Tomb Raider

 Xbox 360
User Score
8.5

Generally favorable reviews- based on 1278 Ratings

User score distribution:
  1. Positive: 1,098 out of 1278
  2. Mixed: 95 out of 1278
  3. Negative: 85 out of 1278
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  1. MatteAce
    Mar 7, 2013
    3
    I can't believe all these people stating that this game is amazing, funny, etc. I just think that these people never got a pad in their hands in their lives except for playing CoD.

    This game is one of those non-games, where everything is scripted and cinematic, where the story comes in front of the gameplay. The problem is, the story is nowhere near as good. It's a messy chaos of    I can't believe all these people stating that this game is amazing, funny, etc. I just think that these people never got a pad in their hands in their lives except for playing CoD.

    This game is one of those non-games, where everything is scripted and cinematic, where the story comes in front of the gameplay.
    The problem is, the story is nowhere near as good.

    It's a messy chaos of Lost quotes (the thinking island, airplanes falling, etc), teen movies (Lara is sometimes called L.C... WHAT??) and russian conspiracy. After several hours of playing I found more holes in the script than bugs in the game. We talk about an ancient japanese civlization from thousands of years ago. and yet, ALL THE WOODEN HOUSES ARE STILL INTACT AND THE BRACERS IN THE FORGOTTEN SECRET TOMBS ARE LIT.

    I can forgive it as a gameplay license, but the gameplay is just absent.
    I can let go of the "win button", a button that shows you exactly what to do, the annoying neverending tutorial that follows you throughout the whole game or the lame experience system.
    but I can't let go the complete absence of anything related to a "gameplay".
    During the shooting you never die. Enemies never shoot at you, they always miss.
    When jumping the only thing you have to do is pressing up and A. doesn't matter if you up the distances, the game fixes that for you.

    This is a game made to be won, and I can accept that if they would have presented a great story.
    But they didn't.
    And playing it is just plain boring.    … Expand
  2. HDFR
    Jun 17, 2013
    4
    For a game with so much hype surrounding character portrayal the supporting cast is weak. Sassy black chick serves as the critical voice to all the Lara’s concerns over the islands supernatural qualities. Cute Chinese girl functions as a plot device by being kidnapped like athat guy who always disappears in The Hangover films. Large framed and even larger hearted Hawaiian guy keepsFor a game with so much hype surrounding character portrayal the supporting cast is weak. Sassy black chick serves as the critical voice to all the Lara’s concerns over the islands supernatural qualities. Cute Chinese girl functions as a plot device by being kidnapped like athat guy who always disappears in The Hangover films. Large framed and even larger hearted Hawaiian guy keeps everyone’s spirits up while the island’s indigenous shower them all with fire based projectiles. The supporting cast is a too wide and nobody gets enough screen time or engaging dialogue to make a real presence, the main protagonist included. Lara isn’t well fleshed out either. She displays brief turmoil following her first kill, but she soon goes on to find new and outlandish ways to expose the inner craniums of hundreds more men without showing any further remorse or having the excuse of being drugged up to the eye balls like Far Cry 3’s Jason Brody. The writers attempt to book end the narrative with mournful references to her dead dad, but everything in between reads like the script of your average cookie cutter action flick.

    A lot of the narrative’s credibility has been tied to the portraying of Lara in a vulnerable light, but this doesn’t instantly make for thoughtful characterizing. If someone rewrote Mansfield Park and recast Fanny Price as a busty gun toting whore I doubt it’d be met with such appraisal, or perhaps it would; Pride and Prejudice and Zombies did alright, but I digress. While we’re talking literature, it’s worth mentioning that Tomb Raider attempts to embellish it’s narrative with collectable diaries and documents la Bioshock, but they don’t embellish it so much as contain every scrap of what could have made this story interesting. Additionally they’re so monotonously voiced and lengthy that players are like to harvest them for xp and swiftly move on. In further regard to the vulnerability aspect of Lara, it’s a tone that fails to resonate when she’s brushing off twenty foot drops every few seconds like some sort of human bouncy ball.

    Average writing aside game play isn‘t particularly jaw dropping, not to say that it‘s altogether poor as it functions fluidly, but remains uninspired. The box art is tag lined “A survivor is born” although survival elements are sparse. An opening tutorial has Lara murder and cook Bambi for nourishment. Later a heavily injured Lara has to abandon aggressive modes of combat, instead making use of throw able objects, bow kills and takedowns. However such scenarios were gimmicky and fleeting when instead they could have been more intricate and permanent features.

    More often or not oppurtunities to employ stealth are scripted and conclude with forced fire fights in which players need to hunker down in the same spot to pick off foes from behind cover. You can’t give a player the option to approach combat in their way for so long only to snatch it away. That’s like being invited to a dinner party where the first two courses are comprised of lobster and caviar, but turns out that desserts a massive un-optional sandwich.

    A.I isn’t too intelligent, take out one enemy by yanking him with rope and arrow from a platform and his buddy two feet away will assume they’ve went for a spontaneous paraglide session. Enemies endlessly gravitate towards flammable barrels like they were full of winning lottery tickets and the island’s rigged with more explosives than a Wile. E. Coyote cartoon so combat soon becomes pretty, but stale.

    Environments make impressive use of vertical spaces, but routes for dispatching enemies are persistently linear. Camera angles are occasionally an issue in woodland areas resulting in the player’s view being obscured by more shrubbery than if they were being tea bagged by a tree beard from Lord of the Rings. Woefully enemies can make better use of the vertical spaces than the player during combat and anytime the opportunity to perform impressive manoeuvres arises the game has the nasty habit of cutting to a cinematic or QTE, alarmed that the players satisfaction levels may be spiking.

    Out with combat, tomb raiding is optional activity and when the ’tombs’, read ‘small caves’, are encountered they’re usually preceded by long needless crawls towards an area containing remarkably simple puzzles. The purpose of these is supposedly to give the player a long look at Lara’s arse so there goes you feminist angle.

    The undeniably present lack of free will displayed in the game’s set pieces leads to the theory that it may have been Crystal Dynamic’s wish to produce a Tomb Raider movie. The abundant use of slow motion, cut-aways and the way the screen goes film noir when Lara takes damage would certainly suggest so. This in mind here’s the alternative to buying the game. Watch one of the old Angelina Jolie films with controller in hand and press the trigger every time Lara wastes some guy.    … Expand
  3. angeljs
    Mar 7, 2014
    0
    As much as I love Tomb Raider, I'm afraid I won't be purchasing the newest release. For some reason, the makers have gone far, far away from what the game started out to be and have made it an 18, adding excessive violence and bad language. What's the point of that? This used to be a game I could play with my kids, with the suspense factor being paramount, particularly in the first game.As much as I love Tomb Raider, I'm afraid I won't be purchasing the newest release. For some reason, the makers have gone far, far away from what the game started out to be and have made it an 18, adding excessive violence and bad language. What's the point of that? This used to be a game I could play with my kids, with the suspense factor being paramount, particularly in the first game. Now they've turned it into a completely different format and just used the Tomb Raider name to create a survival game that has nothing to do with the original Tomb Raider.

    I'm very upset! :(    … Expand
  4. Di-Dorval
    Mar 10, 2013
    2
    All I ear about is people talking about how great the story, characters and graphics are. But the game itself is a boring mess. The game is saturated with scripted events and QTE and also glorified turret section. Cover shooting with the bow is the only thing your going to do outside of the above.

    Those types of games seems to be taking over right now and it makes the futur of gaming    All I ear about is people talking about how great the story, characters and graphics are. But the game itself is a boring mess. The game is saturated with scripted events and QTE and also glorified turret section. Cover shooting with the bow is the only thing your going to do outside of the above.

    Those types of games seems to be taking over right now and it makes the futur of gaming look very unappealing. Games should be more than just a cinematic experience. Glad I borrowed it instead of purchasing.    … Expand
  5. stephenmumbles
    Jun 9, 2013
    2
    I remember playing the old Tomb Raider games on the first Playstation, they were great, adventurous, etc etc. You know what I'm talking about...I heard great things about this one and was excited to see what it had to offer.

    The game starts out with a wreck, and you have to pretty much escape it and find your crew. To do so, you have to do a whole lot of slow crawling through cracks,    I remember playing the old Tomb Raider games on the first Playstation, they were great, adventurous, etc etc. You know what I'm talking about...I heard great things about this one and was excited to see what it had to offer.

    The game starts out with a wreck, and you have to pretty much escape it and find your crew. To do so, you have to do a whole lot of slow crawling through cracks, slow climbing, slow swimming under stuff and through water...out of caves, etc. My little brother was watching me play that part and asked me how it was. I told him the truth, I said "it's boring right now, very boring...but this is just the opening sequences, so I'm sure it'll pick up after I find my crew".

    I was wrong...

    Turns out the entire game is finding your crew and being stuck on this island. Meaning the environment never changes, the tasks never change, and well...there are a whole lot of very long cut scenes that do most of the work.

    As for action, I could probably count the number of bullets I used on one hand. I spent a lot of time trying to upgrade my weapons, for the best gameplay experience. And turns out it was a waste of time. The upgrades are there just to distract you from the fact that you're not doing much of anything in the game. Finding paths to certain places and whatnot isn't tough, and there are a few "puzzle" type moments that are not difficult at all (by 'not difficult' i mean compared to a game that exists in the same world as the very challenging puzzle game "portal").
    All that is really left to do is explore the world and find stuff, right? Well, no, not really...you run out of special abilities to upgrade to, and one is an ability that reveals every cave entrance/diamond/pretty much everything on your map for you. And when you're running around it makes stuff glow on your screen so you can find it, too...taking away the need to explore. So what's left to make the game enjoyable? Nothing...

    Overall this was the single most boring game I've ever played. The cut scenes were intriguing though, I'll give it that...even if they were very very long. And it's nice to see Laura become the Tomb Raider we all know and love. But, if they really wanted to make a cut scene oriented origin story, then I think they should've just made an animated series instead and then released a 'real' game for us to play.    … Expand
  6. jmvizanko
    Mar 26, 2013
    4
    I think its safe to say that this is one of those
    times where the reviewers have been
    completely bought off. This is NOT a Tomb Raider game. This is a mediocre linear 3rd person shooter. You spend 75% of your time engaging dumb enemies with mediocre shooting mechanics. You spend 10% of your time watching cinematic sequences. You spend 10% of your time trying to remember what    I think its safe to say that this is one of those
    times where the reviewers have been
    completely bought off. This is NOT a Tomb
    Raider game. This is a mediocre linear 3rd
    person shooter. You spend 75% of your time
    engaging dumb enemies with mediocre
    shooting mechanics. You spend 10% of your
    time watching cinematic sequences. You
    spend 10% of your time trying to remember
    what button sequence to press at exactly the
    right moment during annoying scripted
    sequences. I’m not sure why this particular
    type of gameplay is popular in games today,
    or why it isn’t ripped apart by reviewers as
    annoying and terrible, but there is NOTHING
    fun about it. And you spend 5% of your time
    actually doing what made Tomb Raider
    games so great: solving puzzles. If that
    sounds like your cup of tea, then by all
    means, pick this up. As for me, I won’t even
    consider this a Tomb Raider game. The last
    few entries, that actually had cool puzzles
    and platforming sequences, were much more
    fun and true to what Tomb Raider is. If only
    I had borrowed or rented this instead of
    wasting $60 on it……    … Expand
  7. cyclekarl
    Mar 10, 2013
    1
    Prepare to die in this game a lot,sure mostly it is brilliant,but has way to many tedious moments to get a perfect score for me,firstly it's way to combat heavy,not much exploring more shooting and is over loaded with dreadful Quick time events that can't be avoided and force the player to repeat them over and over again until you get it right,you get prompts to follow,but if the first onePrepare to die in this game a lot,sure mostly it is brilliant,but has way to many tedious moments to get a perfect score for me,firstly it's way to combat heavy,not much exploring more shooting and is over loaded with dreadful Quick time events that can't be avoided and force the player to repeat them over and over again until you get it right,you get prompts to follow,but if the first one isn't carried out 100 percent you fail to get the next, it's Resident Evil 6 all over again,haven't the developers learned nothing,I guess not,this alone almost made me give up playing and ruins an otherwise great experience,this game looks utterly fantastic and the controls mostly work well,there's plenty of extra's to find and you can retrace your steps most of the time to go back looking for stuff,but like to many games these days not enough efforts been put into quality control and because the annoying elements of the game I don't have the patience to finish it which is annoying since I payed out £50 plus the guide,it could have been great,but then they blew it,what a waste.… Expand
  8. bitw16
    Oct 28, 2015
    0
    This game is perfect example why games nowadays are full of **** . The story , gameplay physics make no sense at all. Lara alone kills about 5 hundreds mens - pretty stupid isnt it
  9. Tron
    Mar 14, 2013
    4
    Incredibly lazy game design. I have killed Lara so many times as they try to 'teach' the controls. Their 'tutorial' mode is enough that I have put down this game. This is solved by very simple adjustments to the game design (ie. the first time an 'action' sequence comes, don't kill Lara if you don't hit "Y" in time, just show her that it is negative and allow her to try again...).Incredibly lazy game design. I have killed Lara so many times as they try to 'teach' the controls. Their 'tutorial' mode is enough that I have put down this game. This is solved by very simple adjustments to the game design (ie. the first time an 'action' sequence comes, don't kill Lara if you don't hit "Y" in time, just show her that it is negative and allow her to try again...). Shame on you game designers.… Expand
  10. MaggotBrain666
    Mar 12, 2013
    0
    Too easy, waaaaay to easy... This hole game (almost!) just felt like a level 1 or the tutorial level from any of the old TR games...6 hours total with hand holding all the way through is a JOKE. And whats up with the camera angles and wardrobe? Where it set and made by religigious fanatics? I really dont want to see Lara with a 1930s adventurer, bomber jacket, case closed!!!!!!!!!!!! AndToo easy, waaaaay to easy... This hole game (almost!) just felt like a level 1 or the tutorial level from any of the old TR games...6 hours total with hand holding all the way through is a JOKE. And whats up with the camera angles and wardrobe? Where it set and made by religigious fanatics? I really dont want to see Lara with a 1930s adventurer, bomber jacket, case closed!!!!!!!!!!!! And yeah, the graphics kinda sucks too...it tries to fool you and make you think that it's good, but suddenly all the caves looks the same, and as in Far Blurr 3 this suffer from the same poor writing distance. I bet this can run well on an ipad in relativly short time, and thats not an overstatementt! Sad to see that Lara is gone cause this simply isnt a TR game!!… Expand
  11. kingjamesjr
    Mar 13, 2013
    4
    I'm appall on the review on this game i will never use metacritic ever again they simply lied this game suks all i can say is don't be fool by the hype like i did, i see they already erase most of the negative reviews already what a shameful practice and this site is a joke on reviews, this tomb raider reboot has zero replay, zero sercet to get if you completed at 100% which i might addI'm appall on the review on this game i will never use metacritic ever again they simply lied this game suks all i can say is don't be fool by the hype like i did, i see they already erase most of the negative reviews already what a shameful practice and this site is a joke on reviews, this tomb raider reboot has zero replay, zero sercet to get if you completed at 100% which i might add is far to easy, puzzles are few and not a challenge at all, bosses nadda and not going to go into qtes its already been comment on but i very shock at the reviews from the professional and the people.....people can't really tell the difference between thumb down i see because this damn title fits the bill. I swear people get dummer by the day cuz this was not tomb raider this game was a complete joke. Recap the story is a joke the characters in the story is a joke Lara croft herself is a joke. but the kill part the joke is on me cuz i wasted my money on this and crystal dyn. is laughing all way to the bank along with some of these fake azz reviews.… Expand
  12. gyigyo2
    May 18, 2013
    4
    I can't believe this is the new Lara i mean she hate tombs,The story is nothing to do with tombs.The old Lara and her persona was way better,story was better king arthur,mystic tombs,This game should be called the "Lost Island" or something similar.
  13. TheAllRoundNerd
    Dec 22, 2014
    4
    Bad things this game did:
    Not an open world like it could have been
    Horrible ending Forgettable story and characters Crafting (while good) you can't read what the hell you just did had to find tombs on your own. one location pretty much "I hate tombs" **** that line Good things: Story: all be it, not brilliant Combat was OK I suppose but it felt more like a cover shooter half    Bad things this game did:
    Not an open world like it could have been
    Horrible ending
    Forgettable story and characters
    Crafting (while good) you can't read what the hell you just did
    had to find tombs on your own.
    one location pretty much
    "I hate tombs" **** that line

    Good things:
    Story: all be it, not brilliant
    Combat was OK I suppose but it felt more like a cover shooter half the time.

    biggest falt:
    NOT ****ING TOMB RAIDER!!!!!!    … Expand
  14. 3icthfromhe11
    Mar 5, 2015
    1
    The game started out not that bad, but soon turned into a never ending stream of blood guts and gore with enemies that can seem to hit you when shooting except when you have nearly won the battle. the only reason that i didn't give this a zero is because the scenes are well done. by scenes i mean the movie like videos that constantly interrupt the game. Even on easy it is ridiculously hardThe game started out not that bad, but soon turned into a never ending stream of blood guts and gore with enemies that can seem to hit you when shooting except when you have nearly won the battle. the only reason that i didn't give this a zero is because the scenes are well done. by scenes i mean the movie like videos that constantly interrupt the game. Even on easy it is ridiculously hard to kill the enemies, who by the way never seem to run out of bullets, oh and when you reach certain areas of the game be prepared to fight enemies who are well shielded, not to mention the sudden jumps in tech and the "unwinnable" situations. But don't take my word for it, try submitting yourself to this horrific game. It is currently free if you have a gold membership. But be warned, there is no way out.

    Side effects: fear, weird dreams, checking around the next corner, complete outrage that something like this was made, and wonder at the "good" reviews    … Expand

Awards & Rankings

11
#11 Best Xbox 360 Game of 2013
5
#5 Most Discussed Xbox 360 Game of 2013
11
#11 Most Shared Xbox 360 Game of 2013

Critic Reviews

All reviews »
Metascore
86

Generally favorable reviews - based on 70 Critic Reviews

Critic score distribution:
  1. Positive: 65 out of 70
  2. Mixed: 5 out of 70
  3. Negative: 0 out of 70
  1. CD-Action
    Apr 5, 2013
    85
    The new Tomb Raider is not as revolutionary as the original from 1996 but this reboot is the most mature, interesting and friendly entry to the series. For me it is Uncharted on steroids, a game that’s better in every aspect than Nathan Drake’s adventures. [CD-Action 04/2013, p.52]
  2. GameCritics
    Apr 4, 2013
    65
    Tomb Raider is a fine game, but something essential feels like it has been left out. Lara seems to have found the map, but missed the treasure.
    Read full review
  3. Gamer Limit
    Apr 4, 2013
    95
    Tomb Raider is the second best Uncharted game behind Uncharted 2. While it gives up a lot of its adventure identity fans have come to know and love, the end result is still a fantastic game that shouldn’t be missed by any action fan. If Crystal Dynamics can inject more adventure elements into a potential sequel, it would be a pretty interesting proposition indeed.
    Read full review
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