The Double-A Team was formed with a certain kind of game in mind. The kind of game where a shaven-headed character takes on generic baddies, armed with a gimmick of some kind. Psionic powers, or a big hammer, or doves. We love these games, whole-heartedly and without irony. But sometimes it’s nice to stretch the meaning of Double-A just a little.
Is Lara Croft Go a Double-A game? It’s probably bending the concept a bit to say yes. It has a gimmick, but it also has a kind of Triple-A poise to it. Yet it’s also clearly a cheaper outing for a blockbuster series. I will leave this maths to you. I want to talk about Lara Croft Go because it’s wonderful.
A while back Square-Enix started reworking some of its big budget games as these Go titles for mobiles. Hitman was the first. Hitman Go looked a bit like a kind of Hitman Subbuteo. It was a spatial puzzler in which you had to work your way through levels, killing without being killed, understanding the rules and fitting inside them. The pieces looked like pieces from a physical board game. It was ingenious and delightful. I liked it a lot.
Lara Croft GO Launch Trailer Watch on YouTube
Then we got Lara Croft Go. Again, it took a complex thing and retooled it as a pure puzzler. But it no longer looked like a board game. It looked like a handsome low-poly take on the Tomb Raider universe, jungles and caves and temples, and Lara looked a bit like her triple-a video game self and could even do that special handstand move when mantling. But now she moved on a series of set paths, each level a kind of circuit board to be navigated. There was combat against beasties and there were rolling boulders, but they all moved in step, locked into the turns you took, as in a Roguelike. And the combat and the boulders were all parts of puzzles really.