The Tomb Raider Problem

Recently I purchased the new Tomb Raider game having heard many good things about the game via reviews and word of mouth.  I initially gave it a few days before starting the single player campaign so that I could fully commit to it without being distracted by things I had to do on other games or to a lesser extent, my life.

Once started though I found the campaign extremely difficult thing to stop player, a testament to this being the first evening where it took me after 5 hours of playing to finally turn it off to get sleep.  The game looks amazing, the story draws you in and makes you want to keep playing to find out how Lara actually gets off the island, and the gameplay is as good as Tomb Raider has ever been.  I would wholly recommend this game to anyone who loved the original Tomb Raider games, and also to anyone who loves a good adventure game.  As with all good games it has it's downsides; the overall story is quite short considering the pure brilliance of the story and the other one being collectibles.  This however is a personal preference because I much prefer to play a storyline rather than spend my free time looking for obscure pointless things that are hidden around the world.  You can always extend the story playing time by hunting the collectibles during the story but I get to distracted by my quest/goal to easily.

The single player is brilliant however I have reached a major problem with the game; the as titled 'Tomb Raider Problem'.

The problem is the second half of the game; the multiplayer.  I can only point blame to the huge successes of games like Call of Duty and Halo that have made the gaming industry think that almost every game has to have online multiplayer.  It's my own personal opinion, and from what I've read from general consensus, that the multiplayer is shockingly terrible and a pointless addition to the game.  To me Tomb Raider has always been a single player game and not a game where I thought the ability to play against each other is what the game was missing.

Even though the online multiplayer has put a massive dent in the game, it has shifted over 3 million copies since release which is a reasonably solid display.  Square Enix however have seen this as a failure compared that their financial expectations for the game.  I get the feeling that if Square Enix and Crystal Dynamics had got rid of the multiplayer and instead concentrated on the single player then they could have sold so many more copies of the game.  If they had invested all that time on extending the single player campaign, enriching the experience even more then this new revamp of the series would have been a phenomenal success.

The issue is that everything has to have multiplayer nowadays and too many games companies can't just plan for a totally single player game.  The companies are too focused on trying to achieve sales of Call of Duty's magnitude to not realise that there is still a big market for good, solid single player games.  You only have to look at games like Skyrim, Fallout 3 and the Arkham series of Batman games to show you that totally single player games still have a place in the gaming world.

I still hold a considerable amount of hope that the generalised collection of games companies will realise that online multiplayer isn't required in every single game, and that they lower their expectations and stop striving for sales figures that are ridiculously high.  But maybe that is a fools hope.

Batman: Arkham City

When Batman Arkham Asylum was released back in 2009 it proved to be a surprise hit, finally providing gamers with a game that made you feel as if you were Batman complete with a good story.  Batman Arkham City has a huge weight upon its shoulders in not only living up to the expectations set by Arkham Asylum, but exceeding them.  It would have been all to easy for Rocksteady to rest on the laurels of Arkham Asylum and set Arkham City in a new location, thrown in a few new characters, a new story and released it.  Instead they have taken the already concrete system used within Arkham Asylum and improved upon it.

Arkham City takes place a year after the end of Arkham Asylum.  Quincy Sharp has become the Mayor of Gotham and deemed Arkham & Blackwater Penitentary obsolete and unsuitable for the criminal and insane of Gotham and set up Arkham City (several boroughs of Gotham converted into a maximum security prison island) to house them.  The new super prison is run by enigmatic Doctor Hugo Strange who is merciless in his treatment of any criminals who try to escape the island but seems unconcerned with the goings on within the City.  This lack of concern in the goings on of the prison has allowed the so called Super-Criminals of Gotham to enlist criminals into their gangs and run certain areas of Arkham City leaving the city in the midst of gang turf wars.  Suspecting that Strange might be up to something a little shifty Batman heads into Gotham City with the intention to find out just what is going on.

Rocksteady have put a lot of effort into creating Arkham City and it shows.  The city is dark, dingy and looks run-down with a genuine Gothic feel that you would expect from the world of Batman.  As you travel through the streets or glide over the rooftops, with the shadow of Gotham City lurking in the background, you get the feeling that you are in a war zone and a location that is rife with crime at every turn.  Whether it's cries of assaults as you swoop over alleyways or the instant cries of "Batman's Here" followed a gang of criminals setting upon you, the instant realisation of a crime infested jungle that you're in becomes all to real.

Players of Arkham Asylum will all too familiar with the free-flowing combat system in the game, which Rocksteady have further improved on with new fighting moves and gadgets to use.  Fighting and defeating criminals, as well as completing quest, finding Riddler Trophies or completing Riddler Challenges will earn you XP which you can use to upgrade your Batsuit or purchase new moves/gadgets to further help you defeat the criminal scum within the City.  That said there are a considerably large amount of Batman's gadgets unlocked and usable from the offset allowing you to instantly feel like you are Batman, ridding you of the long winded process of spending half the game unlocking everything.  The way the Dark Knight moves around the skies has been tweaked too, allowing you to dive bomb and pull yourself back up to let you glide for longer which is very useful considering the distances you now have to cover.  You are also granted the ability to use your grapple gun to boost yourself into flight from the top of a building once the ability is unlocked.

The bread and butter of any Super-Hero game is its villains and once again Arkham City excels here.  There are the main stay villains of the Batman Universe with The Joker and Harley Quinn making a return, with the Penguin, Two-Face and Riddler making appearances among many others who turn up through the course of the game.  Filling a game with lots of main enemies can often be a bad point and drag a game down, making it seem overfilled but this doesn't become a problem.  The pure size of Arkham City helps to enable plenty of space with which to place these villains.

Along with a fairly lengthy main storyline there are a considerable amount of side missions, alongside the seemingly hundreds of the Riddler related trophies and quests.  I will say now that if you're not a fan of collectibles then this will be a major hinderence to you.  The Riddler quests are made a little more complex now, with many requiring puzzles to solve in order to obtain them and some that can only be obtained from the use of gadgets unlocked later in the game.  It is these quests coupled with the 'New Game +' mode (which allows you to start a new game with all your unlocked gadgets and on a higher difficulty), and the combat/predator challenges that give the game a large amount of re-playability even after you have finished the main storyline.

All in all Rocksteady Games have far exceeded the expectations that were set by Arkham Asylum.  Instead of sitting on a tested game formula, they have taken that formula and upgraded it, improved it and came out of it with a game that is now the new king of Batman games and a serious contender for game of the year.