My Review of Rise of the Tomb Raider, and a Note on Critical Perspective and Consensus

I’m thrilled to have reviewed Rise of the Tomb Raider for Feminist Frequency.

Many of the responses to the review have been enthusiastic, and that’s very gratifying to me. 

image
image
image
image

But this review has also, as I knew it would, raised accusations that I’m “doing it wrong,” as if there is one right way to approach and evaluate games, and this is not it. 

image
image

And my personal favorite:

image

as if themes, values, characters, narrative aren’t part of the game, but exist outside of it. The game itself is just, what, then? The quality of the graphics, how powerful the guns feel and how many hours of your life the game can reasonably consume?

It’s no wonder that, when it comes to AAA action adventure games, anyway, some gamers expect consensus: they usually overwhelmingly get it…

image

…and can dismiss the occasional outlier as just someone who is “doing it wrong.” Some readers–those, for instance, who attack less-than-glowing reviews of highly anticipated games that haven’t even been released yet and that they haven’t yet had a chance to play–aren’t interested in actual criticism. They are interested in being told that their emotional investment in a particular game, their anticipation of it, the sense of greatness that they have already imbued this particular entertainment product with, are all justified, that the game they have yet to play is indeed going to be fucking awesome. 

One of the reviews tallied by metacritic, from Game Rant, says this, while giving the game a score of 4 out of 5:

Rise of the Tomb Raider is a game that people will play, love, and be done with, and that’s okay. It’s said to take dedicated completionists over 30 hours of playing to gather all of the hidden treasures, survival caches, golden coins, and weapon parts, which makes for a solid bang for consumers’ hard-earned bucks.

Is that all we ask for, all we expect? A game that can eat up X hours of our time by giving us stuff to collect? Doesn’t it matter what the point of the collecting is, what purpose it serves? Is that a great game?

I have no issue whatsoever with some reviewers finding much to admire or praise in this game. Personally, I don’t think there’s anything remarkable about the gameplay systems in Rise of the Tomb Raider. Yes, it checks the boxes we’ve come to expect from open-world action-adventure games. It has brutal combat. It has resource collection and crafting, skills and weapon upgrades. You could say that it does all of these things competently, but none of these are things that distinguish this game in any meaningful way, and even if we loved games that gave us these things just for the sake of these things themselves the first time or five times or ten times we played such games, isn’t there, at a certain point, diminishing returns on that? For the mechanics to have value in and of themselves, after a certain point, don’t they have to be innovated upon, applied in some way we haven’t seen or experienced before, or done noticeably better than they’ve been done before? Does Rise of the Tomb Raider really distinguish itself in these ways? I can see one or five or ten of the people who initially reviewed this game for major sites feeling that it does. Even 20. But all 43 of them? 

Of course, there’s more to a game than mechanics and systems, and as a result, more ways for games to distinguish themselves. There’s the question of what larger context these things are placed in, the narrative, graphics, art design, and so on. I don’t think there was anything noteworthy or exciting about the mechanics and systems in Dragon Age: Inquisition, but that game still left a lasting impression on me through its characters, and through its willingness to say to the player, “You may be the center of the story, the hero who saves the world, but that doesn’t mean you always get what you want. Tough cookies.” 

I found Rise of the Tomb Raider’s story forgettable. I found most of the game forgettable. At least the first game left Lara a noticeably different person in the end than she was at the beginning. There was a character arc, there was real change. At least some of its locations and enemies had a scary edge to them, making an explicit nod that game made to the horror film The Descent feel perfectly appropriate. 

image

The enemies throughout most of Rise of the Tomb Raider are generic mercenary types; standard, dime-a-dozen action movie and video game bad guys. The story is unoriginal and while it efficiently sets up a sequel, it didn’t leave me feeling like I had a better understanding of who Lara is as a person the way the first game did. 

And again, as with the mechanics, I wouldn’t question it at all if five or 10 or 20 of the 43 people who initially reviewed this game found something more in it than I did, something they felt would stay with them, that made this game not just another by-the-numbers AAA game with mechanics we’ve all experienced numerous times before, but instead a game that stood out from the crowd, that said something meaningful or moving or fused narrative and mechanics in a fascinating way. But every last one of them? 

Not a single one of those people came away from this game feeling like it was fair but wholly unremarkable? Like it was unfulfilling or disappointing or just didn’t do anything to make their time with it worthwhile? Well, maybe some of them did feel like it was an unremarkable action adventure game and gave it a high score and a glowing review because the game did exactly what they expected it to and they have decided that checking all the boxes and being a standard AAA game that doesn’t stand apart from the ones they’ve played before is enough to be considered great. Whatever the case, the consensus suggests to me that there remains something wrong with the way that many of us think about games criticism.

When I was younger, I’d sometimes read negative reviews for films I loved and then I’d get angry. I’d think, “They just don’t get it!” and be upset that they weren’t trumpeting the film’s greatness to their readers. I certainly didn’t want to consider the possibility that there might be some validity to their arguments or their perspective. 

But for some reason I kept exposing myself to writing about film that challenged me and sometimes made me uncomfortable. I got way into the work of Manohla Dargis, who was writing for the LA Weekly back then. She later moved on to the LA Times and then the New York Times. When I liked a film and she panned it, her reviews made me think about the film in ways that I hadn’t before, and because of that, I actually got more out of the film. When I loved a film and she did, too, her writing helped me better understand aspects of my own feelings. And always, these were things that applied not just to my experiences with that particular film but with films in general. I started appreciating film more thanks to the work of writers I often disagreed with and who challenged my perspective. 

We do a disservice to games themselves and to the people who play them when we don’t expect more from games, when we don’t think about them from a variety of perspectives. Contrary to what some people say…

image

…coming at games from different perspectives and expecting more from them does not come from a place of hate, but a place of deep love, and if you consider criticism of games that comes from different perspectives, it can only enrich your own perspective, and with it, your appreciation of games.