Rise of the Tomb Raider

Shout out to Sween and Keith, who lent me a copy of this game and the Xbox One required to play it, respectively. Thanks, bros!

Two and a half months ago I beat the 2013 reboot of Tomb Raider in two days. It turned out to be one of my favorite games I'd play all year. Most of my post touched on how different this newer version of Lara Croft was and how the gameplay felt nothing like the Tomb Raider games of old, but also how I was totally okay with that. So I won't rehash those same old topics. Instead, I want to talk about this game as a direct sequel to the 2013 game. How was it better? How was it not? And above all, where does the series go from here?

Bigger

Like virtually any big title sequel, Rise of the Tomb Raider was just "more so" than its predecessor. I'm pretty sure every single technique and power-up and skill from the first game was back this time around, along with a litany of new gameplay aspects like "death from above," changing jackets, learning foreign languages, and an arsenal that seems to have doubled in size. I felt like I devoted about as much time to dicking around and exploring tombs in this game as I did the last one, and this one took me 13 hours to the last one's 11. I don't necessarily think there were more environments or secrets this time around, but they were definitely more open and spread apart this time around - which might appeal to most gamers, but I found the added space cumbersome and tedious at times. In fact...

Not Better

I mean, not worse, really. But where Tomb Raider was such a breath of fresh air, this game just felt like a natural extension to that game's mechanics and overall design. The story wasn't nearly as good - in fact it was almost incomprehensible - and some rapid-fire time-shifting in the early going left me completely unaware of whether or not I was in a flashback for the bulk of the game. (I wasn't.) There were also some notable glitches and bugs, including one reset-inducing freeze. Nothing like what happened to Trevor during his playthrough, but annoying all the same.

Don't get me wrong - I didn't dislike this game at all. But where the last Tomb Raider felt new and exciting, this one just felt kind of been-there-done-that. To be fair, such a huge part of whether or not you enjoy playing a video game has to do with your mindset, and I've been kind of bogged down with homework lately, which gave me a weirdly guilty conscience whenever I took a few hours to play this. (Which doesn't even make sense, since I still have all kinds of free time! Gah, I'm in my own head.) So the fact that this game took me two weeks to beat instead of two days probably shouldn't be seen as an indictment on this game. But it's still something, you know?

Future

Trilogies are the standard units for video game franchises these days, which means we're all but certainly getting a third installment in the coming years. There's a post-credits sequence in this game that has an unseen assailant lining up a sniper shot on Lara Croft only to be told by a superior, "no, not yet." So it's safe to say we're getting that third game unless an important company goes under. My question is what that game should be like. So far, this reboot series has gone with an exotic island and then a brutally frozen environment - just like Uncharted. Why not follow the pattern of mimicry with the third title and set it in the desert or the Middle East? That wouldn't be unlike Tomb Raider at all. Story-wise, I'd normally ask for a "conclusion" of sorts, but these first two games have told completely disparate stories without any linking arcs, so I guess I don't need to worry about a proper ending for any story here. I'm still kind of holding out hope that this Lara Croft ultimately becomes the cold-hearted badass Lara Croft from the original series - but I can acknowledge that this rebooted character is a better one, and with a game called Rise of the Tomb Raider not really shaping this new Lara into that old iconic Lara at all, perhaps this is a dead end. Oh well!