10 Video Game Heroes With Surprisingly High Bodycounts
9. Lara Croft - Tomb Raider (2013)
Slightly contentious one, this, as Lara Croft was killing everything that looked at her funny from the very first iteration of the long-running series.
It's in the 2013 reboot however, that we see the more sympathetic origins of the Croft heiress and her roots in exploring.
Fuelled by ambition to find the kingdom of Yamatai, a terrible storm shipwrecks them. As they're hunted by the inhabitants of the land, Lara gets put in a precarious situation and is forced to kill someone for the first time in self-defence.
It's then that the drive for Lara becomes more than just surviving the wilderness, as the player is essentially forced to put Lara in a "kill or be killed" scenario more times than we'd like to imagine. Unlocking the ability to kill with your pickaxe or in a variety of more gory ways, it forces the disconnect from Lara the naive explorer, to Lara the unscrupulous murderer.
Longtime fans knew Lara was a killer, but the tonal shift changes the nature of the game somewhat, whereas by the third in the reboot series, all semblance of self-defence is lost, sealing Lara's transition.