Rise’s main thrust is the spectacular roller-coaster ride that Uncharted popularised and the Tomb Raider reboot followed: frantic firefights and chases interspersed with more considered navigation. One woman against the elements.Īnd a tooled-up army, of course. The whistle of the wind and a cinematic flair to framing environments as huge expanses communicate a sense of isolation. Despite every inch being meticulously designed with conveniently placed hooks and overhanging tree branches to aid Lara’s clambering, there is a tremendous sense of place. And further down, the snow melts away and forests sprout up, the tribespeople setting up camps and huts between the trees. Storms whirl, battering Lara as she crunches onward through sheet-white snow abandoned Russian military outposts sit rusting between peaks. Siberia itself is a beautiful, hostile and believable setting. Abilities learned in the first game that are built upon here. Lara’s graduation from naïve punch-bag to confident adventurer opens up her skills as she traverses the ice of the Siberian Mountains, sidling across cliff-sides, using axes to climb sheer faces, firing arrows from her hand-crafted bow to create rope swings.

Rise of the Tomb Raider is far slicker and more balanced than that 2013 reboot.

Lara is a capable, disarmingly confident commando. She’s callous in combat, but clings desperately to the empathy that she started to lose grip of in the last game as she shot up half of Yamatai. Daddy issues and a magical MacGuffin aren’t the most subtle narrative devices, and the broad sweeps of the story are sub-Indiana Jones baloney, but Lara’s misguided determination and refusal to listen to reason make for an interesting character-piece. At the start of the game she sets on her hunt for the Source –an object said to grant eternal life- in order to absolve her murdered father, smeared in the press as a lunatic for his own pursuit of the artefact. This willingness speaks to a woman unhinged. “You bet I am,” she snarls in reply to a Trinity soldier bellowing “She’s here!” with no small sense of fear. Lara is aggressive and viciously capable, her face twisting in rage as she cuts the throat of a man twice her size. She will gun them down, set them aflame, jam arrows into the flesh of their necks.

She has no problem wreaking violence in her obsessive pursuit, racing to the source against the malevolent military group Trinity. Lara Croft’s conscience, as it turns out, is rather frayed as it is. “I hope their deaths are not in vain,” says Lara Croft as she reflects on her companionship with a tribe in the Siberian foothills, a group drawn into her explosive chase for a mystical artefact known as the Divine Source.

Rise of the tomb raider review