Lara Croft and the Temple of Osiris (PC, 2014)

There can be defining moments of your teenage years, and the movie The Mummy was definitely one of those for me. It hit me like a slap across the face and I woke up to the glorious mystery that was Ancient Egypt. I became a little bit obsessed, when other teenagers had posters of Legolas and Anakin on their walls (that's what people had in the early 2000's right?) I begged my mom to take me to Egypt to visit the pyramids. I decided to learn how to read hieroglyphs and... well long story short, a game themed around ancient Egypt sounded like it would be right up my alley, because even though the obsession has mostly died down by now, I still think ancient Egypt is rad has hell.

I have also always had the intention to play some sort of Lara Croft game, and by now there are many to choose from. Well, there you have it - two good reasons for me to check this game out.

I liked the isometric design of it, being a big fan of games like Fallout 1 & 2. Somewhere I also thought that the rest of Lara Croft and the Temple of Osiris (LCTO) would be in that vein, but I was very wrong. Turns out LCTO is a multiplayer action-puzzler and I was immediately struck by two problems: 1. A game designed around multiplayer but no one to play it with and 2. An isometric game but only WASD to control it with.

Let's just establish that WASD is not the best way to control any game that is viewed at an angle (hilariously the control scheme is compared to a SpongeBob Squarepants game on Wikipedia). I couldn't get my usual trusty setup of PS2 controllers to work with this game though, so keyboard is what I've got. Just think about it, to move the direction the game considers straight, I have to press two buttons. During the platforming elements and heated moments of battle it was easy to get confused and this definitely got me killed more often than I liked.  On the flipside, I think aiming is probably a whole lot easier done with the mouse than a controller, though weirdly Lara can't shoot urns that are right next to her. It does mean however that I can't make any comment as to the qualities of the game as a multiplayer experience, I am sadly without friends... who play video games.

It is weird to play this game on your own though. The other people on your team - Horus, Isis and some schmoe named Carter Bell - constantly talk to you, yet are nowhere to be seen within the dungeons. It just emphasized that I was playing it alone, and even the game was confused about it like it was saying "wait, you really don't have friends?".

It's usually clear where you need to go and what you need to do, the game gives you plenty of hints. Enemies are thematically obvious being mostly mummies and scarabs of varying kinds but this is what I expect and want going into a game taking place in ruins from ancient Egypt. It is clear they've borrowed more than a few things from the aforementioned 1999 Mummy movie, I swear the music that plays occasionally is almost exactly the theme tune to the movie. The atmosphere is definitely ancient Egypt, albeit with cool and magical machinery around every corner.

The story is... well, barely worth mentioning. Osiris and Isis were tricked by their brother Set who kills Osiris (the game mentions that Osiris and Isis are married, but not that they're siblings) and now Set has machinations on the human world. To prevent this from happening you need to re-awaken Osiris by reassembling his body parts. Setting out from a hub world, you enter different crypts/dungeons and make your way through, solving puzzles and shooting up the place like any good grave robber would do.  Lara still does what she does best and I never got bored of hearing the noise of an urn breaking or bombing pillars. The reward at the end of each dungeon is a another part of Osiris. Just be careful how you decide to google that, "How to find body parts in the crypt" might put you on some register somewhere.

All over the dungeon you can pick up gems that allow you to open chests in the hub world. The chests contain gear of varying and random quality, the more gems you pay the better the gear piece. The balance between puzzling and shooting is overall good, but actually leans a lot heavier on the puzzling than I was expecting. There are collectables and upgrades to find on each stage and the puzzles are not difficult to figure out, even for me - a notoriously bad puzzler.

To execute them is a different matter though. If combat gets tricky with the WASD control system (though never hard), puzzling can get downright irritating. Especially when there are timed puzzles where you need to really get your button presses correctly and Lara. just. won't. do. what. I. tell. her. to. Of course she does exactly what I tell her to, there is nothing wrong with the controlling - just the counter intuitive nature of it. After a particularly frustrating puzzle segment about 3,5 hours into the game I decided it was time to quit. I really wonder how the games are designed to be solved in multi-player, if they're the same then they're just way easier to do with more people.

Lara Croft and the Temple of Osiris is ok. If you love action-puzzlers or you're looking for a game to play with some friends then this has potential. Just make sure you play it with controllers.