Game Analysis: Rise of the Tomb Raider

Overview:

Rise of the Tomb Raider (ROTTR) is a third-person adventure and action game released in 2016 on PC platform. As a continuation of the previous Tomb Raider 2013, players are to follow the heroine Lara Croft to explore ancient Byzantine tombs in Syria and ruins in Siberia, defeat enemies from a mysterious religious and military group Trinity and figure out the truth of her father’s sudden death and secrets of eternal lives. Players not only need to improve fighting skills and collect gears to slaughter the enemies and beasts, but also have to collect and make use of natural resources to survive in the vast forest. In addition, it also has a large part of content for solving puzzles along the way.

Official Website: https://www.tombraider.com/en-us

YouTube demo (2015 E3 Theater): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fkFG6aoo21Y

My own gameplay experience:

I have played this game for over 60 hours prior to this assignment. I would analyze the game with respect to my experience and the lenses of games in the following parts.

Analysis through lenses of games:

Lens 9: The lens of elemental tetrad

Aesthetics

ROTTR uses vivid 3D modelling to make players immerse in almost realistic environment. The art design restores the Soviet camps, Byzantine towns and ruins very well, especially in terms of the artifacts, murals and posters. With the newly introduced weather system, the environment for gameplay has more variations.

Technology

With motion capture, characters in ROTTR have more vivid actions and facial expressions. Yet, with a higher graphic quality, the hardware optimization of ROTTR seems not as satisfactory as expected. Some scenes (eg. Soviet Installation) suffer from frame drop significantly.

Mechanics

The mechanics of ROTTR is quite simple: collect and craft items, solve puzzles and defeat enemies. Yet, the crafting system adds difficulty in terms of resource management and redesigned combat system adds more options for attacking, which extends third person shooting scheme.

Story

As introduced at the beginning, this story is more like an interim between the previous and the next. It formally introduces the villain, but the real culprit is still hidden behind. Through collecting documents and artifacts, the background is enriched during gameplay.

Despite the optimization, these four elements reinforce each other harmoniously to illustrate Lara’s adventure.

Lens 7: The lens of endogenous value:

Both resources and EXP are valuable to players of ROTTR.

Resources are essential for the player to survive in vast Siberia, especially at the first half of the game. The players have to collect natural resources from the environment to make/enhance weapons, especially poisonous arrows to kill bears, and cure themselves with herb and hand-made bandages during fighting. Depending on difficulty levels, players also have to collect wood to make campfire, for this is the only way to save their progress. This design makes resources essentially valuable to players.

EXP is more significantly to players at the second half, when there are many tough battles with strong enemies. During collecting resource and slaughtering enemies, players have chances to gain EXP to trade for Skill Point, so that they could make powerful weapons, increase physical resistance, etc.

Lens 38: The lens of challenge

The challenge of ROTTR mainly comes from resource management based on difficulty level.

In terms of toughness of battles, the game provides increasing challenges, in spite of fighting the boss, which seems a bit easier than the previous fight with helicopters.

Lens 4: The lens of surprise

The artwork of the game may astound the players during the gameplay, as some of the scenes are spectacular and largely approximate reality. The story’s tone is generally flat, but there are still a few plots beyond expectation.

There are also some hidden traps and plots that require some operative tricks, which could lead Lara to a sudden and brutal death and thus surprise the players.

It is also a great surprise for Chinese players to have a 3A game dubbing in Chinese.

Lens 27: The lens of time

Compared with the classic Tomb Raider series, ROTTR is no longer a linear game, but more like a sandbox game with a main story line and many other branch missions – exploring tombs, collecting artifacts and documents, complete branch missions and other hidden challenges.

This offers more flexibility and variety to the game, but can also spoil the game experience.

As a story-based adventure game, the main story seems a bit short as the players could be able to complete it in 15 hours. It is a bit hash for the players to fully feel the establishment of characters and enjoy the adventurous journey.

Yet, if the player aims for 100% collection, it might take him as much time as to complete the main story line, for the items are hard to spot and obtain. Players could feel bored for being a janitor in the game.

Although there is no time limit, Score Attack mode do encourage players to replay previous chapters as fast as they can to earn bonus points and compete with their friends. This is an effective approach to stimulate the players and make the game more exciting.