Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light

My wife and I enjoy gaming together, especially co-op.  It was my wife who introduced me to the Tomb Raider series, despite the fact that it is sometimes seen as a sexist title owing to the physic and presentation of the title character (although if you've read this post then you already know what I think about that).  We spent a lot of time playing through Tomb Raider: Legend and Tomb Raider: Underworld together.  Then we discovered Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light, and let me tell you, it is magic.

Released in 2010 for the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and Windows (and later ported to iOS and Android), Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light was treated by developers as a new property in the ongoing adventures of Miss Croft, hence dropping the Tomb Raider title and focusing on a more blatant “Indiana Jones” style naming convention.  Lara Croft is definitely still Lara Croft, curvaceous pistol-packing treasure hunter, but the style of the game is a big change from the Tomb Raider series, being presented in a fixed-camera, scaled back isometric environment with a more arcade-style focus on action and puzzle-solving.  It also introduced a new mechanic in the form of Totec, an ancient Mayan warrior who has risen to do battle with the demon, Xolotl, a beast brought forth by some South American crime bosses’ desecrating a temple and manhandling an ancient artifact.  Par for the course with Lara, but in this adventure Totec fights side-by-side with her, bringing in a co-op aspect of gameplay that the franchise had not yet seen.

…and that co-op aspect is amazing.  Although a single-player campaign exists which reorganizes the gameplay so that a second player is unnecessary, the game was designed to be a two-player experience, whether local or via the net, and it is there that the game really shines, with one player controlling Lara and the other Totec.  Lara is just as lithe and athletic as ever, able to maneuver with a sort of super-human grace regardless of the obstacles and possessing two pistols with infinite ammunition (as well as being able to pick up a variety of other weapons).  Totec is heavier, but armed with a throwing spear he can regenerate and a shield.  With a slower, projectile based attach, Totec is not quite the spit-fire Lara is, but backs up his shortcomings with his strength.

Levels are strewn with traps and secrets, and cooperation is necessary to complete them.  Not only do Lara and Totec fight side-by-side, but each possess abilities that the other needs in order to advance and complete puzzles.  For instance, Totec can lift his shield above his head for Lara to use as a platform, or embed his spears into walls which she can jump on (Totec himself is too heavy and will break his spears if he tries this).  Lara has her grappling hook from the Tomb Raider games, which Totec can strut across like a tight-rope.  Sometimes the puzzles are a simple matter of figuring out how to get across a chasm using each character’s unique abilities, sometimes it is a deeper matter of figuring out how to work together to solve larger environmental puzzles and avoid booby-traps.  Oh yeah, and there’s always combat too, with human, animal and super-natural foes dogging your heels as you journey through the game world toward your showdown with Xolotl.

Graphically, the game is beautiful.  It was designed using the same engine developed for Tomb Raider: Underwold, and the physics and lightening effects are wonderful and lend a solid atmosphere.  There are secrets, extra tombs to be explored, and items to collect that will unlock additional content.  Although the game is short, it has plenty of value for at least a couple of replays, and the co-op element is so masterfully executed that it is one of the best two-player titles available for the Xbox 360 (the console my wife and I played it on).  If you haven’t checked it out, it is definitely worth your time.

Backed by excellent reviews and strong sales, a sequel entitled Lara Croft and the Temple of Osiris was released in December 2014 for Xbox One, PlayStation 4 and Windows.  I’d been holding out against getting an Xbox One myself, but a new Lara Croft title is a strong argument in its favor.

Puzzle BeBop (iOS)

Every now and then you come across a title that seems like the perfect blend of gameplay and retro visuals and feels, a game that will take you back to your earliest experiences with titles like Tetris, Columns or Dr. Mario, something that will remain loaded on your iOS device for months to come, continually begging you for “just one more game”.  Unfortunately, Puzzle BeBop, developed by Binary Square and released in 2012, is not that game, which is a shame because it so easily could have been.

From the very start, Puzzle BeBop impresses with its bright colors and retro-style graphics, which to me more closely resemble the graphical styling’s of the Commodore 64 than an early Nintendo game, despite the obvious nod to Mario in some of its embellishments.  A bright title track, also harkening back to days of yore, accompanies the fun visuals.  The effect of loading it up on your iOS device is like stepping into a time machine to discover a long-lost arcade puzzle gem.

The effect on your senses remains as the game starts.  Surprisingly there is no music in the game itself, but the sound effects are well done.  This also drives home the comparison to a Commodore 64 title, for although the Commodore was capable of playing music and sound effects at the same time, it was not uncommon to find games for the system that only had a title track.

The rules of the game are simple yet highly effective.  Brightly colored faces drop from the center of the screen in groups of two.  You rotate these groups to create matches of four in the playfield.  Occasionally crates will drop instead of faces, and these contain color-coded power-ups, such as lightning bolts that will take out an entire column, or stars that will remove all of a given color, but you never know what color the power-up is until after you have placed it, and then must match like-colored faces to it in order to activate it.  Cement blocks will also drop which can only be removed by power-ups.  The objective is much the same as Tetris or Columns: survive as long as possible and run the score up.  As the game goes on, it becomes faster and new colors will be added to the mix, further complicating your task.

At its core, the game is solid and the graphics are beautiful.  The game’s damning factor, the one thing that keeps this from being a true gem worthy of recommendation to all arcade puzzle fans, is the controls.  The best of concepts can be destroyed by inadequate control, and this is where Puzzle BeBop falls flat.  As the game was designed for touch devices, the developers designed the control around finger movement.  To an extent, this works alright.  Swipe to the right, and your pieces move one space to the right.  Swipe down and they drop.  To spin your piece, you draw a circle on the screen, clockwise or counter-clockwise as you desire.  It sounds reasonable, it feels reasonable, and on paper is a great idea.  Unfortunately, in execution it proves to be entirely too slow.  Pieces drop quickly, and if you need to rotate and move a piece to the far side of the board, that would require drawing at least one circle, then a couple of separate swipes to the side.  Even in the early stages of normal difficulty, once you have a few pieces on the board it is very difficult to execute multiples swipes before the pieces hit something, at which point they immediately lock themselves into place.  It the controls had involved, say, tapping the left and right sides of the screen to move, or tapping a certain section to rotate, then gameplay would have been much smoother.  If this were even offered as a separate control mode, then this review would be very different, but unfortunately there is only one control method, that method is entirely made up of swipes and drawing circles, and that method simply cannot keep up with the pace of the game itself.

I really wanted to like this game.  Everything was in place for it to be a real classic, but due to the fast speed of the gameplay and the slow speed of the controls, the only game mode that I found reasonably playable was “easy”, yet although this mode slows the gameplay down considerably, it was also extremely generous with power-ups and made the game so easy that it became boring instead of fun.  Puzzle BeBop is a game that should be good, but due to a control scheme that only works on paper, it just isn’t any fun.