When thinking about games that have you exploring ancient ruins, fighting off an opposing force, and uncovering mysteries, there’s only a couple series’ that come to mind: Uncharted and Tomb Raider. I have played through almost all of the Uncharted games – 1 through 3 on PS3, and 4 on PS5 – and I love all of them. As for Tomb Raider, I have to admit that I haven’t actually played any of the original releases or the earlier reboot trilogy, so I dove in completely blind. As it turns out, this didn’t hinder my experience in the slightest.
Released near the start of the“EVERY game has to be open-world” era, I’m happy this game sticks to the mostly-linear traversal. While it has some open areas to explore, and some secrets to uncover, it holds you within the bounds of the pre-planned route. For some this may come as a disappointment, but for me, I’m happy with it. In my opinion, an open-world setting would only hinder the experience. While some of my favorite games happen to be open-world, I hold just as many closed-world, linear, story-driven games in the same regard.
It was giving Uncharted in a lot of its gameplay and setting. Lara and Nathan are similar characters, but they both have very different attitudes. Nathan is more of an over-the-top, witty, always-quipping Marvel character, while Lara gives a more realistic, down-to-earth depiction of how someone would act in the situations they are presented albeit exaggerated. Kind of like an Iron-Man to Batman comparison.
While I’m comparing it to Uncharted, I have to give the developers some props on not giving every single rusty pipe or cliffside you climb along a 90% chance of breaking. That got old pretty quickly in Uncharted and it’s something I was expecting every time I was on a ledge or a rope in this game. I’m very happy I was wrong. Instead, it only really happens a couple of times throughout the story. I know how easy it would have been to toss a lot more scripted “suspenseful” moments like that in – which ironically devalues the suspense they would have been trying to add – but they showed great restraint, and for that I am grateful.
The “Uncharted-esque” style continued into the story as well, especially when Lara went into the temple only to find Mathias trying to transfer the soul of the Sun Queen into Sam. That was some wild off-the-rails random mystical bullshit, just like how Drake’s Fortune ended, and I’m 100% here for it. Another point for Tomb Raider would be for not relying heavily on cutscenes to tell the story along with its sparse use QTE’s.
It’s definitely starting to show its age nowadays, but it’s still very, very playable. While the story, for the most part, isn’t too crazy or too groundbreaking, it’s still one that kept me wanting to learn more. If you haven’t given it a shot and you like the 3rd-Person Shooter genre, this is, for sure, a game I would highly recommend.
