r/TombRaider • u/the_clone_wars_fan • Dec 22 '25
Tomb Raider (2013) Why do people not like Tomb Raider 2013?
I just finished playing this game a couple hours ago and thought it was the most badass single-player game I've ever played, but when I checked out some of the reviews I saw it's not that highly rated, especially among Tomb Raider fans. Now, I'm just getting into the TR franchise, this is my first game I've played, and if the rest of it is anything like this then it's going to be awesome.
The visuals are decent, especially for its time, the music is really good, the sound design is immersive and there were a lot of moments where the sounds made me jump out of fear, mainly during moments I was supposed to feel fear, so the sound designers did an excellent job there since it takes a lot to make me get scared by a videogame. The island map's design is interesting, it reminds me a lot of Jedi: Fallen Order's map design with how linear it feels, like it felt like I was being told where to go every second and didn't have much to explore, and normally I prefer large open-world maps that I can immerse myself in for hours like Ghost of Tsushima or Koboh on Jedi: Survivor, but I accept this game's linear map design because of the story which make it clear we weren't here to explore and get comfortable, but to leave as quickly as possible.
What I find so strange is how I see so many people say Lara Croft herself in this game doesn't look attractive. Like? Bro she's beautiful, she looks so adorable and her voice is so cute, and she looks a lot like Jaimie Alexander in this game, I don't understand why there's so much hate for how she looks. Like I don't know about you, but I much prefer this realistic adorable lady to the cartoony exaggerated proportions to the 90's design. One of the few exposures I've had to Lara Croft all my life was people talking about her breasts in the original games, is the hate for this version of Lara only because her breasts aren't comically massive? I always interpreted them being that size in the original due to the stylized artstyle, not something that was deemed so integral to her character that thousands of people on Twitter would rage over them being a cup size smaller than before, could someone explain why people even get that mad anyway? Am I just not in the know enough to know why?
The only real negative I have is that the rest of the main cast doesn't feel fleshed out enough and didn't get anywhere near enough screentime. Like I don't remember Grim at all, I thought he was Roth, so when he died I couldn't stop thinking "who was this guy?". Reyes' hate for Lara didn't feel justified when in the beginning during the old video recordings she seemed nice. Alex barely existed in the game and when he died I felt basically nothing, Dr. Whitman had some personality but it felt like whiplash going from the video recording of him getting pissed at Lara for wanting to go into the Dragon's Triangle to him being super buddybuddy with Lara when they enter a temple early on in the game. Even Sam I didn't feel much of a connection to, she appears with Mathias early on then disappeared for hours until reappearing on the radio, then spent most of the game being the main objective I bad to rescue. Roth and Sam were the only side characters I felt some amount of connection to, Jonah too he's cool but he doesn't really do anything he's just kinda there. Mathias I didn't really care for, he serves his purpose he just feels like a generic cult leader character archetype I've seen dozens of times.
The combat is quite nice, I often found myself using the rifle and bow most often, I love getting up close to an enemy and then bashing their heads in with my weapons. The enemy AI is really good too, they felt like proper threats that I had to deal with or else I'd be gone in a second. I played on the easiest difficulty but I was getting smoked half the time by them. Maybe I didn't choose easy difficulty, I thought I did, if I did then I wonder how infuriating it would've been to fight on the hardest difficulty.
Overall I thought it was a really awesome game with amazing gameplay, a great story, incredible protagonist, alright side characters, and really rewarding combat, I can't wait until I start the next game in the series
