Rise of the Tomb Raider: 20 Year Celebration

Rise of the Tomb Raider is a third-person action-adventure built around guerrilla combat, stealth, crafting, and optional puzzle tombs. You play as Lara Croft hunting for a legendary city called Kitezh, mostly across snowy Siberian environments, fighting Trinity soldiers and occasionally very annoyed wolves. The core combat lets you swap between assault rifles, shotguns, pistols, a bow, ice axes, and a combat knife, and the stealth toolkit - rope arrows to tear down structures, environmental kills off explosive barrels, ambushes from elevated positions - gives you genuine flexibility in how you approach encounters. The upgrade trees branch into different play styles, and the crafting loop around animal hides and scavenged parts feeds into that well enough that it rarely feels like busywork. The optional challenge tombs are a step up from the 2013 reboot, with a well-paced difficulty curve that gets meaningfully harder as your gear expands. The 20 Year Celebration edition is the complete package. Bundled in is the full Season Pass: Baba Yaga: The Temple of the Witch (a multi-hour story add-on with its own tomb, the Dreamstinger bow, and Wraithskin outfit), Cold Darkness Awakened (a horde-survival mode set in a breached Soviet weapons base, where you fight waves of Trinity soldiers infected by a biological toxin while crafting gear on the fly), and the Blood Ties story DLC set inside Croft Manor, which is a slower, combat-free exploration piece that also unlocks Lara's Nightmare - a zombie wave mode inside the manor with leaderboard competition via Expedition Cards. On top of that, co-op Endurance mode drops you and a second player into a procedurally generated Siberian wilderness to forage, stay warm, hunt animals, collect artifacts, and survive long enough to light a signal fire. It is the closest this game gets to a live-with-friends experience, and it actually holds up. For a shooter-focused audience, the honest truth is this: there is no traditional multiplayer, no ranked mode, no netcode to stress test. The Expeditions system - Chapter Replay, Chapter Replay Elite, Score Attack, Remnant Resistance - gives you replayability through score chains and custom mission sharing, but it is single-player replayability with leaderboard hooks, not live PvP. The combat is clean and the controls translate well to mouse and keyboard, but if you came looking for a competitive ladder, move on. The Expedition Card system is worth flagging too - common cards are single-use consumables that can be purchased with real money via microtransactions, though you can earn them through gameplay credits. It is not aggressive, but it is there. On PC this is still the strongest version visually, with wide options for resolution scaling and settings tuning. The campaign runs around 15 hours straight, closer to 30-plus for completionists across all nine optional challenge tombs and side content. Throw in all the DLC modes and you are well past 50 hours before you exhaust it. The story is functional rather than gripping - Lara is well-written as a character but the Trinity villain setup is generic - and some reviewers found the open hubs filled with open-world busywork that echoes Assassin's Creed more than classic Tomb Raider. Those are fair criticisms. But the shooting and stealth hold together, the tombs are the best they have been in the reboot trilogy, and the 20 Year Celebration edition gives you everything without having to chase DLC separately.

Fred · Scout Team

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