Tomb Raider Anniversary, complete! Demiboy vs. Backlog, Game #3

This past week I played Tomb Raider: Anniversary! Each week, I select a game at random from the 228 entries in my backlog and play only that game over the course of the week, writing about it here whenever sufficient time and thoughts align. This game's series began with this post and continued here and here.

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With a mighty late-Christmas-Day push, I finished Tomb Raider: Anniversary! It took rather longer than I had expected or hoped.

I present to you this chubby, letterboxed exploding island from the final cutscene as proof of the kill.

 
Pertinent stats:

• Play time: 17 hours
• Average play time per HowLongToBeat: 13 hours. I am 30% slower (or suckier at jumping?) than the average gamer!
• Walkthrough lookups: 2. One was the centaur fight I screenshotted last post; I had it 90% figured out, but didn't realize I could pick up the enemies' shields after I'd disarmed them. The second, though, was due to...
• Gamebreaking bugs: 1. There's one spot where a jump becomes impossible due to a collision glitch. To work around it, you have to turn on VSync in graphics settings, of all things. (There's another route through that room, but it involves tricky maneuvers with the grapnel, whose controls I found painfully fussy on gamepad.) I can forgive this, though, because not all bugs were bad--
• Glitches in my favor: 3. When attempting to reach the "Hephaestus" door, I jumped badly, but instead of falling to my doom I glitched onto an out-of-bounds ledge and emerged back into the world right where I needed to be. In the mines level, I failed a jump for the nth time but managed to land on some scenery you're not supposed to stand on, which broke my fall enough to take only minor damage and nab the next checkpoint. And in a particularly infuriating time-limited grapnel sequence in the final area, I ran out of time but landed on thin air when I fell, letting me shoot the switch to reset the timer and resume from where I'd left off. In total, these must have saved me half an hour of frustration or more!
• Times I got Lara Croft horribly killed: ...it's probably a good thing the game doesn't keep track of this.

So what's the verdict? Given this is my first time giving a formal rating on this blog, I should introduce my spin on ye olde five stars. I've used this ever since the Backloggery introduced a five-star scale, and it serves me pretty well!

1 star: "I couldn't stomach it." This game and I didn't get along. Plenty of games lose my interest and get abandoned, but one star means I actively rejected the thing out of intense frustration, disgust, or boredom. Titles that have earned this dubious distinction from me include Braid, Gratuitous Space Battles, and Jet Set Radio.

2 stars: "Wasn't my thing, but I can see the appeal." Two stars is something of a default category for those games that didn't hook me enough to finish them. That means even a good game that's just too damn long is likely to get two stars; in my working adult life, with multiple hobbies and a decent social schedule, I have no qualms dinging a game for that. I occasionally revisit two-star games if I feel the itch, as opposed to one-star games, which are truly dead to me. Examples: every Elder Scrolls game ever, Starpoint Gemini 2, Shadowrun Returns.

3 stars: "A solid title. I recommend it!" Any game I found good enough to play through to the ending, but felt no desire to spend extra time on, earns three stars--making this a very common rating. A diet of three-star games would still make for good gaming! Examples: Borderlands, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, VVVVVV.

4 stars: "I couldn't put this game down!" A game earns its fourth star when I get to the end and want to keep playing. Short, memorable experiences that reward replays, or titles with compelling endgames that keep things fresh even after the credits roll, that's the stuff! My examples: Rogue Legacy, Persona 3 FES, Shadow of the Colossus.

5 stars: "An all-time favorite! I'd play this over again in a heartbeat." A four-star game is great; a five-star game is inspiring. The fifth star appears when a game moves me to tears, gets me to replay it over and over, inspires me to write my own game or story in imitation, or the like. If you want a peek into my gamerly soul, play a curriculum of these games. Examples: Undertale, Final Fantasy Tactics, Path of Exile.

If you've been following my writings on Tomb Raider: Anniversary, then, it should come as no surprise in light of the above rubric that I rate it three stars. I enjoyed it; I played through to the end even when, according to the conceits of this blog, I was free to move on to something new. But I must admit I was ready for it to be over, in that final push. It overstayed its welcome by maybe three hours. If the controls were tighter, such that the platforming were smooth and gratifying rather than a bumpy stop-and-start frustration-go-round; if the story were original or at least intelligible; if the combat delivered on its cinematic promise rather than being a button-mash fest... maybe TR:A would have a chance at four stars. But these were not to be. Glad I played it, no interest in doing so again!

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Next up in the randomly generated play queue is the goofy lite JRPG 200% Mixed Juice!. Anticipated play time is somewhere in the 6 to 7 hour range, which suits me just fine. I'm thinking of shaking up the play queue process with a reader vote or "blogger's choice" play, in another game or two. Is there anything from my monster list you want to see blogged on? Shoot me a comment!