Developer: Crystal Dynamics
Publisher: Square Enix
Platforms: PC, Xbox 360, Xbox One, PlayStation 4
Tested on: PC
Rise of the Tomb Raider (PC) – Review
Lara Croft and Tomb Raider have always been popular since the beginning they arrived. The franchise has been growing a lot in the past few years, and now there’s yet another game trying to complete the “rite of passage”. Rise of the Tomb Raider will take you to the cold Siberia and back on a journey that your father wasn’t able to discover, but maybe your findings weren’t supposed to be uncovered after all…
Story
In Rise of the Tomb Raider you of course play as Lara Croft, who goes on yet another archaeological adventure. After uncovering a mystery that your father died trying to uncover, you go on a journey to Siberia to reveal the secret of immortality. However, you’re not the only one after the secret. Trinity, an evil organisation that has existed for hundreds of years also intends to find the secret and use it for their own good rather than helping the world, which is your intention with the secret. In your journey to Siberia, you’ll meet the local tribe of an ancient city where you’ll have to earn their trust before they’ll help you. You’ll also face betrayal and gain some much needed information about your father, who committed suicide after the world mocked him for being crazy after thinking he found the secret to immortality.
All in all, the story in Rise of the Tomb Raider is very good. Compared to the previous game, this one seems to have a lot more depth and backstory to it because the game also provides you with plenty of flashbacks as to when your father was still alive. There’s also much to learn about the local tribe, as well as many different artifacts left behind by other civilizations.
Graphics
The graphics in Rise of the Tomb Raider are, as expected, very good. A lot of the scenery is simply beautiful and the weather effects are also really well done. Everything also looks very detailed, even places you’d think would have been finished with less care because they’re tucked away. Tomb Raider also has great lighting, which will come in to play a lot when exploring dark caves with a torch.
Because of these beautiful graphics and effects, a fairly good PC is needed to run everything smoothly on high specifications. However, there’s always the possibility to lower them quite a bit with the vast amount of graphical settings, but this means giving up a lot of the detail, lighting, shadows and more that make the game so visually stunning.
Sound
As with graphics, the sounds are also really well done in Rise of the Tomb Raider. The sound effects are very well done, like weather effects, animal sound, foliage, enemies, weapons and much more. They all contribute to the immersion and they almost sound lifelike. The music is also very nice, but it doesn’t appear that often or is often left unnoticed, but this didn’t really seem like a flaw because the thought “hey there isn’t any music right now” didn’t appear even once while playing the game. When it comes to the voice acting, one can say it’s also pretty well done. Sometimes it seems to lack some emotion, but overall it’s done very nicely and of course Lara still has the same voice as in the previous game.
Gameplay
When it comes to gameplay, everything pretty much falls in its place. Rise of the Tomb Raider is as much of an Action Adventure game as can be, and your ultimate goal is to stop Trinity from getting the artifact that grants immortality. Of course you’ll have to do a lot of adventuring, and the controls don’t hinder you with this in any way. It’s much like the “Assassins Creed” style controls where you can do some free running like climbing trees and jumping from branch to branch.
Tomb Raider is played in third person, which gives a nice dynamic to the game and helps a lot with adventuring. To help you in your adventure, you have some climbing axes to your disposal, because it can be pretty cold and icy in Siberia. These axes can help you climb vertical ice walls and can also be used to melee kill enemies and animals, but more about that later. However, these axes are both a blessing and a curse because for some reason the developers thought it was necessary to make the ground crumble away below you, requiring you to jump to a wall and use your axes far too often. It seems that a lot of the time you have to follow a certain path which you know is not a good path, which makes one wonder if Lara is really that good of an adventurer after all, because she should have been dead a long time ago with those kind of instincts.
Besides adventuring, there’s also combat of course. You’ll use your bow for most of the first part of the game, either to hunt wildlife or kill enemies. Wildlife can be found all over the island and can provide you with precious hides, fat and other crafting materials. There are also exotic animals which give better hides, used to make better items which can help you to carry more ammunition. Of course you also have a couple of other weapons to your disposal like a pistol, assault rifle and shot gun. You can also find different weapons in each category, allowing you to swap them out if they better suit your play style.
Crafting is also available in Rise of the Tomb Raider. There’s resources scattered everywhere around the island, and your survival vision will help you find them by highlighting them. Almost all resources are quite easy to get to, except for the exotic animal rewards, which only come up once in a while when exploring. The resources can be used to craft ammo pouches, different attires or used to upgrade your guns and bow.
Additionally, you also have a skill level, which allows you to spend points in the talent trees “hunter”, “brawler”, and “survivor”. Each of these will give you some bonuses for your specific play style, like stealth, head-on combat or a bit of a combination. There’s also ancient and not so ancient artifacts scattered around the game, which are usually in a different language. You can translate these and this will give you language experience, allowing you to translate more complex pieces.
Of course there’s a lot more that you can do, like complete challenges, find hidden tombs, complete achievements and much more. The story alone with some side-questing and adventuring here and there should give plenty of game time, and for a 100% clear you’ll be sweet for many hours to come.
Conclusion
Rise of the Tomb Raider brings yet another great Tomb Raider game into the franchise. It’s a great game from start to finish with beautiful graphics, great adventuring and quite a bit of content. However, it can be quite repetitive when the game keeps throwing the same stuff at you every five minutes, and the puzzles aren’t particularly hard or big either, which may leave the hardcore adventurer a bit disappointed.
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