Rise of the Tomb Raider

Rise of the Tomb Raider is a well oiled machine, where it’s many moving parts all fit together nicely and the whole thing runs smoothly doing exactly what it was meant to. Many years of practice and expertise have clearly been invested in the project, and yet, in spite of all the technical craft on display, it’s oddly soulless, and but for a few arresting visuals feels like an almost academic exercise in generic game design. It’s competent, well produced, and yet lacking in inspiration, creativity or any real kind of magic.

As with 2013’s Tomb Raider reboot, the plot, characters and writing are as perfunctory and as utilitarian as to bore me to tears. There's no humour, no personality; everyone is a cliché and an annoyingly worthy one at that. Lara is depressingly bland and banal in her thoughts and observations with her VO as forced and as cringe-worthy as ever before, on yet another identikit quest to find some ancient artefact that in the wrong hands could spell destruction etc. etc.

This is B-movie fodder, but is treated with a hilarious degree of self-seriousness, where the game’s po-faced want of wit, charm, and personality is terminal to its aspirations of being emotionally engaging. It’s also cravenly sanitised, where there’s little or no depiction of blood nor injury even when Lara is stabbing someone in the neck for the 300th time. It’s strangely duplicitous to on the one hand push the idea of desperate survival and violence yet flinch from showing what that would mean for someone physically, not to mention emotionally or mentally, something that the game ignores entirely. It’s not brutal enough to be a gritty survival story, and it’s not fun enough to be an Indiana Jones-style romp, and instead it just reads drunkenly from the book of tedious action-adventure clichés.

As for the gameplay it’s as you were from last time, you run around performing the standard cover based shooting, jumping, swinging, climbing, and solving rudimentary puzzles. The structure is semi-linear, where you progress from area to area of variable size, finding side missions, tombs, and various items and objects to improve Lara’s abilities. You can fast travel as before so accessing earlier areas with new abilities is easy and convenient. The controls and excellent and very slick; movement is fluid and aiming feels smooth and satisfying. You also get the usual set of upgrades and weapons, only this time there are more of them, just more thinly spread across the various locales and secret areas, where the best upgrades and items can be exchanged for a special currency you find scattered about the world.

You also get the titular tombs to explore, but disappointingly these are much too short and simplistic to solve, and are still just optional side quests in a game which leans far too heavily on generic third person combat, however competently executed. It’s all very unremarkable, and doesn’t grant its audience much in the way of intelligence in how much it tries to handhold you through it. It certainly isn’t lacking in content however, with my playthrough clocking in at around 16 hours with all tombs completed and most of the collectibles found.

There’s also an Expeditions mode where you can replay sections of the game with various modifiers you unlock with cards, which in turn are unlocked via credits bought/obtained in game, but I can’t say I found it in any way appealing, and just smacks of an attempt to shoehorn in some way for people to waste money on junk micro-transactions.

Visually it’s all very impressive; the weather effects and lighting are lovely and do a great job at making the world come alive where you can feel the mud squelch beneath your feet and see the sunlight wash prettily over the horizon. The tombs especially are often gorgeous and hammer home just how frustrating it is to spend most of the time in run-down industrial buildings and generic caves.

It’s certainly not a bad experience overall, but it’s hard to really praise something that feels so familiar and refuses to even try and do something genuinely different or unique. It’s very good for what it is, but that’s entirely the problem; what it is, is a nice piece of furniture; sure it’s well made and does it’s job, but it doesn’t excite or inspire, and in a medium where creatively and imagination ought to be paramount, it’s a shame that so much money has been spent on something so aggressively pedestrian.