The challenge tombs are combat-free puzzle-platforming trials that feature some of the game’s most imaginative environments and clever level designs. The lack of tombs to be raided was a half-joking criticism of the previous game, but their presence here highlights the way Rise excels. Lara’s got some friends to make if she aims on surviving If you’ve got a beefy PC, it looks incredible and runs super-smooth, but the options are wide enough that you can easily scale it back to the standards of a few years ago and still get a playable experience.
There are tons of visual options, and the game does a terrific job of scaling in both directions. It’s appropriate, then, that Rise is about transcending death, as it transcends the violence that defined the previous game and builds a new future for the series’ heroine.Īn exclusivity agreement with Microsoft briefly anchored the game to Xbox platforms, but now it’s finally available for PC, and the port is terrific. It felt like nothing so much as a nonstop carnival of violence and destruction, and was so obsessed with shootouts against inhumanly violent antagonists that it lost the joy of discovery which define archaeological adventures stories. My memories of 2013’s Tomb Raider reboot consist almost exclusively of things exploding and Lara Croft getting impaled in increasingly grotesque ways.
