There needs to be an option to pick indifference or a maybe when reviewing a game on Steam

As I sit here trying to write this review with one hand, I feel nothing but an inky, sludgy defeat, this creeping thing crawling from my stomach, slithering up my throat. I was right there, I saw it, the end, the goal, the finish line. I was so close. This is my first Tomb Raider game, figured I should start with the trilogy that came after the OG Trilogy, this was the Lara I grew up with, so why not start here. I knew this port wasn't the best, so any hiccups that I encountered didn't bother me too much. It was a fun romp! I was getting into the swing of things, I was flowing from one level to another, Lara was clambering and scaling up impossible monoliths and jumping over chasms and danger. I was stopping and taking in all the scenery, this game begs you to stop every once in a while and really chew over all the landscapes, the crashing waterfalls, the birds in the air, the butterflies dancing on the wind. The skyboxes are beautifully done, it was like I could breathe in the crisp Bolivian air, feel Brother Winter's chilling embrace in Nepal, taste the dust in Peru. The team really tried their hardest to make every level as natural as possible and I can totally appreciate that. The gunplay, ehhh, I can take or leave it, I felt like the real meat of the game was the platforming and climbing, the set-pieces and the environments. Don't get me wrong, Lara needs to be a bullet-spewing bombshell, it's what she is. Lara is THE ultra-capable, worldly intellectual with a body that won't quit and the aim that won't miss. I just wish that there was more of an impact, more of an oomph to the guns, more heft in the reactions. I just unloaded 10 bullets into a guy, what do you mean he just kinda crumples in place? Some sections in this PC port are VERY broken. One example is the train race in the Kazakhstan level. The damage output from the enemies is almost unsustainable on hard, which is the difficulty I played this entire game on (the mistake that would be my downfall), so I had to find out the hard way on how brutally unfair certain sections of this game can be, but nonetheless, I pushed on. Collecting all the collectibles, doing all the time trials, I was fully in control now. I reached the end, the final level, all that was standing in my way was this last obstacle.

Two hours, I spent two hours trying to get around this GOD ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ AWFUL final boss. This broken, rickety and creaking amalgamation of whatever boss ideas the team took from the worst of the medium. On the hard difficulty, this becomes one of the worst bosses I have ever encountered in a video game, if not the worst. There is something so fundamentally inhumane about how the team decided on handling this. The whole point of the game is gathering fragments of a sword that caused Lara's mother to disappear during a airplane crash in her childhood, this is supposed to be ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ Excalibur in her hands. This is what you use for the boss fight. It is a clunky, slow glorified stick whose green orbs couldn't hit the broadside of a barn. By the time Lara summons all her might to swing this hunk of stone once, the boss has already either dodged out of the way or fired off one of it's three explosive attacks that send you flying either off the stage or into a wall (it will then fire another one off before you can gain control again). You have to go through this back and forth, this ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ song and dance four times. After two hours of this grueling torture, I finally got it into it's last stagger phase, all I had to do was press Y and be done with it. I press the button. Lara stabs the sword into the boss. Lara screams in agony. She falls to the ground dead, lifeless, a corpse. Fade to black. Loading screen. The start of the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ boss. I think I stared at the screen trying to understand what happened (turns out the PC port also has a bug that causes the final stab to instakill Lara). I will admit, I have a short fuse, but with experience, I have learned to calm down just as quickly. I guess it just kinda built up. By the time I realized what I was doing, I had raised up my hand high into the air and slammed it down onto my desk as hard as I could. I quietly closed out of the game, uninstalled it, watched the ending on youtube (which I actually enjoyed) and began writing this review. I played the PC port of Tomb Raider Legend on Hard, got all the collectibles, did the time trials and all I got was a mostly enjoyable game, a large crack in my desk and a busted right hand (turns out flesh and bone lose to solid wood).

The fact I gave up on the very last level will really bother me for a long while.

Is the game fun? Yes, yes it is. Even if the game is a bit easy and it doesn’t require a lot of pre knowledge it’s still a Tomb Raider game. If you like puzzles, platforming, parkour, exploring old ruins and a bit of supernatural on the side, then this is the game for you. The gameplay is simple, and your only obstacle will likely be the camera at times. And when it comes to replayability I would say, that it depends on what you want. After you finish the main story you can replay the levels and find the missing artefacts that you missed or try the levels on a harder difficulty. Other than that there isn’t really anything else to do. So 4/5 for me.

Берите по скидке, не пожалеете. Сразу вспоминается детство и то, как зарождались и умирали подобные жанры. Забавно, что с 2007 года стим-версия не играбельна на Win 10 и надо искать решения в интернетах. В любом случае, люди всегда любили сиськи, а в 2007 году они их ещё и получали вместе с отличным геймплеем. 9/10 (-1 за вылеты и краши спустя 18 лет, лол)