Review: Lara Croft gets gritty in action-packed ‘Rise of the Tomb Raider’

You know, this Lara Croft lady just might have a future in video games.

Like the cinematic reinventions of James Bond, Batman and Captain Kirk before her, the video game icon received a full-scale origin reboot in 2013’s Tomb Raider. The new Lara was meant to feel more real and grounded, as well as having a bra size in line with actual human females. It turned out to be a damn fine game.

Rise of the Tomb Raider proves Lara’s successful do-over was no fluke. It’s a bigger, broader, meatier adventure that’s more confident and capable, kind of like its heroine. Unlike Lara, though, it’s a game that doesn’t take many risks, preferring the if-it-ain’t-broke-don’t-fix-it route to sequel success.

Rise of the Tomb Raider is set a year after Lara’s life-changing experience in Tomb Raider, when we saw her shipwrecked on a mysterious island and forced to adapt to survive. Having witnessed supernatural phenomena she can’t quite wrap her head around, Lara is obsessed with tracking down the Divine Source, an immortality-granting artifact her late father spent years trying to find.

This quest takes players to ancient ruins in sandswept Syria and then to frozen Siberia, where the bulk of Lara’s adventure is set. You’ll explore a sprawling, interconnected series of criss-crossing wilderness environments, from a grim Soviet gulag to a lush geothermic valley to a lost city buried under glacier ice. With Rise of the Tomb Raider currently an Xbox One exclusive — a PlayStation 4 version is due around time next year — everything in its huge world is rendered in exquisite visual detail.

The trouble with all-powerful ancient artifacts, as we know from Indiana Jones, is they also attract very nasty people. Here it’s a group of heavily-armed religious nutjobs called Trinity, a secret society led by the face-scarred (of course) and power-mad (naturally) Konstantin. He’ll stop at nothing to get his mitts on the Divine Source, even if it means blowing up half of Siberia — and, ideally, that pesky Lara — in the process.

Rise of the Tomb Raider doesn’t concern itself with the jarring contradiction of the first game, where Lara openly wept after having to kill a man for the first time but then went on to slay a small town’s worth of baddies. She’s now quite willing and able to defend herself, and gunplay in the game is crunchy, tactical, and satisfying. Although Lara is adept with everything from a pump-action shotgun to her deadly compound bow, it takes stealth and smarts to beat Trinity’s well-equipped soldiers, and it’s hugely rewarding to skulk among a group of enemies and pick them off one by one.

Lara’s also better at climbing, clambering, and swinging between platforms, with wicked-tight controls that are giddily empowering. If you fall to the bottom of a chasm or get swept over a waterfall, it’s almost always your own fault.

But despite Lara’s skills, Rise of the Tomb Raider desperately wants you to feel her pain: every bruising tumble, every grunting leap, every scream of agony as she’s shot or stabbed or set on fire by a flamethrower-wielding goon. And thanks to another emotionally spot-on performance by actress Camilla Luddington as the voice and face of Lara, the game is exceptionally good at that. Lara is tough yet vulnerable, sexy yet never overtly sexual.

It’s all a bit earnest and serious, though, and there’s nary a chuckle to be had in Lara’s singleminded quest to live up to her daddy’s last wishes and avenge a betrayal revealed in an early plot twist. Whether she’s helping the local resistance and its enigmatic leader or having flashbacks to her time with her father, Rise of the Tomb Raider wants us to know Lara is a really good person. A really good person who is skilled at burying a combat knife in the brainstems of bad men, but hey, they probably had it coming, right?

As with Tomb Raider, the game’s world is built around a series of connected, branching hubs, giving you the freedom to backtrack to previous areas to finish off optional challenges, ranging from freeing prisoners of war to, um, cutting down snared rabbits. (Experience points are experience points, OK? Don’t judge.)

In the age-old tradition of games like Metroid and Castlevania — as well as the Tomb Raider reboot itself — certain areas are closed off until you’ve unlocked the necessary gear. Want to see what’s behind that metal barrier? Come back when you’ve got grenade arrows. Can’t quite make the leap to that ledge? Return when you’ve got the wire spool that allows you to fling your ice axe like a grappling hook, or the special arrows that can be shot into soft wood to form climbing perches. It’s not an original design concept, but cool new abilities and gear are salted in from start to finish, keeping the action fresh.

Unless you’re an obsessive-compulsive completionist, it’s easy to ignore some of the busywork that Rise of the Tomb Raider tries to push at you. Find the relics! Hunt the animals! Learn the ancient languages! It’s easy to get preoccupied, but it pays to play through the game’s nine challenging, crafty tombs. Sometimes the solutions boil down to spamming your survival instincts to highlight the object you need to interact with, but most of the tombs are nicely designed and offer meaningful gameplay rewards. I wish there were more of them.

And while the game packs a solid 20 hours of story-driven exploration, combat, and crypt-creeping, Rise of the Tomb Raider allows you to replay chapters with your own custom-designed set of modifiers. Presented as virtual trading cards, these modifiers range from enemies that shrug off melee attacks to a bow that shoots chickens instead of arrows. The trouble? The cards can be purchased with credits earned in-game, but it’s also possible to buy packs of them with real money. Because what would a game in 2015 be without microtransactions? A welcome break, that’s what.

Rise of the Tomb Raider’s only real flaw is that it follows the template of the first game a tad too cautiously, right down to the tough-to-kill supernatural foes that populate its final act. It also completely jettisons the notion that Lara is reluctant to take human life, a decision that makes for grittier action at the cost of some heart and soul. But as only the second installment in Lara Croft’s reinvigorated career, there’s still plenty of time to explore new territory. The tomb raider has risen. Let’s see where she goes next.

What’s Hot: Gorgeous visuals; combat is gritty and challenging; climbing and traversal controls are super tight; adds cool new gear and abilities throughout

What’s Not: Follows the first game’s formula too closely; could use more tombs; hard to reconcile Lara’s kind heart with her penchant for mass murder

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