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.
