I know Microsoft is betting Rise of the Tomb Raider will be one of the biggest games of the year because it made sure it will come to Xbox One first, not Sony’s PlayStation 4-and because Microsoft and Crystal Dynamics let me play a sizeable chunk of it last week without standing over my shoulder. It took nearly a full quiver of arrows-and a few poison-cloud arrows for good measure-to slay the beast, so I imagine that I won’t be the only one to watch the bear take a bite out of Lara once the game finally arrives. In the three hours I had with the game I barely scratched the surface of what I could do in each area, and spent a lot of time messing around on ziplines and stealthily sneaking around practicing headshots with my bow in addition to completing side missions.
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But it’s certainly not the first moment in the game where we see Lara growing into her role as the tomb raider. Fortunately, the requirements for crafting these special items weren’t too onerous; I never felt like I was being forced into unnecessarily long fetch quests to pad the game’s running time. Optional tombs, puzzles, warehouses, underwater caves (yes, Lara can now swim underwater) and treetops will all wield rewards like scrap and treasures when you find them.
This time round, completing a tomb will not just give you a bunch of scrap, but you will earn abilities or exotic weapon parts. It isn’t until you reach Siberia and the Soviet installation that things come into their own. Start a campfire at each location to set up camp, which enables fast travel as well as offers an opportunity to upgrade your weapons and skills. There appears to be a good deal of optional stuff here (including optional tombs) but you wont necessarily have access to them at first. Upgrading weapons borrows a page from the Far Cry series, requiring you to collect various ingredients from the world before you can craft an upgrade.
There are things to find all around the environment that could provide important clues as to what is happening such as murals on a wall or other older objects that help to fill in the pieces of the puzzle so you can figure out what happened there in the past. Tucked away, deep inside caves, you’ll find tombs with elaborate contraptions hiding ancient manuscripts that help Croft on her journey. You can look at your story objective at any time as well as any sub-objectives that you might have.
It’s up to you to stop, look for temples, search for relics and hunt out all the nooks and crannies. Fighting enemies and crafting earn Lara skill points, which can be attributed to abilities on three separate branches of Lara’s skill tree: the Brawler, Hunter, and Survivor. While playing, I found the stealth aspect to be the more satisfying way to go, though that may simply be personal preference. If there was a group of enemies that I needed to eliminate I would quickly study their patterns and then pick them off one by one. Climbing up a tree and staying above ground was also an effective strategy that I would employ from time to time. There does seem to be some truth to that, but the game is also still very dynamic.
And maybe it’s just the bagel talking, but based on the three hours I got to spend with it, Rise of the Tomb Raider could justify the hype once again. Certain events have transpired and now she is on a mission to prove that a particular artifact exists while everyone else is telling her she is insane.
Crystal Dynamics are continuing the trends established in “Tomb Raider“, the game that rebooted the iconic franchise.
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If the 2013 reboot explained how Croft survived a shipwreck to become the badass that we know and love, Rise of the Tomb Raider is her first real adventure.
