Romancing the Jewel of the National Uncharted Code (Guardian of Light review)
Game: Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light
Rating: T
Platform: Xbox Live Arcade/Playstation Network/Steam
Developer: Crystal Dynamics
Publisher: Square Enix/Eidos Software
Released: August 2010 (XBLA), September 2010 (PSN/PC)
If, like me, you're a gamer with a fondness for quality offline co-operative play, 2010 has been a pretty lousy year.
Let's look at this for a second-- "Army of Two: 40th Day" was crap, "Harmony of Despair" is curiously void of such a concession to people who have the audacity to want to play with human beings they directly know, and I don't think I really have to go into "Kane & Lynch 2," do I? I'd rather not.
And so it ends up being rather surprising that Lara Croft-- of the "Tomb Raider" series that (if we're honest with ourselves) really only did well in the first place despite awful gameplay was because you could back her into a corner and look at her square boobs-- a perpetual loner, should be the one to bring what's easily one of the year's best co-op games. Who knew?
"Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light" is, surprisingly, about Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light-- a guy named Totec who is magically awakened after some mercenaries beat everyone's favorite bizarrely proportioned woman who isn't named "Jessica Rabbit" to some mystical thingamajig that frees an evil god, and so it falls to the duo to take said god out when their time isn't occupied by environmental puzzles and point-hoarding.
Gameplay-wise, "GoL" is a pretty drastic departure from the "Tomb Raider" formula-- granted, you're still in a Tomb and you're certainly Raiding its wealth, but in addition to the new isometric perspective and the fact that the gun combat is not shit for once, there's a healthy veneer of the arcade on this entry. Levels are pretty short-- around 15-20 minutes depending-- and offer plenty of opportunities to get points, between collecting gems and killing enemies and finishing quickly or completing challenges, and you're generally rewarded with better weapons or stat-building Artifacts.
The game can be completed on your own if you really must and are even more of a friendless loser than I am and you're my dad, but it really shines when you're playing it with another human being. Puzzles and rooms are slightly tweaked to make the most of cooperative play, and between the usual suspects of 'hold a switch while your friend gets across' or 'synchronized attacks' or 'defend while I take care of this thing', there'll be plenty of opportunities to cheer in united victory before seamlessly switching to enraged shouting and back again. In other words, it does exactly what a co-op game like this should do.
There's also a nice degree of competition here as well-- while most rewards are shared, some of the individual score-based ones are dependent on the given player's performance. In other words, you may not want to let your teammate watch your back all the time and rack up the kills, or beat you to that cache of gems first.
Overall, the game is quite a bit of fun, but it's not perfect; the isometric camera is very strict about keeping everyone in view, which gets a little annoying when you're trying to make a jump at the other end of the screen but your partner isn't over far enough and you just drop into the nearest pit, and while the levels themselves are very well designed the art direction gets pretty tired after the first three minutes. Seen one Mayan-inspired stairwell, seen 'em all.
There's not enough feeback for where exactly you're aiming as well, which gets especially troublesome when you THINK you're aiming your ammo-draining rocket launcher at a charging zombie-giant-thing and it whizzes right past his left ear. Curiously, there's also a little bit of the problem "Trine" had, i.e. the feeling that you got through a puzzle a bit too easily because you didn't do it exactly the way the developers probably intended you to.
Oh, and I should probably mention that some people are probably angry at the game because the promised online co-op hasn't been patched in and there's only offline, a sentiment that I quite frankly can't sympathize with much at all. As someone who feels that "Modern Warfare" is superior to "Battlefield Bad Company" because the former actually has splitscreen multiplayer, it's been quite depressing to see games that would be more fun in a more social setting be restricted to purely online affairs with anonymous people who take victory way too goddamn seriously.
And honestly, I'd rather have a damn good puzzle-platformer that I can play with someone else than twenty military shooters that I have to play eight bucks a month for the privilege of getting to use half of.
The Good: Great co-op gameplay, clever puzzles.
The Bad: Camera rather restrictive and makes small details hard to identify, anytime those goddamn exploding poison plants are there
The Ugly: Whenever you're partner's feeling vindictive about that stash of gems you got just about the time you're halfway across a weighted-switch-mechanized bridge.
Rating: 23/23 Jim Cummings Appearances