Video Game Review: Tomb Raider

The guys at work love to recommend new games for me to play and so when I finished "The Walking Dead: Season One," they were quick to recommend a new one. One of them even brought in his PS3 copy of "Tomb Raider" and let me borrow it for a few weeks. So I guess that is my first disclaimer about this review, I didn't purchase the game, I just borrowed it. That being said, I did enjoy it enough that I probably would have purchased the game if I had known it was going to be so fun.

Early versions of the Tomb Raider video game used a disproportional physical representation of Laura Croft, the protagonist. The 2013 version of the game treats her with much more respect.

I jumped into the game on a Monday evening while staying on my sailboat in the San Francisco Bay and found it difficult to find a stopping point for the evening. It is not that they don't exist, I just could have easily kept playing all night long. Considering I have to get up at 4am on Mondays to catch a flight to the Bay Area, that says a lot about the game as I was incredibly tired. I then faced a similar dilemma the next two nights I played. It really is that good of a game. The thing I appreciated most is the variety of game play. Sometimes you are looking for things, other times you are battling bad guys, then you get to move to a different part of the game. It all blends together well and I never felt like I was doing the same thing over and over again. Tomb Raider is not the first Square Enix game that I have played. I completed Thief earlier this year and found that game to be a lot of fun, but now feel Tomb Raider is much better.  It took me about 20 hours to complete the game.

Tomb Raider has an ESRB rating of M for mature because of violence and strong language. I would recommend the game to young adults looking for an action-adventure game that is well done. Oh and my final disclaimer is that I work for a large video game company that might be associated with one or more of the products listed in this review.

Video Game Review: Thief

I felt so great when I was finally able to finish Bioshock Infinite that I was eager to see what the free video game download on PlayStation Plus for the PlayStation 3 was for the month of February. There were two and the more interesting of them was Thief. I have a PlayStation 3 that I keep on my boat in the Bay Area and so I downloaded it one evening while I slept. My Internet connection on the boat is not very fast and so it took a bit longer than if I was at home or in the office.

Thief was created by Eidos Montreal and published by Square Enix. I asked the guys at work about the game and they all said it got bad reviews. That didn't deter me from playing and so I started playing one evening and couldn't stop for several hours. Instead of running around trying to kill people like you would with a first-person shooter, you are thief and try to sneak around without being noticed. It was very refreshing as I wasn't constantly trying to kill everything in sight. There are also a lot of puzzles to solve including picking various locks, looking for important items, and figuring out where to go next.

Unfortunately I get bored by video games rather easily and so the next night I went to play the game but it didn't hold my interest nearly as long. Instead of wanting to play through for several hours, I was good for about an hour and then decided to move onto other things. I still want to finish the game but the end of the month is coming quickly and I am afraid I may jump onto another game instead. We'll see how this week goes.