There are so many set-pieces in the campaign that you barely feel like you can come up for air. The vistas are easy to forget until you pan the camera around and are once again wowed by what you’re seeing – they’re rendered lifelike by the skyline and lighting, and it all makes for a special looking game with no tearing, and no textures popping in – it’s just a smooth, glorious visual spectacle, with some of the best facial animations I’ve seen outside of The Order: 1886 and Until Dawn, and the best hair modelling since…well, the last Tomb Raider. Shards of ice will fall and blur the vision as they explode, passing through the floor that once seemed so secure in front of you. Caves will flicker with the hint of life thanks to dim torches, as Lara walks with trepidation towards a glimmer of daylight. We’re far enough into the new console generation that visuals can lose their allure, but this is a lovely looking game, and it knows it. This isn’t a complaint as such, because everything about the actual playing of Tomb Raider was sublime, and it remains so here, only with gorgeous visuals and a larger scale. The ability to throw your pick as a grapple means you can access new heights in old areas, and firing arrows into soft wood lets you climb farther, but these are only new in the same way you unlocked fire arrows, or the strengthened bow to shoot ropes to get to new areas in the last game. And much as I hate to say it, the two franchises are analogous to one another, now more than ever, as Crystal Dynamics has refined what the phenomenal Tomb Raider brought us with small improvements that make for a better game on the whole, but one that suffers ever so slightly from diminishing returns.įor example, it’s well over halfway into this sequel that any major new mechanics of note come into play, and when they do, it’s only to the degree that you’ve come to expect. The old saying “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” applies to Rise of the Tomb Raider, because this is the strongest case of “more of that thing you loved” I can think of since Uncharted 2 came out and improved on the original game without rocking a single boat.