In Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light, Lara Croft joins forces with Totec, The Guardian of Light, in order to fight off an ancient evil threatening to engulf the world in never-ending darkness. Players will journey through the game in a franchise first isometric cooperative adventure that aims to deliver intense action and bite-sized puzzles.
GenreAction Adventure
Platforms xbox360
DEVELOPER Crystal Dynamics | PUBLISHER Codemasters | RELEASE DATE
Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light Reviews xbox360
telegraph.co.uk review
even at full price I would wholeheartedly recommend it. It’s an exciting reinvention for a heroine whose light has unfortunately faded in recent years; an exciting parade of action, puzzling and exploration elegantly crafted with fresh direction, all while retaining that familiar Tomb Raider ethos. So there you go Lara, all you needed to get back on top was a fresh perspective, and just a little help from your friends.
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gamechronicles.com review
Technically, the game is gorgeous with a Diablo-style perspective that looks great from a distance but holds up even when the camera swoops in close. The camera pulls out in co-op play so you are never fighting for control against the edge of the screen. Colors, lighting, textures, and animations are all AAA quality and I love the comic-style story panels for the narrative. The music and sound effects are awesome and the voice acting is great even if the script is a bit corny at times. I loved when the giant Ogre burst through the wall and Lara says, “Oh my!†in her proper British accent, like she had spilt some tea.
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ztgd.com review
If you heard me talk about this game after E3 you won’t be surprised: I still love it. The balance between puzzling, platforming and combat is, well, delightful. There are great bosses that test both wits and arsenal (can you say “fire-breathing dinosaur�), a ready complement to the playful stages. This re-imagining of the badass archaeologist is gameplay centric, and while Lara’s bosom and buttocks take a bit of a backseat there’s enough attention given to her other assets to warrant the game’s new perspective.
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play.tm review
The game supports an upgrade system that allowed Lara and Totec to equip relics and weapons that improve their general performance. Early artefacts and relics give Lara a boost in speed or attack damage by reducing her defence or bomb radius and it’s in your best interest to find better items that offer only positive effects. You can equip two artefacts which will be your default power ups while the relic is only activated when you have built up your relic meter. A slight blue glow will surround your character of choice and any abilities from the relic will be activated until you next take damage or die. It’s a neat addition that really aids those trying to complete the more demanding objectives or those who just want to dominate on the leaderboards.
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teamxbox.com review
Now this is a downloadable game from the core. I dabbled with the cooperative play, but made my full playthrough of the game in single player mode. The full experience on the medium difficulty setting took me around four hours, with the longest level taking about 31 minutes and the shortest just under two.
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planetxbox360.com review
The reason this is so important is because death has no consequence in the game, besides the fact that when you are returned to the previous checkpoint, your points will have decreased. This builds a challenge to beat out your friends by making it through a stage with the most points, and trust me; you’ll want to play each mission again numerous times. Aside from a load of enemies, there are a few stages scattered throughout with some great boss fights that typically require some puzzle solving to take down. This is all accomplished with a great control scheme. Lara or Totec’s movements and attacks are controlled mainly via the thumbsticks aside from actually firing shot which is done via right trigger. More or less, the left joystick is for movement, right stick for aiming. Pretty simple and it works well. The face buttons are used for dragging items jumping and dodging. The only thing that really ever can hinder the game is the camera which occasionally does not pan out enough, causing a long fall to a quick death. Aside from that, Crystal Dynamics took the best gameplay elements from the series and experimented with them. This was risky, but it culminated into a game that is genuinely fun to play. On top of this great package, the game looks astounding for a downloadable title. Environments are richly detailed and partially destructible.
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gaming-age.com review
For those concerned with how the game looks, the visuals, as well as, the sound effects are on par with other games in this genre. In other words, there really is nothing to write home about. For achievement hunters, this is one of the few downloadable games in which all of the achievements are not totally ridiculous. While there is one for getting all of the collectibles, all of the achievements are doable.
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gameshark.com review
In combat, the game seamlessly transitions into a twin-stick shooter – aim your gun of choice with one stick and move Lara with the other while hammering the trigger. The fighting is smooth and Lara moves nimbly – and there are armies of lizards, dinosaurs, spiders, monsters, demons, and so on to mow down.
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1up.com review
If you don’t have a second controller and a friend within driving distance, you may want to wait until Guardian of Light’s online multiplayer is switched on; the game’s single-player mode is competent but incomparable to the sheer joy of raiding tombs with a couch-side friend. Just be prepared for the inevitable arguments and subsequent passive-aggression when you grab a power-up your pal’s already called dibs on.
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gamingnexus.com review
But just when it felt like Lara Croft’s fifteen minutes were up, Eidos Interactive managed to reverse the downward trend and make a couple of half-decent Tomb Raider games. With games like Tomb Raider Legend and Anniversary, there was a glimmer of hope that maybe Ms. Croft’s best days were not behind her. Now comes Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light, the best Tomb Raider game in more than a dozen years.
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eurogamer.net review
No Synopsis Available
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gamesradar.com review
The bombs, of which you have an unlimited supply, are plopped down one at a time, and triggered manually. They have a nice bright circle, colored red or blue depending on which player you are, which tells you their radius of explosion. This allows you to drop bombs with extreme precision. Running into a pack of enemies, dropping a bomb, somersaulting out of the group, and triggering the bomb just as you inch out of its radius is ridiculously satisfying, addictive, and most importantly, effective. The bombs are absolutely integral to the combat, especially later in the game or at higher difficulty levels when huge swarms of enemies come at you.
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videogamer.com review
Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light is slight in terms of storytelling – the one area seemingly skimped on to keep costs down – but everything else here is worthy of a full retail release. Visually it’s excellent, the campaign is just as long as recent full-price titles I’ve played and is different when played co-operatively, and the gameplay equally tests your brain and your trigger finger. Even when you’ve finished the story, competitive score-based play should keep you coming back time and again. Online co-op won’t be available until September, but don’t let that stop you picking up Guardian of Light now. It’s a fine example of how to take a popular franchise and make it work for the budget downloadable market.
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eurogamer.pt review
No Synopsis Available
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metro.co.uk review
The game is extremely well paced, with the slow exploration of Tomb Raider replaced with a mad dash to each of the cleverly compartmentalised puzzles and combat arenas. To add further to the arcade tone there are reams of Achievement style rewards to unlock for hitting score and time targets and performing specific feats of gymnastics or bad guy extermination.
eurogamer.es review
No Synopsis Available
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eurogamer.it review
No Synopsis Available
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gamerstemple.com review
Either way you go the basics of the game are the same. The camera is locked at an isometric angle that furthers the feel of its connection to last gen’s action-RPGs. The left stick is used for movement and the right to aim your current weapon, which is fired with a trigger pull. You’ll be using those weapons a lot, as there is no shortage of enemies large and small. There’s also a jump button, but jumps are more a means of solving puzzles and reaching new areas than jumping for the sake of jumping as in a platformer. In addition to each level’s main goal and puzzles, there are plenty of bonus objectives and challenge areas that feature slightly trickier puzzles but house special artifacts as a reward for meeting the challenge. The levels are certainly built for exploration, and it can certainly take you more than one play-through to unlock all of a level’s secrets.
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cheatcc.com review
You can play by yourself or with a partner, but the co-op play is the game’s real high point. (For the time being, co-op is local-only on Xbox 360. Online co-op will be added via a free update September 28, to coincide with the game’s release on PSN and Windows.) The second player takes on the role of the 2,000-year-old Mayan warrior Totec, also known as the Guardian of Light. Lara has her trademark guns and grapple, while Totec carries spears, which serve both as weapons and as convenient tools that you can throw into a wall and jump on. Totec also has a shield that Lara can use as a platform; if he jumps while she’s standing on it, Lara can reach even higher.
gamingtrend.com review
One area where I felt the game could have been improved on was in the variety of level design. I know that Lara Croft is a tomb raider, so I expected to be knee deep in ruinous structures and the like. Still, the color palette never strays too far from its brown/green/red undertones and a detour from the Maya-esque architectures would have been a breath of fresh air. The game also has a small share of jankiness (Jank: Bugs, lack of polish, etc.). There were two game-breaking bugs I encountered that forced me to load an earlier save, there were also a handful of moments where the physics went awry and I fell to my death or a moveable object got stuck. The janky moments were rare though so don’t let the fact that they exist on a minute level scare you away.
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avclub.com review
There’s a reason for that: Guardian bears little resemblance to Tomb Raider, aside from Lara Croft being the main character. The biggest shift comes from the move to an isometric three-quarters viewpoint with a fixed camera. That’s all a fancy way of saying that instead of the underdressed, highly nimble archeologist Lara taking up most of the screen, she’s now so small, you’ll have to bust out a magnifying glass to keep tabs on her. This proves especially irritating in boss-battle situations, where lumbering dinosaurs can somehow outmaneuver you and the fixed camera, leaving you high and dry in the middle of the screen, unable to evade certain death.
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