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Rise of the Tomb Raider – exclusive Sibirian gameplay

I couldn’t even tell you why. Perhaps out of the entire experience, I shouldn’t be so morbidly entranced by The Many Deaths of Lara Croft, but they’re gruesome for the goal of impact.

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And believe you me, there’s a lot more area to explore.

When Lara isn’t fighting for her life against wild animals and gun-toting maniacs, she’s piecing together the puzzles that will get her closer to her ultimate goal. That was her origin story, of sorts. “But as we’ve gone to Rise of the Tomb Raider and she’s seeking these spaces out, we wanted to be able to provide a more robust sense of tombs in Tomb Raider“.

Let us know what you think of this new video game footage in the comments section below! That was my biggest complaint with the reboot.

Rise of the Tomb Raider strikes a nice balance between driving the story forward and allowing players the time to explore areas for secret items as well as the titular tombs players felt were missing a bit from the first game. There were likely more.

As I progressed through the game I found myself trying to play the game as a stealth character whenever I could. My three hours covered the intro, the tutorial-ish parts, top-heavy exposition and navigating menus for the first time. The three temples scaled in difficulty, and the third took me much longer than the first. “Lara can now climb trees, she can swim underwater, and she can hide in bushes to evade detection”. You can still find the generic salvage around the world, but some puzzles will require you to scour the environment for specific materials you’ll need to survive. You’ll be alerted that a temple entrance is hidden nearby. Once you are back in the present you find yourself making your way through Siberia where humans arent the only thing you have to worry about. Perhaps this is the part where folks might take some issue with Rise of the Tomb Raider.

It feels really important to the game and something that should have been introduced in the initial reboot. It’s a very well-orchestrated event and has the climbing and moving tutorial built right into it, so not only must you get Lara out of there to proceed but you really have to pay attention. Your survival instinct highlights things of importance around you to try and nudge you in the right direction. You can fast travel to previous campsites, but this isn’t a purely open world.

Fans are to await Rise of The Tomb Raider as it arrives November 10, 2015 for the Xbox One and the Xbox 360.

There was a lot of noise made regarding how murderous Lara was during the E3 demo of this game. But the majority of what I played put me in a vast, frozen wasteland where the weather feels as much of a threat as the enemies stalking you. They’re safely far away from the dreaded Uncanny Valley here, and it’s not just in the cutscenes – everything looks great throughout, whether or not you’re in a pre-rendered storytelling scene. There were moments during the campaign where killing was pretty much forced on the player. The game simply isn’t set up that way. There were times when I had to take care of some wolves and then even a couple of instances where I needed to eliminate a really big bear.

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In the end, this is a Tomb Raider game, through and through. You can do that here, and that’s good news. It was like the original Tomb Raider, but better. This is a temporary Xbox exclusive. That means PS4 and PC players will still get to shoot Lara’s bow and arrow – however it’ll just be a little later.

Rise of the Tomb Raider interview and gameplay video: Crystal Dynamics' Brian