In the end this game had fun gameplay but the story was relatively boring, pretty depthless. Made me think of other sandbox style games where there are tons of side things to do but is shallow. Not as good as the first for sure, but also had pretty good production value. Somehow lost that cinematic feel I guess.

Score Breakdown

“The Tale”
Story- 6
Pacing- 6
Characters- 6
Originality- 5
Linearity- 9
Length- 7
Epicness- 6

“The Presentation”
Visuals- 9
Display- 7
Music- 7
Sound FX- 8

“The Mechanics”
Ease of Use- 7
Innovation- 6
Replayability- 5

I loved this game. The story was great. Lots of drama and deep emotional events that really drove the game forward. I’m not going to spoil too much.
The gameplay was great. Everything worked smoothly. It froze on me once. But then unfroze. I’ve never seen a game unfreeze. I love the obstacles. Climbing and jumping through crumbling landscapes.
Graphics are improved of coarse. Lara Croft’s face changed. Not bad or weird. It’s just animated different from the first game. But everything else is great. The graphics are clear.

Conclusion: Overall, It’s a fantastic game. Certainly worth playing.

EyeCandy: The visuals of this newest Tomb Raider are great. The environment and texture artists really outdid themselves in this installment driving home an authentic feel of wherever the journey takes you. A lot of time, detail, and professionalism went into the world of Lara’s adventure and it shows. I myself have never been to Russian prisons, mass grave sites and torture chambers, or Byzantine tombs, but if I ever do end up in one of those bizarre places I would imagine it would look exactly like this game. Even the areas that weren’t completely void of life were warm and rich with creatures and fauna. It doesn’t matter where you traverse in this universe, whether it be crawling through glaciers, sidling on cliffs in a cave, or solving ancient puzzles in hidden tombs. This world is real.

SoundDesign: I was pleasantly pleased at the audio engineering and even a little surprised. The sounds are Hi-Fi, custom and believable, and the ambiance is incredible and really elevates you to the game’s peak by its excellent job of immersion. The soundtrack holds originality and has a few memorable tracks you’ll be hoping to hear every now again. To me it wasn’t a boring blend of instruments and themes already explored and are found in standard AAA video games and movies. The actor’s performances are all incredible and I even got attached to a man that was never revealed in the game. I caught myself searching for a non existent character’s diary entries, essentially, for the simple fact that it was very progressive, and the voice actor was an incredible narrator. Which leads me into the game’s dialogue. While it doesn’t sit near the writing of The Witcher, every character has their own tone, emotions, and every interaction is unique. If the devs can hear me, keep at this level right here. You have it right.

Gameplay: Rise of the Tomb Raider takes on its new traditional formula of gameplay and added a hell of a lot to it. The game kept its fire camps to upgrade your weapons, spend skill points, and fast travel to other unlocked base camps in the game while Lara chats up little summaries and thoughts of recent events. While I upgraded and added more skills to her repertoire I couldn’t help but notice a couple things. Some of the skills are recycled from the first one (makes sense) and some skills are completely useless. Some skills do stack on top of others and add to the base skill which is nice, but there wasn’t much improved or added in this department. Just an observation. Over in the weapons section is also the same from the previous title. There’s the bow, the pickaxe, and your selection of different variants of a pistol, rifle, and shotgun giving Lara an arsenal of up to four weapons in total giving her an advantage in any situation and the developers being able to adhere to any play style. For example, if like me, you’re the type for a heavy offense, I would recommend the Compound Bow, Automatic Shotgun, Heavy Pistol, and the SMG. You’ll already have one type of each at your disposal, but it’s up to you to explore and find all the pieces you can to build said ‘special’ weapons. But then this game goes deeper with its crafting system. For each weapon, there’s alternate ammo types. The arrows can be armed with a grenade, lit on fire, or sabotaged with a poison (which is my personal favorite) or maybe you want some dragonfire rounds for your shotgun? The option is there. But to get these ammo types you must loot and scrounge to find the basic items: cloth, wood, metal nuts and springs, animal pelts, and so on. This is either a highlight or the nadir of the craft system because it can get overwhelming. Your weapons and gadgets can have attachments, your skills can have skills, it’s honestly a little bit of a spider web’s mess. Everything seems intertwined, and for the first time in a very long time, I actually didn’t disable the pop-up tutorials just because this game is jam packed with all sorts of little features that aren’t utilized the entire game. Not a real problem though unlike the games controls and direction. Lara was definitely a tad clunky in certain spots. All game, she is constantly leaping platforms like Nathan Drake, climbing cliffs and mountain sides like one of Desmond’s ancestors, and killing and shooting like a madman. Woman, sorry. The environment climbing will send you plummeting into pits of doom because of wrongly registered input controls and the combat mechanics are very dry heavily relying on shallow gunplay. The reason why both of those are problems are because it leads to unnecessary checkpoint reloading, which isn’t gamebreaking because Crystal Dynamics are very forgiving with their checkpoints. No, really, the game autosaves every couple minutes and I never once dreaded reloading a checkpoint in fear of having to start over from “who knows where” so that almost makes up for it. But the gun combat, while slightly non-redundant, slightly doesn’t make sense. Example, your given the choice to upgrade any weapon of your choosing by utilizing the crafting system I briefly described earlier, and while it’s very possible to upgrade a weapon’s damage, rate of fire, and reload speed, an option is also a gun’s recoil stability. Not accuracy, recoil stability. That means no matter how many junk parts you throw into your jerry-rigged AK47, or how true your aim is in a firefight, the weapon will never shoot where it is aimed. I would’ve lost count if I tried to keep track of how many heads I missed just because the bullet would travel outside of the on-screen reticle. Those two aspects of the game were the most frustrating in my experience. Lara, seemingly intentional, jumping to her death, and a useless gun attribute. Can’t hit a single enemy at point blank because of the bullet spread, but at least the gun won’t travel upwards.

Conclusion: Conclusion: Lara’s new Journey is definitely a step in the right direction forward from its predecessor. I wouldn’t describe it as “broken” but more “flawed”. All in all everything works. The characters are real, the story has big enough curveballs and twists to drive the narrative, the game is wealthy in its own history, and the gameplay is deep. It’s just not good enough to play through twice. If I honestly had to give the game one complaint is that it wasn’t difficult. I beat the game on Survivor mode, it’s hardest difficulty, and still finished it in about 9/10 hours with an almost 80% completion. The last fight was a little cliched and anti-climactic, but the very last cinematic made up for it. The game didn’t end on a cliffhanger, but there will definitely be another one. Personally, I’m skeptical to where the narrative is headed, but I’m just thinking worst case scenario. As long as the next Tomb Raider holds to this formula, and keeps its mature and adult themes, I will definitely be a modern fan of Lara Croft.