The Tomb Raider heritage shows itself in the game's secret tombs, which are secreted around the island for you to discover. There are quiet, tense moments inbetween the combat-heavy setpieces, and you're never in the same place doing the same thing twice.
Once it gets going, Tomb Raider is high-octane and squeezes your adrenaline gland dry, but it's also got great variety and pacing. But even when Tomb Raider falls back on action-game cliché, it does so with such confidence and aplomb that you don't mind – in fact, that burning-building sequence is one of the game's most breathlessly exciting moments. There's an escaping-from-a-burning-building scenario, and more than one sequence where you're skidding at speed down a waterfall. Tomb Raider has definitely taken inspiration from the other great action games of this generation. The game is well-designed enough that you can read the environments perfectly well without it. It’s most useful when you’re hunting for collectibles, but otherwise I played the rest of the game without using it. Croft’s Survival Instincts vision – which, at the touch of a button, helpfully highlights things like climbing walls, flammable objects and rope surfaces you can attach to – makes navigating the island and its puzzles easier, and thankfully is completely optional after it’s first introduced. It’s also rich with detail and tightly designed, and as Lara masters the skills of survival and picks up new tools along the way, you can venture further into its hidden crevices. It is stunningly beautiful, and the game gives you plenty of opportunities to admire it from cliff-sides, misty mountain outlooks and precarious climbing ropes. Croft has been to some really impressive places in her day, and happily this island is among them. Leaping across cliffsides with a climbing axe never quite loses that heart-in-throat feeling. Lara moves naturally and confidently in her environment, but it still feels excitingly dangerous. Though survivalism is one of the plot’s dominant themes, if anything it’s under-used in the gameplay hunting and foraging are introduced in the first twenty minutes, but then quickly abandoned. But for most of the game, Lara has to work with what she’s got. By the later stages of Tomb Raider’s story her arsenal rivals that of a small guerrilla army, and she’s equally deadly in hand-to-hand combat. Building Lara’s skills and upgrading her weapons with salvage proves unexpectedly gratifying. I gravitated towards the bow – there’s something vastly more satisfying about being a hidden assassin than leaping into the fray with a shotgun or hiding behind a wall with an assault rifle, though the game necessitates all these approaches and more in different situations. Lara periodically discovers new weapons, injecting the combat with fresh novelty every few hours. Whether with a bow, a shotgun or a pistol, fighting is fun, and crucially there's not too much of it (though the body-count is certainly high).
Combat has never been the strength of Crystal Dynamics' Tomb Raider games, but the developer has finally nailed it here. Lara has to get used to killing quickly, and so does the player. One minute she's retching over a corpse, the next she's skewering five guys through the neck with arrows, which leads to a period of narrative dissonance as you adjust. After that moment, though, the game quickly moves on thematically the transition from terrified survivor forced to take a life to headshot-happy killer is jarringly instant, and this is the narrative’s only significant weakness. Lara's first kill is the game's first dramatic crescendo, a moment of genuine emotional impact. It's a good while before you first pull out a gun in Tomb Raider. There are a few jaw-dropping moments in this story, which develops quickly from survival-struggle into action epic.
Thankfully, this doesn't rob the plot of impact. Lara is shipwrecked alongside a crew of friends, and her guilt over bringing them along on this expedition provides much of the plot’s emotional thrust, but it’s difficult to feel as much for them as you do for Lara. Lara herself is so well-realised that her friends and enemies feel two-dimensional by comparison. Play The supporting cast is less developed, though.
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