4/5 ★ – eatpotatochip's review of Rise of the Tomb Raider.

​​The Tomb Raider games have had an interesting history - starting in 1996, Crystal Dynamics made a series of games starring Lara Croft, who started off as being a thinly sketched female counterpart to Indiana Jones (though, to be fair, most games didn’t really prioritize characterization at that time). The games had a new take on 3D platforming that became immensely popular, and every 3D third-person perspective game that followed owed something to the mechanics and ideas demonstrated by the very first game, which combined giant sprawling levels full of monsters (with admittedly poor shooting mechanics) with intelligent exploration and traversal mechanics, good puzzle design and a great sense of atmosphere. Then the game series got unpopular, then it got popular again, then it was ultimately rebooted in 2013 as a gritty, gory game where Lara Croft’s origins were emphasized, showing her as a normal woman exploring intense horrors on a supernaturally cursed island that eventually hardened her and opened her eyes to the evil of humankind - as well as the supernatural horrors that existed in the most remote ruins of the world. I’ve been a fan of the Tomb Raider series ever since my childhood (the original 1996 game and Tomb Raider: Legend are my favourites of the bunch) and I like the reboot quite a bit, but this was also the time the Tomb Raider series started visibly diverging from exploration towards combat - there were many more mechanics for combat than for climbing or jumping, for example, with skill trees and customizations for your weapons. That really hasn’t changed with its sequel, Rise Of The Tomb Raider, released in 2015 - you have new mechanics for crafting explosives and ammunition on the fly, with an increased focus on making you feel like a scavenger and improviser on the battlefield. And while they are a lot of fun, there’s something to be said about how 3D platformers are, apart from Mario, mostly only found in indie games nowadays. That being said, there are some optional tombs throughout the game that are definitely a highlight. Even with the simple exploration mechanics, they offer multiple interactive elements in a large room to provide a puzzle that requires quite a bit of thought to successfully combine and use to get ahead to a tomb you can discover. It took up to ten minutes for me to properly understand how to solve some of them, and I really enjoyed figuring each one out. The combat was also, even with all my gripes, genuinely thrilling - I found myself ducking and moving around from cover to cover, looking for fuel cans or walkie talkies or bottles to rig into explosives on the fly, which was a lot of fun. Rhianna Pratchett, the daughter of Terry Pratchett, is an experienced writer for lots of games, and she’s served as the lead writer for the 2013 Tomb Raider reboot and Rise Of The Tomb Raider. There’s a nice focus to the story that she brings forward, even if I have some issues with the story and the writing in this game - it's not that memorable compared to its predecessor’s story and setpieces, derivative as they were, and Lara's motivations for the main quest are mainly focused on trying to redeem her father’s reputation, bringing it to a character-based climax that, while good on paper, isn’t something I thought was very well earned. Also, a footnote - the game is absolutely beautiful, and Lara’s face is so well rendered that I often had to gawk at the details of the hair and the facial animations (even if I don’t think the rest of the cast comes close with enough detail). The environments are also beautiful and have some great imagery, like a massive medieval ship suspended in a frozen waterfall, for example.