rise of the tomb raider reviews easy allies

Like its predecessor, Rise of the Tomb Raider mixes together open-world elements with environmental puzzles and third-person shooting, and probably the best thing about the game is how often it gets those ratios right. Rise understands it’s not just that Lara is a badass, but that she’s at her most interesting when she’s nerding out. Now she’s converted what feelings of survivor’s guilt might have been at play into an obsession with proving right her father’s apparently harebrained archaeological theories. Lara’s moved on from her experiences on Yamatai, the weird supernatural island where she had to shoot a lot of bad men in the head and several of her friends were killed. This isn’t quite the post-traumatic stress disorder story Rise of the Tomb Raider’s early marketing would have had players believe.

The fun and excitement Rise of the Tomb Raider expertly delivers make it easy to overlook its faults. And Rise of the Tomb Raider excels in one department above all others: it is a quintessential blockbuster, well-paced, overwrought and intense in all the right ways. Lara Croft has gone beyond being just a relatable, fascinating and well-rounded protagonist to becoming one of the best lead characters triple-A gaming has seen in a long time. Rise of the Tomb Raider returns to that Lara and that world, and like its predecessor, it does many things very well. In Tomb Raider, she finally became a real character, with the game’s full focus on her personality and humanity. For her entire existence, Lara Croft had trouble not being viewed as a 12-year-old boy’s polygonal fantasy object first, and a badass archaeologist second. While Tomb Raider fell down on elements like challenging puzzles and a dearth of actual tombs to raid, it succeeded in humanizing one of gaming’s great misused protagonists. The 2012 reboot of the Tomb Raider franchise was one of the best things to happen to a game series in a long time, even if at times the new version of Tomb Raider wasn’t quite what the old one had been.

Rise of the tomb raider reviews easy allies