Lara Croft’s twin pistols are iconic. You can’t think of Tomb Raider without thinking of her two hip holsters. They’re a core part of her legacy, adorning posters and box art while featuring heavily in the most dramatic cutscenes of the original tetralogy, and a few games beyond. They were even responsible for a bus driver causing the original Lara Croft to almost be arrested. Here’s the thing though – and don’t kill me Tomb Raider fans – the twin pistols kind of suck.
In the gritty reboots, Lara ditches the twin pistols for a pickaxe. Ostensibly, this is less useful – two guns seem like they’d be significantly more handy when it comes to survival than a piece of sharpened metal. However, despite not being absorbed into the Tomb Raider mythos in the way the twin pistols have been, the pickaxe has helped Lara out far more frequently. Traversal in the reboots is more varied and realistic than ever – gone are the weird wooden bars that stick out from temples, centuries old yet able to support Lara’s weight while she loop-de-loops around them to fling herself across caverns. Now, she’ll climb up rocky walls, abseil down into tombs, or zipline across canyons with rope arrows – all thanks to her trusty pickaxe.
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Lara used to be able to shimmy along ledges with her fingertips. It was cool, but it didn’t make a lot of sense. I know these are games where she fought off a T-Rex, but still. There are levels of suspension of disbelief, and weirdly I find it easier to accept the land time forgot giving us a living T-Rex than I do Lara’s super glued fingers. The pickaxe changes that. There's still some 'video game' stuff to it, like Lara jumping off cliffs and wrapping her pickaxe rope around ornamental statues in order to swing further, but just as the reboot focussed on exploring dense areas instead of globetrotting, the pickaxe helps bring Lara back down to earth. Not literally, thankfully. It sticks in the wall and everything.
It's not just a tool for traversal though. It would seem rather nonsensical to compare pistols to a climbing aid, after all. The pickaxe is also a weapon, and a pretty malleable one at that. With the twin pistols, you can shoot people and, um, that's it. You can shoot them in the head, in the arm, in the chest, in the leg… even in the crotch if you're feeling particularly nasty. But still, you're shooting them and that's about that. The pickaxe, while less powerful than twin pistols, gives Lara far more opportunities. She can crack skulls from behind, she can deliver an uppercut to fend off attacks, she can use the handle to choke people out, or she can hook it into clothes and pull guards underwater. The original games defined Lara as 'cool' above all else, so she swaggers into gun fights, leaps through the air, and blasts away like an action movie heroine. Reboot Lara is not so much ‘cool’ as she is a survivor, and the realism of the pickaxe – combined with its versatility and low volume – makes it the perfect sidearm.
The pickaxe is also constantly useful. Sure, you get pistols – and bows and shotguns and machine guns – in the reboot, but you never come to a huge wall and think 'Hmm, maybe if I machine gun this I'll be able to climb it…', just like you never come to a jungle road you need to clear out silently and think 'Aye, shotgun time here'. The pickaxe always has its uses. In games that relied on the twin pistols, not so much. They were the default weapon, and likely the most used loadout throughout each entry, but that was driven by necessity and availability more than anything else. Other guns needed to be found, and bullets were harder to come by, so when it came to fodder enemies, you picked the pistols not because they were cool, or because they were the best, but because they were there. You needed to save your better guns for better enemies, and so the twin pistols became the default.
Don't get me wrong, I loved the twin pistols. Tomb Raider: Legend is my favourite Tomb Raider ever, and that game can't get enough of them. The bar scene in Tokyo wouldn't have been half as cool if Lara was hiding a pickaxe under her dress instead of twin pistols. I see the appeal, I really do. But did anyone enjoy Alicia Vikander's camera wink when she got her twin pistols at the end of the movie? The pistols are dated now, they belong to the '90s and early '00s, to a different era of video games and a different Lara Croft. This Lara, our Lara, uses the pickaxe. I wouldn't have her any other way.
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