers up a cliffside, passing under a glittering waterfall to emerge over a submarine moored in the crystal blue water below. The sun is low in the sky, dispersing its golden kiss across the entire vista. It's staggeringly

pretty.

In this Tomb Raider reboot, the sky over the cove is ominously dark and crackling with electricity, the rain hammers across the cliff in sweeping droves and down below, a cluster of ships from different eras lie broken, wrecked, smashed against the rugged rocks. It's a graveyard. Whether the visual echo is intentional or not, the implication is clear: Lara is no-one's matinee idol anymore.

In fact, Crystal Dynamics have gone back to the drawing board entirely. This Tomb Raider is a reboot. A gritty, new imagining of Lara's roots. At 21, Lara is just starting out on her adventuring career, taken under the wing of veteran treasure hunter Roth. The pair find themselves shipwrecked on this mysterious island, their ship, the HMS Endurance, joining that collection of sunken husks.

Lara is captured by someone --or something, who knows?-- and strung up in a dank cavern. This is where we join her, hurt and vulnerable, setting up a tale of sheer survival in this most hostile of environments.

Crystal Dynamics are quick to show off that Tomb Raider is now more about fighting the environment than fighting dinosaurs (though maybe that comes later), with Lara swathed in an apparently inescapable cocoon. Swinging back and forth in her binds, Lara hits a lit torch attached to the cavern wall, setting fire to her binds and sending her tumbling into sheer darkness, impaling herself with a spike as she crashes into the rock floor below.

A quick-time-event (QTE) has the player hammering the X button as identified on screen, making Lara rip the spike from her flank with a yelp of pain, before staggering into the depths of the cavern.

What strikes you at this point is the animation of Lara as she stumbles and squeezes past through tight rock walls. There's a terrific connection to the world as Lara presses on, her vulnerability expressed in movement. Fire from Lara's torch casts flickering, jumping shadows across the cragged rock interior. It's incredibly claustrophobic. Heavy on detail, Tomb Raider is a strikingly attractive game, despite the dark tone.

And it certainly is dark. After Lara finds another victim dead, strung up in a type of ghoulish shrine, she is attacked by a feral nutcase brandishing a scythe. Halfway through another QTE the demonstrator deliberately fails, and the attacker violently drives the scythe into Lara's heart. It's brutal, shocking, another message that this isn't the plummy, invincible heroine we know.

Retrying the scene, Lara progresses into a wide open cave with a rudimentary pulley system, oil barrels and a passage blocked by very flammable objects, but covered by a tumbling waterfall, dousing any attempts to burn open the way ahead.

Puzzling has always formed a key pillar of Tomb Raider, but here it's not about mysterious ancient contraptions and spike pits, but more basic tools. However, the intricacy and experimentation remains consistent. Fire plays a large role in Tomb Raider, and moving fire through the waterfall is the key in this particular task. To guide you, Crystal Dynamics have incorporated "Survival Instinct" which can be activated at the touch of a button --much like Batman's Detective Vision in Arkham Asylum-- to highlight points of interest. After some experimentation, traversing the area, testing out the actions of the pulley, Lara finds the solution by burning the holdings of a makeshift scale, which lifts up to block the waterfall, and jury-rigging the rest of the junk to move the oil barrels towards the blockage.

It's a simplistic task, but the potential for more intricate environmental puzzles is obvious, especially as Lara gains access to more equipment. Making her way out of the cavern to that storm-swept cove, Lara comes across some more QTEs while clambering rock faces and fighting off assailants. Despite how impressive it all looks, there seems to be a worrying lack of real interaction in these early scenes, with the player just matching button prompts to push the action on.

However, as Lara emerges onto the island proper, coming across Roth severely injured, that classic Tomb Raider traversal comes into play. Given full control over her movements now, free from the claustrophobia of the caves, Lara scrambles across outcrops and cliff edges, fluidly scampering across the environment. Lara's searching for Roth's backpack, which holds much needed medical supplies for her injured mentor. As she find the pack in a tight nook, Lara is attacked by a monstrous dog-like creature (another QTE to escape, sadly), suggesting this island hosts a terrifying supernatural force. Crystal Dynamics are unsurprisingly cagey about exactly what the appearance of the monster means. It all feels just a little bit Lost.

As Lara returns to Roth and sets up camp, we see the character progression and RPG elements that Tomb Raider has introduced. The game isn’t open-world as such, but the base camp hub areas allow for exploration and a grander sense of place. From base camp, Lara can fast travel to areas of the island that she has already discovered, craft new gear out of recovered salvage, and build her 'survival skills'.

This kind of character progression feels a natural fit for Tomb Raider’s rebirth. At the beginning of the game, Lara is young, scared, and weak. She has relied on Roth up until now, and with her captain injured, she’s thrust into a hostile environment, required to adapt or die. A fascinating coming of age story, then, Tomb Raider shows huge promise. There are a few concerns, particularly regarding the overuse of QTEs in this early showing, but there’s much more to come. We haven’t seen any combat, yet, for example. While the key here is survival rather than aggression, Lara will eventually need to fight back against the horrors of the mysterious island. It’s a daring departure for Tomb Raider, and we can’t wait to discover the rest of its secrets.

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