Death is common in many video games, especially the death of the main character. In games where one can die, you will often witness your character die hundreds of times before completing the game, almost always as a result of your failure. You'll watch your character die many times, in many different ways and unless you're playing a simple avatar, you'll expect them to react to their death in a specific manner, one that follows their personality. After all, no one dies without putting up a fight.

So why is it that Lara Croft, a video game icon and a solid, well-realized character, has all the personality of a bag of sand when she passes on?

Lara's latest excursion, Tomb Raider: Legend, has her leaping and creeping through Bolivia, Peru, Japan and other locales in order to retrieve artifacts involved with mysterious events surrounding old friend. While the story and its disjointed plot points are merely a flimsy pretext to have her jump from one mind-bogglingly designed arena to another, that's the fun of the franchise, right? Thanks to the game's diabolically constructed levels (and a finicky control and camera system), Lara will find death by your hands many times, including (but not limited to) flubbed leaps-of-faith, mercenaries assault rifles, oddly placed swaths of fire, rotating (and stationary) spikes, motorcycle crashes and so on. You'd expect a woman like Lara who, clearly and with precise wit, states what's on her mind to do a bit more than just crumple to the ground when death is closing in. You'd expect her to protest it, to make a ruckus, to toss out a final distinguished remark or something as no one, especially someone as strong-headed as her, would take such fatal injuries silently.

But oddly, that's not how Tomb Raider: Legend plays out. By including ample checkpoints and not retracting any items when you die, death is treated less like a punishment and more like a minor inconvenience. Each death causes a loss of perhaps a minute or two of progress, and never requires any strenuous activity to get back to speed. As such, Lara acts accordingly, dying with hardly any reaction at all. When she's flung off her motorcycle, her body goes limp and slides across the ground with absolutely no exclamation. Accidentally step into a fire? She falls to her knees, as if her spirit has preemptively vacated her body. If you've taken the wrong route trying to hop ice blocks up a river, she's completely mute concerning the matter, completely content to allow herself to slide off into oblivion. Why bother with an utterance? It's literally easier to die and start back at the checkpoint than it is to try and leap back to that point.

Granted, there are occasions when Lara will scream out, such as when plunging to her doom from an all-too significant height or the occasional groan when she's been downed by an enemy. But most of the time when she's about to be snuffed out she is surprising quiet concerning the ordeal. What's possibly worse is that her two remote compatriots, Zip & Alister (the former is her wise-crackin' tech guy, the latter the stiff history sage), don't bat an eyelash upon seeing her die, even though they frequently (and obnoxiously) grouse and quip in her earpiece about her dizzying jumps and risk-taking endeavors. However when she actually does step off into the abyss, they're oddly hushed.

Contrast Tomb Raider: Legend's characters' lack of reaction to similar action/adventure games such as the detail-oriented Metal Gear Solid franchise, which has frequently featured lead character Snake's remote partners reacting loudly to his passing, futilely shouting through their headset to see if he's alive. Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time takes a different, more flippant (but character-revealing) route by having the Prince himself contradict your life-ending move (after we've stared at his body heaving its last breaths) by firmly stating "No, no, I didn't fall there. Let me start over," literally narrating the events as a storyteller. It's a brilliant device, one that Tomb Raider: Legends could have learned from.

As Prince of Persia: Sands of Time and Metal Gear Solid show, characters don't begin and end with cut-scenes, and their personalities shouldn't disappear when they're going through their death throes. This doesn't just cause a deficiency in the character department but it also results in a gameplay problem. Loading screens aren't 'game over' placards, but yet Tomb Raider: Legends treats them as such. Apart from the loading screens displayed upon advancing a level, the only time you see one is when you've died. However, there's no on-screen indication that you've actually been killed - it's simply a splash action shot showing off Lara's dexterous nature. With little-to-no feedback from the lead or secondary characters, and no closing 'game over' screen, it raises the question: if a character dies and no one reacts to it, have they actually died?

Given that the checkpoint system in Tomb Raider: Legend auto-saves your progress with every other step, any 'death' can be seen as an ill-fated step backwards instead of the proper violent assault on your character (and your talent as their wrangler) as it should be. And while that makes advancing through the game relatively easy, it's the lack of character imbued into Lara's final moments that really provokes me. Without seeing the character try to grasp onto life, or at least do or say something, even if its gasping for their final breaths, I can't help but perceive the character as an actual ragdoll instead of one blessed with a persona. I'm merely piloting a software-enabled automaton, one that can't articulate the need to keep living. And while that's the truth of the matter, it would be nice if the developers at least tried a little harder to keep the illusion alive.

This article was written concerning the Xbox version of Tomb Raider: Legend, with screenshots taken from the PC version.