Rise of the Tomb Raider Review

Rise of the Tomb Raider is a third person adventure game developed by Crystal Dynamics and published by Square Enix in January 2016. The game follows Lara Croft in the Tomb Raider franchise. A sequel to the 2013 Tomb Raider game, this game takes us to Siberia in search for the city of Kitezh where the divine source is located. (An object promising immortality to whomever uses it). Not soon after arriving in Siberia, Lara soon discovers she is not the only one in search of the divine source. A military group called Trinity is also seeking the path to immortality. Lara finds herself in a struggle to stay alive in her search.

Rise of the Tomb Raider is a lot like other Tomb Raider games in that it is a third person adventure game which has lots of climbing, fighting and puzzles to solve. The game mechanics this time has a crafting system where you collect items in the environment to craft items like weapons and arrows and upgrades for your items. You collect wood from trees, skins from animals, feathers as well as treasure items. There are also lots of voice recordings scattered about the place. The game has a map system which you can access to see where the objective is and the game also has a feature to give you clues of your surroundings by pressing Q on the keyboard.

You have a variety of weapons to choose from in the game. (Some not available until later on in the game). The most popular being the crossbow for which you collect wood to craft the arrows. There are a variety of guns as well, with little ammo. I would recommend using the crossbow as much as possible as arrows are easy to come by. Grenades are in the way of items on the map such as petrol cans, bottles as well as explosive barrels etc. Climbing, jumping and swinging is not in short supply. That is the majority of the game in fact. If I had one complaint it would be there is too much of it. Climb here, swing there, jump over here. On the other hand, it keeps you on the edge of your seat as most of the time you are precariously dangling from great heights, one mistake and it’s your demise. One good feature is that you can’t just walk over the edge like some other games have done.

Some of the action sequences are quite spectacular as well. They have you running and jumping and swinging while the ground falls away around you. It is quite a demanding game with all the graphics settings all the way up but it truly looked quite spectacular at times. I played the game with a controller at first then found it difficult so I switched to keyboard and mouse. The game is also long enough with huge open world maps and a plethora of side missions. When I finally finished the game to the end credits I discovered that I had only done 60% of the entire game. The story is pretty good but nothing spectacular. If you read every note and listened to every recording you would probably be satisfied with an in-depth story. In the game, there are locations with campsites. These campsites let you travel to any other campsite wherever it may be. This comes in very useful when you have finished the game so you can go back to find other missions and other discoveries. The music didn’t play a big part in the game but was quite ambient. It would also change and get louder to give you a clue when the enemy was about.  With the difficulty on easy the game was not hard to finish.

There are many ways to traverse the land in Rise of the Tomb Raider. You can keep to the ground and risk getting attacked by a wild animal or you can take the high road and risk falling to your death. You gain extra items during the game that makes it easier to move from A to B. By the end of the game you can jump, fire a rope to swing, shoot arrows to climb on and make a flying fox by shooting rope. Some of the puzzles can take some time to solve in this game but they are not impossible.

Overall the game is very good, as long as you don’t mind being at great heights for most of the time. The story was good. The game mechanics were easy to learn and the visuals looked stunning as well.

8.3/10