Rise of the Tomb Raider (2015) Review

September 24, 2018 ragglefragglereviews1 Comment

Rise of the Tomb Raider is the sequel to the 2013 Tomb Raider game, just like its predecessor Rise of the Tomb Raider was developed by Crystal Dynamics and it was published by Square Enix who are most famous for the Final Fantasy Series.

Four years ago I reviewed the 2013 Tomb Raider game, you can check out that review here

https://ragglefragglereviews.com/2014/07/07/tomb-raider-2013-pc-360ps3-review/

The game takes place one year after the events of the first game, Lara is suffering from PTSD due to the trauma she suffered while on he last adventure. In order to seek answers to help explain the supernatural events that happened on the island she decides to follow her late father Richards research in order to find a lost city called Kitezh, according to her fathers widow Ana, Richard Crofts obsession with the lost city drove him to madness and suicide and she try’s to prevent Lara from going on the mission but Lara ultimately decides to go anyway in order to finish what her father could not.

Rise of the Tomb Raider is an Action- Adventure game which uses stealth and combat as major elements to its game-play, finding the tombs and discovering the secrets of the lost city are only a small part of the game, there are a lot of enemies who want Lara dead so players need to use quick thinking and good reactions to survive.

Lara has a huge arsenal of weapons she can use including a bow and arrow, pistols, a shotgun, incendiary grenades and many more.

Lara can stop at various campfires throughout the game in order to gain new skills and in order to level up her equipment, the camp fires can also be used to fast travel between various locations in the game.

In a similar manner to the first game the most useful weapon is the bow and arrow which can be used for multiple uses including taking out your enemies, firing various types of arrows which can be modified for use with various element including but not limited too poison and fire. Lara can also shoot arrows tied to rope in order to bring down obstacles and too create rope bridges.

With all the traversing, sneaking and combat you need to do in the game, its really important that it controls well and I can say that Rise of the Tomb Raider has fluent controls which interact with the player and the environments perfectly, once or twice when jumping between ledges I would fall to my death and it did seem a bit unfair although this hardly ever happened.

The Soundtrack was composed by Bobby Tahouri and is outstanding, in my last review I stated that the soundtrack sounded like it was composed by John Williams and I can say the same here, it has emotional and slower tracks for the more serious parts of the game and faster more intense tracks for the more adventurous segments of the game and overall it is fantastic.

Rise of the Tomb Raider is an amazing game, I loved the first game but I enjoyed this more as it had a more in depth look at Lara and her fathers relationship before he passed away and I found the adventure as a whole to be more thrilling, it has a wonderful soundtrack, crisp and fantastic visuals and fluent controls, Rise of the Tomb Raider is one excellent expedition. 9.7/10

I hope you enjoyed this review of Rise of the Tomb Raider if you respect my opinion I will respect yours.

With Halloween on the way this will be the last non horror related review of the month and through out October we will be kicking off the Halloween reviews with this years theme Alien movies.

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ELF (2003) Review

December 18, 2015December 18, 2015 ragglefragglereviewsLeave a comment

“I’m a cotton headed ninny muggins”

Buddy played by funny man Will Ferrell is a human that was accidentally raised by elves after he climbed into Santa’s sack when he was a baby, Buddy stays with the elves until he is an adult which is when he starts to realize that he is a human.

After pondering the idea of leaving the North Pole, Buddy eventually decides to go on a search for his real Dad (James Caan) in a magical land called New York City, of course his father thinks that Buddy is an absolute nut case and refuses to accept that he really is his son but after a positive DNA match Walter Hobbs doesn’t have much choice and tries to accept the reality of his long lost son who has come to visit him.

ELF is brilliant and that’s not just because its funny and has a perfect cast but its more to do with that fact that it should have sucked, we have seen the cliche of someone/something not from our world trying to fit in with our world far too often and far too often it has failed miserably

ELF is hilarious it has brilliant writing, the jokes are extremely funny and very well paced, Will Ferrell makes this film and honestly if he wasn’t in it, it wouldn’t be the same.

Fun Fact did you know that this was the film that helped Will Ferrell start is acting career? it’s hard to believe that a Christmas movie could be so good that it could help make someone extremely famous.

ELF is a fantastic,funny and wonderful Christmas movie for all the family, all of the actors and actresses are absolutely perfect for the film, of course none of them can top Will Ferrell but James Caan comes pretty close with his role as the asshole dad.

Watch ELF its even better than spaghetti with syrup.

Thanks for reading my Review of ELF

The next Christmas movie I will review is

You can contact me at ragglefragglereviews@gmail.com

The Christmas Wish (1998) Review

December 17, 2015December 17, 2015 ragglefragglereviewsLeave a comment

Business man Will Martin (Neil Patrick Harries) is visiting his Grandmother for her first Christmas since her husband past away, while looking through some of his grandfather’s old journals Will discovers that his Grandfather had a secret woman in his life called Lillian, Will sets out to find this woman in order to help put his Grandmother’s mind at peace but this journey may be much more difficult than he anticipated.

I’m not quite sure how I feel about this movie, the plot was very interesting and through out the entire film I was trying to figure out who Lillian was and at times I wasn’t sure if we would even find out, the film was very slow which was its biggest problem because it had this really interesting plot that should have grabbed the attention of the viewer but half the time I was falling asleep due to how badly paced and boring the film was.

Only half of the cast gave an effort to show any enthusiasm at all, most of the actors I found to be either really boring or extremely annoying, the little boy who was obsessed with Dinosaurs did not help at all, I don’t know what it is but for some reason six year old’s are extremely headache inducing on camera, the little boy in this film was almost as annoying as the little boy in The Babadook (if you haven’t seen the Babadook trust me the little boy is the absolute worst).

On a lighter note given all of my complaints its at least a really nice movie which tries to spread what is apparently the meaning of Christmas, I’m actually really surprised that this isn’t aired on TV that often as it’s a really unique and different kind of Christmas movie and even though I complained that the some of the cast are really annoying they wont ruin the film for you this isn’t Jim Carrey stars in the Grinch so you don’t have too much to worry about.

An unknown Christmas film that is probably unknown for a reason, still worth giving this one a shot though.

Thanks for reading my Review of The Christmas Wish

The next Christmas movie I will review is

You can contact me at ragglefragglereviews@gmail.com

Building a Ginger Bread House: Featuring What Maff Said

December 16, 2015December 16, 2015 ragglefragglereviewsLeave a comment

Building a Ginger Bread House so amazing that even Hansel and Gretel would be jealous

Christmas is the most beloved and celebrated holiday in existence and of course almost every aspect of Christmas is iconic, one popular aspect to Christmas is the many sweets and chocolates that you can freely consume without much guilt simply because its Christmas, I personally have always loved having an excuse to eat loads of crap and so this year me and another blogger (What Maff Said) decided to team up and build a Ginger Bread House.

Now before I begin explaining the steps we took in order to build our marvelous house, I first need to explain the most important things that allowed the magic to happen.

The Ingredients

The most important ingredient was the Ginger Bread House itself, yes we did buy it instead of baking, we did this mostly to save time as it took a long time to put the house together and decorate it without having to bake the ingredients as well.

other ingredients include

Cheap Chocolate Peanuts

One tube of Smarties

One bar of Milka White Chocolate

Marshmallow Biscuit Snowmen

and finally Ginger Bread Stars and Penguins which we bought more for the extra ingredients more than the ginger bread itself.

The first thing we needed to do was too construct our house,we used some icing glue that was included with the Ginger Bread House kit,this is me using my pretty swag gluing skills.

This is Maff fitting the roof on our Ginger Bread Home, he is a perfect craftsman and hes looking pretty snazzy in his Christmas Jumper.

At this point the house was looking quite nice, it was a little bear and could most definitely benefit from some tasty decorations but before that we decided that we needed to scrape away any glue that was leaking through the roof and walls.

Next we melted up some of that delicious and creamy Milka chocolate and we then spread the white chocolate on to the roof to help create a snow effect.

Once the our chocolate snow roof had hardened we decorated the base of our house with some Peanut M and M’s, we originally intended to do the whole house like this but the M and M’s were much too heavy.

Maff had this brilliant idea of creating a path to our house using tiny marshmallows, in this image you can also see him starting to draw around the doors and windows with red icing to help them stand out more.

I decided to take the liberty of adding a smarty to the door knobs of each of the doors, and I also added a pattern of smarties to the top of both the front and back of the house.

And that’s it we finished our epic masterpiece, we finalized the house by adding a lot of icing sugar to the roof to give the snow some fluff, we also added two residents to our home.

Unfortunately we never had time to eat the ginger bread house but I’m sure it would have tasted delicious, if it helps we did each eat a snowman and they tasted vile.

Thanks for reading my first collaboration blog.

big thanks to What Maff Said for joining me you can check out Maffs Blog here

http://www.whatmaffsaid.co.uk/

go on give him some love

I know today was meant to be for the movie review, I have been very busy the past few days and I promise that the film review will be uploaded tomorrow so for the mean time I hope this will do.

Merry Christmas

By Padawan.

It’s a Very Merry Muppet Christmas (2002) Review

December 10, 2015December 10, 2015 ragglefragglereviewsLeave a comment

It’s Christmas Eve and an evil business woman is going to legally own the Muppet Theater if Kermit and his friends cant raise enough money to pay off the Theater’s loan.

This movie is brilliant and not in the sense that its a perfect movie but more to do with the films premise, for those who are unaware this film is a Muppet’s version of It’s a Wonderful life.

Of course its not as dark and depressing but it does have a lot of charm and originality for what is essentially a remake of an already existing property, the Muppet’s are great as usual and they provide a lot of very funny jokes including some that are purely for the adults.

Whoopi Goldberg plays an amazing God, its so funny to see such a chilled out lord of the universe and who wouldn’t love a God who is a massive fan of Spongebob? (from the movie haha not sure if Whoopi really loves Spongebob)

There are so many references in this film from Steve Irwin to Star Wars, the only reference I didn’t like was the Grinch and that was because instead of choosing to reference the original they chose that terrible Jim Carrey Movie.

I don’t know how they do it,but somehow almost every Muppet movie has a sad song that makes me cry in this case its about Kermit wanting his life back, trust me guys this rivals the goodbye song from Muppet’s Take Manhatten.

It’s a Very Merry Muppet Christmas is a surprisingly very good film, its not perfect but its nice and that all you really need for a decent family flick, all of the actors, actresses and Muppet’s do a fantastic job and the film is genuinely quite charming.

Do yourself a favor and pick this one up this year.

Thanks for reading my Review of It’s a Very Merry Muppet Christmas

The next Christmas movie I will review is

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO !!!!!!

You can contact me at ragglefragglereviews@gmail.com

Four Christmases (2008) Review

December 4, 2015December 4, 2015 ragglefragglereviewsLeave a comment

They gotta celebrate four Christmases with four families and all in one day.

Four Christmases is about a couple Brad and Kate played by Vince Vaughn and Reese Witherspoon who always lie to their parents and make excuses as to why they cant visit for Christmas every year, unfortunately for them on this particular year they made the excuse that they couldn’t make it because they are doing some charitable work over in Burma when in fact they are actually going on vacation in Fiji, all flights get cancelled due to fog and a news team comes in and interviews them live about how they feel about the holiday being cancelled, of course as you may expect all of the parents see the news report and are very excited because now Brad and Kate can spend christmas with each of the families which is great the only problem is that each of their parents are divorced which means that they will need to fit in visits to all four families on Christmas day.

The movie has a really interesting plot that honestly I have to give praise too as it’s definitely something that could actually happen in real life, I would be surprised if this hadn’t happened to anyone especially given the large number of divorced parents in the world.

What I hate about the movie is everything else first of all it is so obvious that Vince Vaughn and Reese Witherspoon did not want to be in this movie, I don’t think I have ever watched a movie where the actors and actresses have looked so bored and uninterested through out an entire film, Reese Witherspoon did occasionally have fun playing her role a good example would be the bouncy castle scene where she is trying to get back her pregnancy test that had earlier been stolen by a child, the same cannot be said for Vince Vaughn his performance through out the entire movie can be summed up in just two words boring and awkward.

As what is probably expected all of the families are very different and each over play their lifestyles to give off a comedic effect, the families are great and each of them have left me some memorable moments from the film, you got Brad’s angry dad and his abusive kid’s which is the complete opposite to Brads mom who is what most people would call a hippy, Kates mother is played by Mary Steenburgen an award winning actress who has performed in many popular films such as Step Brothers, Elf and Back to the Future 3, Kate’s Mother is dating a Pastor and so to Kate’s surprise shes actually become a christian and Kates dad is just normal

The movie is advertised as a comedy and yet the jokes are just about as childish and cliched as they can get, I didn’t expect much else from this movie given it’s average rating on IMDB but the problem I have is that the film almost does have good Jokes but for some reason it moves on before even executing them, a great example of this is a scene in Brads mum’s house where a kid finds some Marijuana Brownie’s and that’s the joke he doesn’t eat them and it’s never even mentioned again, the kid finding the brownies is not funny but what would of been funny is the affect the Brownies would have had on the kid yet for some reason the movie doesn’t even try to make a joke out of the situation.

Four Christmases was a really disappointing movie, it had a great premise but an awful and effortless execution, the cast was just as boring as the film, the jokes aren’t funny and the entire movie is so predictable that you will know what going to happen before long before it ends.

Thanks for reading my Review of Four Christmases, please comment below if you think I was too harsh and remember this is just my opinion plenty of other people like this movie, I’m just not one of those people.

The next Christmas movie I will review is

You can contact me at ragglefragglereviews@gmail.com

It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) Review

December 2, 2015 ragglefragglereviewsLeave a comment

There will be spoilers, so keep that in mind

“Every time a bell rings an Angel gets it’s wings”

It’s a wonderful life follows the life of George Bailey, as a young lad George enjoyed a regular childhood of playing in the snow, climbing trees and trying to find adventure in his every step, unfortunately for George after he saved his brother from a near death experience he went death in his left ear.

As an adult George is married with three kids and has taken over his fathers job as a bank manager and everything is going absolutely fine until eight thousand dollars goes missing just when the Bank inspector arrives, this causes a warrant to go out for George’s arrest and at this point he’s lost it.

George runs to nearest bridge and hes about to jump when he sees another man fall into the river, George jumps in and saves the screaming man, the man tells him that his name is Clarence and that he is George’s Guardian angel.

George tells Clarence that he wishes he had never been born, Clarence decides to grant George’s wish and he shows George what life would be like if he had never existed.

Every time I watch this movie I cant believe that there is a Christmas movie about a man wanting to kill himself and yet it is so good, It’s a Wonderful Life is one of the most iconic Christmas classics out there and and with good reason, it manages to send a serious message about suicide while also having enough charm and character to keep it’s audience thoroughly entertained.

The film surprisingly has quite a bit of well written humor on offer and lets not forget it’s brilliant cast, James Stewart (George) and Henry Travers (Clarence) have a really good connection not only as their respected characters but also as actors, throughout the film both of their personalities bounce of each each other perfectly and it’s this connection that really helps the film maintain such a wonderful atmosphere for such a dark subject matter.

The film is runs for over two hours and unfortunately Clarence doesn’t make an appearance until near the end which is a real shame because as much as the rest of the film is still brilliant at maintaining an interested audience I always felt that he should have been in the film more often than he is.

It’s a Wonderful life is and always will be my Favorite Christmas movie of time and I most defiantly recommend to any fan of classic Christmas films.

Thanks for reading this review of I’ts a Wonderful Life

Next film I will review is

You can contact me at ragglefragglereviews@gmail.com

Snow Sculptures of videogames

December 18, 2012December 18, 2012 ragglefragglereviews1 Comment

With Christmas so close now it only seems appropriate to do some Christmas related blogs. Christmas is quite an amazing day it is the birth date of Christ if you believe in that stuff and it is also a great time to get together with family, Open presents and maybe build a snowman or two. Everyone has built a snowman at least once in their lives but have you ever built a snowman of some of your favorite videogame characters because I sure haven’t. To start off the Christmas blogs and simply because I’m a nerd I have decided to choose 5 video game series and find my favorite snow sculpture I can find (all thanks to Google Images) for each of my chosen videogame series. The series I have chosen are Super Mario, The legend of Zelda, Pokémon, Kirby and Sonic the Hedgehog.

Yoshi

This wonderful Yoshi sculpture was actually part of an entire snow Mushroom Kingdom but I wasn’t able to show the others because they can only be viewed on flikr due to copyright which is fair enough. The rest of the sculptures include a Mario, Toad and a Koopa shell. Since I would have loved to have uploaded all if the images in the blog I will include a link which you will find underneath this part of the blog. I did find that my favourite sculpture was the Yoshi because the detail is almost perfect and you can see that it took the creator a long time to make the Yoshi alone and as well as creating the other sculptures.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/rgosling/4339007247/

The Triforce

These men are geniuses don’t make a snow sculpture of Link or Zelda no make a snow sculpture of the most important thing in the entire Legend of Zelda universe the Triforce. I really like this snow sculpture you can see that a lot of effort went into it and from the picture I gather they only just finished and its night time now that’s some nerd dedication. There is truly nothing off putting about this sculpture apart from what appears to be a dog turd underneath it but that doesn’t count.

Rayquaza

Out of all the Pokémon snow sculptures I could find this one had to make the list because it is the most bad ass and best looking one I could see. This snow sculpture is of Rayquaza one a legendary Pokémon from Pokémon emerald.

Kirby

Ok so maybe this one is not as impressive as the other snow sculptures so far but it is the best Kirby snow sculpture I could find and it’s not that bad they got the body shape and the face right plus they even coloured the eyes and mouth in black to help give it more of a Kirby look and before you say Kirby is meant to be pink Kirby, Kirby was originally white and snow is also white so yeah a white Kirby but it’s still awesome.

Sonic the hedgehog

Sonic the hedgehog was the first video I ever played so only feels right for a snow sonic to be in this blog. I really like this sculpture because even without much of the detail the sculpture still looks really awesome, although it is worrying me that the snow is yellow let’s just hope that it is caused by street lights and not the other cause of yellow snow.