RISE OF THE TOMB RAIDER
Lara pours the champagne over ice
It’s that lady again – the First Lady of PlayStation’s latest adventure unfolds.
Pack away the disappointment at Rise Of The Tomb Raider’s delay in reaching PS4 – Lara has reaffirmed her claim to the title of First Lady Of PlayStation with a landmark outing that pushes the series into bold new territory. And though its subzero campaign doesn’t quite match up to that of the 2013 reboot, never mind this year’s peerless Uncharted 4, it’s just one part of a wider 20th Anniversary Edition package that carves out ROTTR’s must-buy status. That main story outing’s a bigger, brasher mode than the reboot’s excursion to the island of Yamatai (and one, you’ll be pleased to know, that runs a little bit better on PS4 than it did on Xbox last year). Dumping Lara in the middle of the freezing Siberian wilderness, it pits her against vicious wildlife, an army of elite soldiers and the biggest threats of all: scores of slippery slopes and crumbling ledges.
The giant, interlinked world template setup from before has returned wholesale. So has the reboot’s mix of funnelled set-pieces, wide-open hub sections, puzzle-centric challenge tombs and compact battle arenas. But lessons learned from the first game have sweetened that balance. Hubs and challenge tombs that speak to more classic Croft days are both larger and more intricately constructed, and new tools such as a roped axe and an underwater rebreather help ensure navigating the world’s geometry, not to mention backtracking, is always interesting.
INHERENT ICE
So why doesn’t it edge out the previous game’s campaign? A combination of small design niggles doesn’t help: a handful of steep combat difficulty spikes and the ridiculously vast number of collectibles irk.
So does the storytelling itself. A tedious script veers between overexplaining everything in banal detail and wheeling out monologue after monologue about Lara’s father – a frustration exacerbated by voice actor Camilla Luddington clinging onto syllables like Lara grips cliff edges, dragging out sentences to laboured lengths.
But the biggest offender is the setting. Although there’s more to see than just snowy plains and icy caverns, Siberia just isn’t as inspiring a world as Tomb Raider’s Yamatai.
When you think back through Lara’s past excursions – and well you should given that this is billed as the 20th Anniversary Edition – you tend to first recall treks through dense jungles and desert tombs and inviting, dinosaurfilled caverns. Yet for all the great level design on show in ROTTR’s campaign, the blinding-white of Siberia is forever in the shadow of the beautiful, bite-sized prologue chapter set in sunny Syria.
Excellent, improved action; enticing level design; imperfect setting; irritating story – all eyes ahead to Lara’s next excursion in a year or two, right? Not quite. Those two ‘20th Anniversary Edition’ mentions earlier on aren’t just to fill up space – they’re hints at a bumper offering that will keep discs firmly camped in PS4s long after credits have rolled. Not with a multiplayer mode that you’ll try once and never return to, but through a series of single-player and co-op extras that make this essential playing for series fans.
MIND YOUR MANORS
The return of Croft Manor is the highlight, and while it’s only an hour-long adventure, you can double, even triple, that time if you’re exploring in PS VR. Poking around the mansion’s nooks and crannies in virtual reality is a revelatory experience, and one of my favourite moments from the entire franchise. The non-VR zombies spin on that manor chapter is less mind-blowing, but a brutal affair with more in the way of replay value.
Yet it’s the surprise success of the online co-op Endurance mode that keeps me hooked on ROTTR. Forcing me to forage for food and maintain Lara’s core temperature during blizzards, it’s a genius blend of campaign mechanics and survival game ideas, and Crystal Dynamics would do well to roll some of its innovations into the next game’s main story.
All combined, you’re looking at the biggest and one of the most enjoyable Tomb Raiders yet. Here’s to 20 more years.
VERDICT
The campaign isn’t quite as thrilling as the 2013 reboot, but mechanically this is leaps ahead of Lara’s last and the extra modes are sublime. At this rate, the next one could equal Uncharted. Matthew Pellett