Well that was… underwhelming.
I liked Tomb Raider.
That was an understatement. I loved Tomb Raider. I had been in that unenviable position of having no time nor general attention span that would allow me to actually complete any single-player game that I started. Tomb Raider was the exception to that rule, and so far has managed to be the only one. I blazed through it in two days straight, determined that I would get 100% completion the first time through.
And I did.
Except somehow I also managed not to at the same time.
(Trust me, I combed every single area where that last possible GPS could be. Yes, including the parts that don’t show up on the fast travel map. That was hours of scouring too embarrassing to actually try and number now.)
The point of the matter is… I finished it completely. Kinda.
Well, recently North America has been hit with several new DLC packs, one of which is the Tomb of the Adventurer DLC that was originally attached to certain pre-ordered versions of the Survival Edition. You can find it on Steam for $3.
The reason for the price is because it is essentially just one extra optional tomb for Lara to plunder (and not even for treasure, just experience and some extra salvage). As DLCs go, it was just meant as a little extra cookie tossed into the jar to drive up pre-order numbers. I understand that. I bought it anyway.
To make a long story short… I was underwhelmed.
This is not due to the fact that it was such a small DLC – I knew that going in. Rather, it had to do with the puzzle proving to be completely unplayable, even with a completely reasonable approach.
Accessing the extra temple is easy. In a section of the Coastal Forest is a mine shaft that is filled with rubble. Once the DLC is installed, this rubble is gone and you have the ability to enter without trouble.
Since I came to it after the end of the game, I tried to pretend I wasn’t godlike in every ability known to man and mountaineer, and tried to figure out the puzzle using as pared-down a weapon/skillset as I could. The puzzle itself is not hard – the total time of the video playthrough above should give you a pretty good feel for how long it takes.
Unfortunately, even approaching the puzzle in the most rational way possible found me crashing into a wall, and completely incapable of doing anything except fall over end to in in the broken interior of the plane that I needed to climb up.
Undaunted, I reloaded and tried again, this time with FRAPS on to see if I could duplicate the issue. I could. Spectacularly.
I documented my efforts in my first YouTube video ever, to preserve the moment in which I thought “well gee, someone sure thought this one through.”
Once again, I managed to finish something without actually managing to finish it. And unlike the base game, “Tomb of the Adventurer” didn’t have the weight of being amazingly freaking awesome to make up for the frustrating end result of “oh, well that was dumb.”
If you ask me, take a pass on this one. Calling my experience a ‘glitch’ would be minimizing the effects of it. It is an integral part of the DLC that makes it virtually unplayable – a flawed piece of gameplay that should not have been released. I think that if you make that, refuse to do any testing that would reveal this sort of integral, rather obvious, flaw, and then sell it, you are producing a piece of work that is rubbish and not worth even three measly dollars.
Sorry, Squeenix.
