Things I love and hate about…Rise of the Tomb Raider

The second game in the recent Tomb Raider reboot franchise was a delightful experience to play through; it felt to me in many ways like what a game should be. While there were certainly things to love about it every title will have elements to hate about it too, so here is what I predominantly loved and hated about Rise of the Tomb Raider.

Loved – Design

The mix of linearity and open-endedness found in Lara’s second adventure is something I adored. Main campaign missions are often tightly focused affairs driving you from set piece to set piece with occasional puzzles, platforming segments or stealth sequences changing up the pace. It’s refreshing to know that once you hit the next hub space you will be presented with the choice of either pressing on with those same main story missions or taking a break from the drama and exploring. In each zone you can expect to find a couple of the games challenge tombs which offer some of the best experiences of the game as you delve deeper into ruins, old mines and even a frozen ship embedded into the side of a cliff. What makes this a welcome design choice is that none of it is ever forced upon you, if you’d rather not get involved at all with the optional content then you don’t really miss anything but the actual content. Sure there are rewards for completing them but none that impact the game majorly.

I think what benefits this is that if you remove all the open world elements and just had a straight game of the story missions pieced together Rise of the Tomb Raider would still be enjoyable. That is very much to its credit that it’s taken such a tight campaign and added in the extras.  There is somewhat of a trend in modern day AAA titles that drop players into a huge open sandbox with a map so cluttered with “collect these, destroy that, find this” type of content that offer no actual depth to the game or any rewarding experiences other than the fact that you’ve ticked the box; making both the optional content and story content suffer as a result. Such content can certainly be found here but the story never seemed to be hurt in spite of it during Ms Croft’s trip to Siberia.