Is it just me or is Square-Enix on a tear lately? Well, maybe not the Japanese business, which seems to be struggling to match the relevance of their SNES/PSX heyday, but the Western side of the company, Eidos in particular, has been churning out quality titles over the last few years. Deus Ex: Human Revolution was a welcome return to form for that series, and I loved the grindhouse charm of Hitman: Absolution. 2016 is looking to be another great year for Eidos, with much hyped sequels to those franchises arriving soon. As a prelude, 2015 turned out to be the year of Lara Croft, with two new games starring the adventurer released. The first was Lara Croft GO, an excellent mobile puzzle/board game that recalled the franchise’s past, and the second being the bombastic Rise of the Tomb Raider.
The latest Tomb Raider is an interesting study in sequel design. Rise is of course the sequel to 2013’s reboot Tomb Raider and it hews close to the formula laid down by its predecessor. Both games take place in isolated and exotic locales chock full of secrets, collectibles, and dangerous enemies to deal with. Lara and her allies are few in number and are forced to face down a massive enemy force that wishes to find a pseudo-magical ancient macguffin before our hero does. Rise of the Tomb Raider doesn’t tinker with this formula too much, but makes smart improvements nonetheless. There’s more upgrades to improve Lara’s survivability, more crafting options, and more honest-to-goodness tombs! The tombs in particular are the most notable enhancement, as there are quite a few of them and each provides a fun 15-30 minute challenge with different aspects of the game’s mechanics. They are also well integrated into the level design and setting but are distinct enough to avoid repetition.
The game’s story doesn’t necessarily break new ground and I doubt I’ll remember most of the non-playable characters, but there is some good character development here for Lara. Our protagonist feels more seasoned right at the start than she was in the previous game, and the game proceeds to develop her into a capable explorer that can, well, rise to be the Tomb Raider. The setup has Lara picking up the pieces of her father’s search for the secret to immortality while being pursued by a weirdly religious paramilitary group that seeks the same. Notably, the game moves away from the reboot’s unrelenting brutality and in doing so makes Lara look far more competent and in control than she was in 2013. Some of the grisly death animations remain, but there’s no unavoidable rebar through the gut this time around. Finally, the dialogue is good throughout, although Lara tends to do a lot of monologuing to herself which comes out as stilted despite Camilla Luddington’s best efforts. Nevertheless, the story does do a serviceable job shunting Lara from one jaw dropping locale to another.
Of all the things going for Rise of the Tomb Raider, the locales are the true stars of the show. The game starts off in Syria before moving to the primary location of Siberia, but the variety the art team squeezes out from these areas is truly astonishing. In addition to the expected deserts and tundras, you will explore snowcapped mountains, dense forests, and old Soviet installations. While the settings are uniformly breathtaking, the level design within them is some of the best I’ve seen in 3D gaming since Batman: Arkham Asylum. There’s a secret tucked away in every corner of the game world and it is a joy to use your ever expanding toolset to find them all. I particularly love the visual language the game employs to subtly let the player know how they can interact with the world, from scratch marks indicating that Lara can scamper up walls to winding rope around a pole indicating its use as an anchor for your rope arrows. If only the development team displayed the confidence that their style deserved, as they chose to have text prompts pop up that explain what each indicator means almost every time you see one. These prompts are distracting and provide little value beyond the first time the player sees them. Hopefully the PC and PS4 versions provide an option to turn these hints off.
The game for the most part is well paced, as it adeptly pivots between intense action set pieces, open ended combat encounters, exploration, and puzzle solving. The variety prevents the game from having any major lulls, although that doesn’t save the lackluster endgame. I won’t spoil anything here, but suffice it to say that Lara’s journey becomes bogged down with extremely tedious combat. That said, the story wraps up nicely with a neat eleventh-hour reveal that rewards those paying attention to the various bits of environmental lore.
Rise of the Tomb Raider may very well be the high point of the franchise as it currently stands. Much like other recent sequels such as Far Cry 4 and Saints Row IV, Rise feels like a safe gamble that doubles down on the positive aspects of its predecessor while not really adding anything substantive to the established formula. That’s not necessarily a bad thing right now, but it does put Crystal Dynamics in a corner if they wish to continue the franchise. The next Tomb Raider needs to shake things up to avoid franchise fatigue. In any case, what’s here is quite good, and I highly recommend checking out Lara’s latest.
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