It isn’t purely exploration-driven, either. Take a left in a forest and you might discover a crypt, or swing ‘round a mountainside and meet the stoney face of some forgotten god of an ancient race. A dark corner of a tomb might house a number of skeletons in stocks, eternally forced to pray at the feet of a statue. While pretty vistas have always been a calling card of the franchise, the enormous, snowy mountains, crumbling tombs, and dark forests here have been built with great imagination. Outside of the main storyline there’s plenty to discover, and Rise of the Tomb Raider’s beautiful semi-open world provides the incentive to hunt for it. Lara’s as powerful as a Terminator by the end of Rise of the Tomb Raider on standard difficulty mode, however - something to be considered when choosing how you want to play. Like in the last game, I found myself gravitating towards the shotgun and bow the former for its lethal incendiary bullets, the latter for its wide-reaching poison arrows.
Weapons are upgradable based on parts you can find scattered throughout the world, which injects new novelty into combat every few hours. Happily, playing with the latter is still nice and crunchy. It was much more enjoyable to cause as much destruction as possible and gain bonuses for headshots and multiple kills using a combination of crafted items and Lara’s significant arsenal.
While you do get XP bonuses for stealth takedowns and you can hide in bushes and up trees, she’s such a potent fighter that I didn’t find any real incentive to avoid combat altogether. It does, however, make Rise of the Tomb Raider’s much-touted stealthy approach rather redundant. It’s a fun, vicious, and slightly ridiculous new ability which adds a great deal of variety to enemy encounters. While its third-person shooting is the least inspired aspect of Rise of the Tomb Raider, Lara can now build nail bombs, smoke bombs, molotov cocktails, and special ammo while on the fly, all of which can turn a mundane shootout into a pile of dead bodies in seconds. As I played through the main storyline, I increasingly found myself hurrying through combat sections just so I could branch off and hunt down my next puzzle fix, buried in the unsettled guts of an icy mountain or under a murky lake in the mouth of a cave. My only real criticism of Rise of the Tomb Raider’s puzzle-solving is that there isn’t more of it. There are a couple by the end I spent a good hour or two on, but the elation I felt upon solving them was huge. Rise of the Tomb Raider’s ‘challenge tombs’, those that speak most strongly to Tomb Raider’s heritage, are its highlight imaginative, environmentally gorgeous, and increasingly tough as you progress through the world. While puzzles have been baked deeper into the main storyline than they were in Lara’s last outing, the most interesting ones are still those that you have to hunt down on the side. A couple left me lingering idiotically around a rope-wrapped stump, clueless as to what to do with it, until that rush of relief when I spotted another in the distance. One saw me blowing up a statue, another had me slowly and delicately equalizing the weight on a platform. Lara’s rope arrows get a lot more use, too, and the puzzles which utilize these span a remarkable range.
The most heart-hammering moments in Rise of The Tomb Raider come from frantic, acrobatic chases as I fumbled for the right button hundreds of feet above ground. All her tools - which now include a wire spool for latching onto hooks while airborne and arrows Lara can use to climb up vertical surfaces - can be used in quick succession to keep her in the sky for longer. Lara’s means of traversing her world has also been expanded upon. To talk about these two - and the mysterious organization they associate with - in too much detail would spoil some great twists, but they’re morally grotesque foes, and their clash of wills result in moments of real darkness. Unlike 2013’s Tomb Raider, I wasn’t wincing at her constant broken bones - she’s now a formidable fighter who inflicts more than she takes - but I did see the cracks in her moral compass.Įlsewhere, Rise of the Tomb Raider’s supporting cast are less developed, but fortunately they occupy far less screentime than Lara’s juicy antagonists. This time round she’s driven by obsession, not survival, and for the first time we see her in shades of grey. As a character, Lara Croft has never been so endearing. Yet she’s scarred by her last adventure, so she carries a sort of charismatic weariness that tinges her quips with self-deprecation. She’s confident and smart, and reacts to danger with an action hero’s calmness and intuition.
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