Tomb Raider

I came into Tomb Raider 2013 skeptical of the cinematic-action-game formula, and I left genuinely surprised by how well Crystal Dynamics threaded the needle between cover shooter, light stealth, and traversal game. The core loop is simple but satisfying: you scavenge salvage from yellow crates and enemy drops, then funnel it into a weapon and skill upgrade tree that gradually transforms Lara from a barely-armed survivor into someone who can headshot a mercenary at distance with a compound bow or close the gap with a shotgun and not feel stupid about either choice. The island of Yamatai gives you a semi-open structure split into distinct regions, most of which reward exploration with optional tombs, document collectibles, and GPS caches. Movement is confident and the gunplay has real snap to it, especially once you start chaining headshots with the bow, which has better feel than most rifles I have used in games from the same era. The campaign runs somewhere between 10 and 15 hours depending on how thoroughly you sweep each region, and the pacing is mostly strong. Crystal Dynamics leaned hard into set-piece spectacle, so expect frequent sequences where the geometry collapses around you while you sprint and jump to safety. A few of those sequences tip into QTE territory, which interrupts the flow and has aged less gracefully than the open traversal sections. The narrative does what it needs to, charting Lara's transformation from frightened archaeology student to someone capable of clearing out an entire militia compound. Whether you find that arc believable or not probably comes down to how much story you require from your action games. The production quality throughout is high, and the environmental design on Yamatai still reads well today. Now, about the multiplayer. It exists. Eidos Montreal built it as a side project while Crystal Dynamics focused entirely on the single-player campaign, and that divided attention is obvious. The mode shipped with Team Deathmatch, Deathmatch, and a few objective variants using an XP and prestige leveling system, environmental traps like spike levers, and weapons pulled from the main game including the bow, pistols, shotguns, and grenade launchers. On paper that sounds serviceable. In practice the community evaporated not long after launch, and today you would need a coordinated group or a Discord to find a match. Some achievements are locked behind multiplayer progression, which is a genuine headache for completionists given the dead lobby situation. The multiplayer is effectively a ghost town, and should not factor into a purchase decision at all. The right audience for this is anyone who wants a well-paced third-person action game with solid gunplay and enough optional content to reward thorough players, and who is fine treating the multiplayer tab as decorative. If you have already played Rise and Shadow of the Tomb Raider, the 2013 entry is the origin point for those mechanics, slightly rougher around the edges but worth playing in sequence. If this is your entry point to the trilogy, the campaign holds up and the Metacritic score of 86 is not nostalgia talking. Just do not buy it expecting a live multiplayer component.

Fred · Scout Team

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