Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light review

By goukijones — September 4, 2010
Tags: lara-croft-and-the-guardian-of-light review summer-of-arcade

Gouki.com review. Lara Croft is full of great puzzles that change when you play alone or with a friend. Either way you’re screwed. But this game is a total blast.

Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light is the best arcade game I’ve played since Shadow Complex. Both games come from the summer event, Xbox Summer of Arcade. I liked the Castelvania as well, just didn’t play it that much. I think BatRastered enjoyed the Limbo, allagedly pwnd it in less than a day. Monday Night Combat? Fuck me, probably the biggest let down in arcade history. I don’t need to mention Hydro Thunder do I? Hell I couldn’t even remember the name of that game.

Lara Corft and the Guardian of Light. I am kind of surprised that I like it as much as I do. I knew it was a platformer. I knew it was a top-down shooter. I knew it was a puzzler. I just didn’t have a clue that it would be so much fun. The puzzles change for you whether or not your lonely ass has any friends. I played with BatRastered, after only 3 sitting and about 8 hours, railed. We did look for everything that was hidden, didn’t find it all. Gotta find those secret red skulls. Throughout the game there are special challenge rooms where you can get more guns and special abilities unlocked. That’s right like every other game LCatGoL(LCatGoL LoL.) has some rpg elements. It’s okay though, there’s nothing wrong with them in the game. There are tons of different items to pick up, so many that I know we didn’t find everything and we were looking.

This game has no invisible walls and it’s pretty dark most of the time. What does that mean? You fall in the hole a lot. Don’t worry though, you have infinite lives and being dead some of the time or all the time doesn't really matter. Hell when you die, you come back with full ammo. Back to the holes, while you search the maps intensely looking for every last red skull, watch out for the drop offs. Otherwise jumping and rolling, which is a perfect dodge move are both really well worked into the game. If the Guardian of Light Jimmy throws a spear into the wall Lara can jump onto it. She auto aims and auto locks her jump. Perfect. Most of the puzzles were solved by us just throwing spears into the wall and jumping over shit. I don’t even know if that’s what the developer intended. But fuck it.

The puzzles are great. Something I really enjoyed about the game was just standing in a room trying to figure out “What the fuck?” There’s one room that comes to mind in particular. There’s just a round pillar in the room and a switch that raises a floor and then drops it, if you step off. After being in there for about 20 mins and just trying different shit, I figured out to wrap Lara’s rope around the pillar so the GoL Jimmy could jump across. What’s cool about this to me is, looking at the room, obviously we didn’t guess that right away. Eventually we did figure it out and I’m thinking now, that the developers had some really cool ideas. Solving puzzles in LCatGoL is really satisfying and you have to think outside of the box.

The shooting is also very enjoyable. Most monsters have little puzzles to killing them as well. Like these skeletons I’d like you to pay close attention too. When you shoot the skeleton and he drops to the ground, he will regenerate and start walking around again. The trick here is that you have to bomb him while he’s on the ground to blow up his bones so he can’t respawn JIMMY! Watch this nubfarm I found in this video below, while I was trying to remember what LCatGoL even is.

Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light is a great game. The best of the Summer of Arcade IMHO. We played it on hard and got through it after 3 sitting and about 8 hours. For 1200 Microsoft points, I think it’s a great deal. Gouki.com Editor’s Choice.

Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light review

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