With its grim weather systems, crumbling buildings and beautiful scenery, the island is a formidable location the most coherent, mysterious and exciting of any Tomb Raider game. First of all, there are aspects of the new style and the new Lara that really work. Fighting to Surviveīut underneath all this, the early part of Tomb Raider demonstrates real strengths.

Most worryingly, there’s a reliance on quick-time-event sequences, where all you can really do is jab at the button when the generously timed prompt appears. Early previews seemed to suggest a fairly open-world game, and while that’s not entirely inaccurate, there are long stretches where Tomb Raider is relentlessly focused.Įarly sections seem determined to drive you along one path, funnelling you from run and jump set-piece to combat set-piece to cinematic sequence. Butchered corpses, Texas Chainsaw Massacre decor and feral hicks will take you so far, but the impact soon fades with over-use.Īnd if Bond and Batman are Lara’s cinematic inspirations, then the gameplay seems to owe a little too much to Uncharted. You begin to fear that someone has confused dark, adult and gritty with gruesome, ultra-violent and clichéd. The new game is, like Batman Begins, an origin tale, with Lara and her archaeologist friends stranded on a remote Asian island with all the odds stacked against them.Īs Lara is battered and bruised by everything around her – from hostile weather to a colony of crazed shipwreck survivors – the game occasionally veers towards Hostel territory, with constant sobbing, yelping and screaming the order of the day. In the early stages of Tomb Raider, this is sometimes overdone. This is a Lara of incredible agility, strength and courage, but a more human figure one who bruises, bleeds and struggles. This isn’t Core’s original Lara Croft or the Lara Croft of Tomb Raider: Underworld, and it’s certainly not Angelina Jolie. Taking its lead from Batman Begins and Casino Royale, the new game takes a character who had become a sort of cartoon super-hero, and grounds them in a more recognisable and realistic world. The latest installment of Tomb Raider is bold reinvention. Something needed to happen to put the series back on top. Yet Tomb Raider seemed stuck paying second fiddle to the games it had helped inspire, not least Assassin’s Creed and Naughty Dog’s Uncharted trilogy. With Tomb Raider: Legends, Anniversary, Underworld and Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light, Crystal Dynamics had done a fine job of pulling the franchise back from the disaster of 2003’s Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness.

Available on: Xbox 360 (version reviewed), PS3, PCĭid Lara Croft really need a reboot? Yes and no.

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