After about seven hours with Tomb Raider, I’m on board with Evan’s endorsement. It’s a very good game, and a very strong example of the whole “game that’s like a movie” thing that Uncharted laid out a few years back. But what of the PC version?
I’ve been putting it through its paces, and can happily report that it’s a very strong port, albeit with some stray rough edges that will hopefully be ironed out in the near future. The PC port was handled by Nixxes, the same people responsible for the great PC versions of Deus Ex: Human Revolution and Sleeping Dogs, among others. Like those games, the PC version of Tomb Raider comes with all manner of expected PC customisation options, and it runs well.
I’m using a rig with an Intel i5 2.8GHz CPU, 8GB of RAM and a GeForce 660Ti graphics card, and have been able to get the game running pretty smoothly on “Ultra” settings. That means the framerate hits 60FPS a lot of the time, but slows to 45-50 when I’m in some of the bigger outdoor areas.
The game carries the AMD brand, and it seems like it’s got some issues with Nvidia cards. That’s mostly manifested itself in the constant crashing I experienced, which I fixed by toggling off tessellation, but which can apparently also be fixed by rolling back your drivers. I’ve also had a strange visual freak-out happen during a rainstorm shootout where suddenly, I was subjected to kaliedescopic visual glitching. Restarting the game fixed it, but even the main menu was totally glitched and unviewable, meaning I had to use the arrow keys and some guesswork to get myself to the “Quit game” option.
There are other bugs as well, and at least one Kotaku reader has reported the game being entirely unplayable on his 660Ti. There’s also this video that Patricia found, which shows one of the game’s most harrowing sequences playing out with a weird invisible-woman Lara. Eep.
But really, those kinds of bugs have been the exception, not the rule. The PC version also has a helpful benchmarking feature that lets you test out your various settings and get a feel for the FPS range you’ll see. It seems a bit conservative with its verdict, but that’s ok.
Another (very small) thing that nonetheless bugged me: It’s too difficult to quit the game, largely because the in-game “quit to menu” option isn’t at the bottom of the list as usual, but the middle:
Kinda weird. A small thing, but one I noticed. Mostly because, of course, it breaks one of the 10 commandments of video game menus. In fact, there are three steps — the quit to menu click, an “are you sure” menu, and an additional quit game command in the menu — between the player and their PC desktop in the game. Yes, these are the tiny things that bug me.
Enough about menus. Let’s talk about hair! One of the features exclusive to the PC is the humorously named “TressFX” which AMD describes as “a new frontier of realism in PC gaming” and which I describe as “kind of weird-looking.”
Here’s a video of TressFX in action on my computer:
The cinematic Quicktime events in particular just don’t work all that well on the keyboard — for example, an early one has Lara scrambling up an incline to escape a cave. On a controller, players use the triggers, which feels like an approximation of the act of scrambling. On PC, it’s the left and right keys, which don’t feel as good and also make it confusing when players have to dodge left and right to avoid oncoming rocks.
There’s also the problem Patricia pointed out pointed out where the game shows you the quicktime prompt in one place but tells you which button to press in another. That’s confusing, and I’ve seen a ton of people getting stuck on the varios QTEs. Which is also a drag because often, if you fail a QTE, you’re rewarded witha grisly, graphic death sequence. Not the kind of thing you want to watch 15 times while you try to figure out which button to press.
But those (mostly small) shortcomings aside, the whole, the PC version of Tomb Raider is a strong port. And Nvidia is working on a fix for the issues with their cards, so it’s likely that it’ll get more stable for Nvidia users sometime soon. Even as it stands, despite a few stray hairs, Tomb Raider‘s PC version matches the quality of the game itself.
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