I had Tomb Raider the Definitive Edition free from Games with Gold. It’s mostly sat on a shelf and collected dust since I bought it and I needed to justify its existence in my collection. ![]() Three weekends ago I finally caught a break in the action and was looking for something to do on my Xbox One. A huge gimmick with some puzzles thrown in.” I had read and been told that Tomb Raider was a good game but for any number of reasons, time being chief amongst them, I hadn’t played it. I promise it’s worth the read though if you are one of those gamers that like RPG’s and look at Tomb Raider and say, “Lara Croft? Yeah I remember her from the late 90s. If you have already played 2103’s Tomb Raider then some of this column will be a bit of a rehash for you. For me that isn’t a bad thing in this case. You can make choices that allow you to impact the moment to moment gameplay but nothing you choose to do will impact the overall story arc. That’s because the game plays out like a cinematic experience. No matter what you do you will not have the ability to make choices that clearly impact the story. That last part is the biggest thing missing from Tomb Raider and what sets it apart from modern cRPGs. So too is the ability to make choices that have dramatic and lasting impact on your character or the overall narrative. Add in an involving cinematic storyline full of double-crosses, gripping action sequences and more cliff-hangers and cave-ins than a Libertines tour schedule and you have a next-gen Tomb Raider truly worthy of the name.Having a strong main story is one of the central pillars to modern cRPGs. It’s like the killer from Saw got a job designing The Crystal Maze. These are by far the game’s crowning moments: fathoming your way round the rigging of a ship encased vertically in ice, manipulating runaway mine carts or flinging explosives between chambers of a flooding cavern. But as she races a shadowy, brutal organisation called Trinity to reach the ‘divine source’ through a densely-packed Siberian landscape full of savage wolves and patrolling badasses, she’s offered copious opportunities to explore hidden crypts, search out clue-riddled relics and tackle tomb puzzles that require some truly outside-the-box reasoning. Lara’s still scavenging for weapon upgrades and learning on the job – mostly languages, such as Russian and Greek. Seemingly influenced by Uncharted – itself a dumbed-down, battle-weighted Tomb Raider tribute – it was shorter, focused heavily on character development as Lara gradually learned her Tomb Raider skills and shunted the (vastly simplified) puzzles off into bypassable tombs so as not to scare off the Candy Crush generation.Īt 30 hours plus, this follow-up redresses the balance brilliantly. Dying every 15 seconds or so was the norm, usually with an unexpected arrow through your neck or in the jaws of a surprise dinosaur.Ī reboot prequel strand, begun with 2013’s Tomb Raider, was pretty impressive but relatively insubstantial. The franchise began in 1996, and early Tomb Raider games were a lengthy, challenging and deeply involving series of chamber puzzles, trap-foiling, deep exploration and the sort of intricate gymnastics that would qualify Croft for a spot in the X-Men. If your interest in The Rise Of The Tomb Raider revolves primarily around how, um, anatomically convincing Lara Croft has become on the Xbox One, you’ve completely missed the point of the finest platform series in video game history.
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